Release Fullspeed Amiga Emulation On Pandora!

[WizardStan]

That's the only downside that I can see - you'd need to have separate solutions for each application/game. The solution would know how to find the current position of the amiga mouse sprite, so converting the coordinates into a translation would be simple enough.

If you can find the position of the mouse, why not just poke coordinates back into it?

 

[Aninhumer]

How about a "Calibrate" feature in the emulator?

You click where the cursor is, then it sends 10 "move right" signals to the game or whatever, and you click it again, and the same for vertical, repeating a few times to be sure.
Then the emulator can work out how to offset correctly.
You could also save each setting, so you don't need to do it every time.

 

[Caine]

How about a "Calibrate" feature in the emulator?

You click where the cursor is, then it sends 10 "move right" signals to the game or whatever, and you click it again, and the same for vertical, repeating a few times to be sure.
Then the emulator can work out how to offset correctly.
You could also save each setting, so you don't need to do it every time.

In the general case, you would need to do this for every motion you make on the touchscreen as the decision to actually move the cursor lies in the Amiga software being run. So if you report move 10 pixels to the right and the software decides to truncate this to 5 (e.g. for hitting a boundary) the assumed cursor position already drifts.

The two easiest solutions:
- First tap (start position); second tap (end position).
- drag on screen: relative motion from starting point (essentially dragging the pointer around).

The sensitivity of the mouse could either be set in the emulator or detected from subsequent motions.
E.g. first motion: (tap1, tap2), second motion: (tap3, tap4). Difference between tap2 (expected position) and tap3 (actual position) can be used to calibrate the sensitivity.

 

[hal9000]

In the general case, you would need to do this for every motion you make on the touchscreen as the decision to actually move the cursor lies in the Amiga software being run. So if you report move 10 pixels to the right and the software decides to truncate this to 5 (e.g. for hitting a boundary) the assumed cursor position already drifts.

I don't see this as a problem. You can simulate mouse mouvement from one point to another with a chosen speed, at an emulator level. Two tap at positions far away from each others could be simulated by a sequence of small steps.

From my understanding, the problem is that the position of the mouse can change from an application to another and be changed by the application itself, the touchpad driver would not be aware of that, and that would kill the calibration.

However, I can see two solutions to this problem:
- A "quick calibration" button, which would require just one tap on the cursor itself.
- Implementing a way for the driver to check where the cursor actually is. I know nothing about amiga emulation, but I have hard time to believe that getting the position of the cursor can be impossible. It has to be stored somewhere, so it should be possible to get it.

Or maybe I am wrong and I did not get the actual problem...

 

[gaterooze]

it's not a big deal to have what you want. it's possible to set mouse x/y to touchscreen x/y (with velocity)..

Awesome.

 

[xxreini]

wiimote works as a mouse in wii uae - so it should also work with a touchscreen.

 

[puppydee]

Is the amiga emulator finished yet? My pandora will arrive tomorrow hopefully and I'm dying to polish off my game collection and try them out so any news would be great

 

[Pickle]

Is the amiga emulator finished yet? My pandora will arrive tomorrow hopefully and I'm dying to polish off my game collection and try them out so any news would be great

Sort of...

For uae4all I need to finish some control stuff that ive been putting off.
EUAE/PUAE should be good to go, not sure if was put into pnd form yet.

 

[TitanUranus]

I will try and think about the mouse/touchscreen problem and try to come up with some ideas.

My first thought (which is awfully naughty) is where does the basic mouse control system come from? Is it actually part of the kickstart rom?

EDIT: has anyone considered actually getting one of those small mouses that are thin like a credit card - if you are a serious amiga mouse user it may be worthwhile, and of course wouldn't add much bulk to what you are carrying anyway. OF course it depends how much room you have in the environment you will be using it in.

 

[puppydee]

Is the amiga emulator finished yet? My pandora will arrive tomorrow hopefully and I'm dying to polish off my game collection and try them out so any news would be great

Sort of...

For uae4all I need to finish some control stuff that ive been putting off.
EUAE/PUAE should be good to go, not sure if was put into pnd form yet.

Will send beer money to twist your arm into not putting it off, lol. Where do i send it?

btw @ above, having a mini mouse wouldn't be a problem if it couldn't be worked out. Most of the games I'll be playing don't really include the mouse anyway.

 

[silver]

EUAE/PUAE should be good to go, not sure if was put into pnd form yet.

Looks like PUAE still under fairly active development (and bugfixing, reading the UAE mailing list) by GnoStic.

Latest version here: http://github.com/GnoStiC/PUAE


Note despite the name (Pandora-UAE, originally), I don't think Gnostic is that bothered by the Pandora any more (wish he was) - he is basically porting all the current WinUAE stuff to PUAE.

This is great, as WinUAE is currently the 'best' Amiga emu out there, though may mean someone else will have to compile for the Pandora and then roll into a PND...

Once this is compiled, would be very interesting to see performance on a Pandora - uae4all will be faster, but PUAE will give A1200 / AGA / 020 / 030 / hardfile emulation etc...

 

[TitanUranus]

Basic a1200 emulation with HDD would be excellent if it could run at a good speed (using JIT it might be possible, but is JIT supported with ARM?). If it could, and you can assign 8mb fastram then installing games using WHDload would be by far the best option for most stuff. That would pretty much be what I'd aim for if I was porting it, no need to bother with picasso and zfast or anything above 68020 as it'd just be too piss poor performance wise.

I'm just having a flashback to the first time I watched and listened to Jesus on E's... Ahh, the A500 was a sweet machine.

 

[silver]

Basic a1200 emulation with HDD would be excellent if it could run at a good speed (using JIT it might be possible, but is JIT supported with ARM?). If it could, and you can assign 8mb fastram then installing games using WHDload would be by far the best option for most stuff. That would pretty much be what I'd aim for if I was porting it, no need to bother with picasso and zfast or anything above 68020 as it'd just be too piss poor performance wise.

JIT is currently x86 only, which is going to be one of the most significant performance hits. I'm guessing 020/030 emulation without a JIT compiler for ARM is going to be really pushing it on the Pandora. Here's hoping a strong overclock, or a competent soul to port the JIT compiler to ARM.

 

[hal9000]

JIT is currently x86 only, which is going to be one of the most significant performance hits. I'm guessing 020/030 emulation without a JIT compiler for ARM is going to be really pushing it on the Pandora. Here's hoping a strong overclock, or a competent soul to port the JIT compiler to ARM.

I am always a bit confused by comparison between A1200 and A500. I would expect emulating an A1200 to be not that much harder than emulating an A500, and considering that GP2X is able to correctly emulate A500, emulating A1200 on pandora should not be a problem. But I guess I am wrong somewhere.

Wikipedia says that the 68EC020 of the A1200 is roughly 5 times faster than the 68000 of the A500, and I have to say I am a bit surprised by this figure. I clearly remember that running A500 games on A1200 did not really lead to impressive speed-ups. 3D games, in particular, were less than twice faster on A1200 than on A500. The main obvious superiority of the A1200 over the A500 was its graphic chip, able to display 256 colors (in standard mode) instead of 32.

 

[darkwave]

In the bog standard A1200, the 68020 was hindered by only having access to the slow chip ram. With a bit of fast ram added the speed of the A1200 roughly doubled. The difference between playing something like Frontier on the A500 compared to the A1200 with fast ram is substantial. Even without fast ram it transforms it from unplayable to moderately playable.

 

[silver]

I am always a bit confused by comparison between A1200 and A500. I would expect emulating an A1200 to be not that much harder than emulating an A500, and considering that GP2X is able to correctly emulate A500, emulating A1200 on pandora should not be a problem. But I guess I am wrong somewhere.

Although the A1200 is not vastly superior to a A500 (4x as much ram as standard, newer custom chipset, faster & upgraded cpu - although a big attraction here would be able to emulate an expanded A1200 - with an even faster 68030 cpu and mem) there is currently quite a jump in emulation terms.

uae4all and similar use heavily optimised ASM 68000 emulation cores. Last time I check, there are not much in the way of optmised 68020 or 68030 emulation cores around (for ARM or anything). So currently there is a large performance drop when comparing a A500 emu (uae4all) with a A1200 emu (EUAE etc).

On the plus side, 68020 and 68000 have very similar instruction sets (020 has some extra instructions, and 24bit addressing I think), so hopefully someone with 68000 core experience can expand it to create a 68020 core.

I know Picodrive by Notaz uses a bug-fixed Cyclone core (68000 core written in Arm Asm) - it would be awesome to expand this to cover 68020/30. This might be significantly harder than I have suggested though.

 

[samuraicrow]

On the plus side, 68020 and 68000 have very similar instruction sets (020 has some extra instructions, and 24bit addressing I think), so hopefully someone with 68000 core experience can expand it to create a 68020 core.

The 68000 and 68EC020 have 24-bit addressing but the full 68020 and 68030 have full 32-bit addressing. It was a mistake for Commodore to put a 68EC020 in the A1200. For a scant $10USD more they could have had an '030 with a data cache. The instruction set for an '020/030 is nearly identical in user mode but the 68000 is a far cry from the '020/030. I've got a 50 MHz '030 in my A1200 and a 64 Meg SIMM waiting to go into it. The perfect Amiga model.

 

[TitanUranus]

The 68000 and 68EC020 have 24-bit addressing but the full 68020 and 68030 have full 32-bit addressing. It was a mistake for Commodore to put a 68EC020 in the A1200. For a scant $10USD more they could have had an '030 with a data cache. The instruction set for an '020/030 is nearly identical in user mode but the 68000 is a far cry from the '020/030. I've got a 50 MHz '030 in my A1200 and a 64 Meg SIMM waiting to go into it. The perfect Amiga model.

You might want to try 'Payback' on that thing, it'll probably work quite well. I tried it on my old P4 emulating an Amiga with all the bells and whistles but it was quite slow. Maybe I'll try it again on this I7 now you've made me think of it. So far I've been too busy playing old PSX games with excessive gfx enhancements, could be time to have a proper go at amiga emulation again.

Anyway, what's your bet on there being playable A1200 emulation on Pandora? I remember trying Super Stardust AGA on one of my old PC's and it needed a frameskip, which ruined the flashing ship effect when invincible, I'd take a frameskip of 1 though if it'd play nice on the pandora - go on Notaz, get writing some arm assembly 68020 emulator!

EDIT: I suppose a version of PUAE could incorporate the faster 68000 core. At least that would open up the possibility of emulating a fairly speedy amiga, and using the a1200's kickstart rom, 8mb fast ram and a HDD image all the WHDLOAD versions of A500/600 softwate should run nicely and load fast. I'm sure I've used workbench 3 installed on VHDD in WinUAE while keeping the CPU set as 68000 but with kickstart 3.1. Correct me if I'm wrong, or I'll try it sometime in the next couple of days and report back.

 

[Iorgy77]

EDIT: I suppose a version of PUAE could incorporate the faster 68000 core. At least that would open up the possibility of emulating a fairly speedy amiga, and using the a1200's kickstart rom, 8mb fast ram and a HDD image all the WHDLOAD versions of A500/600 softwate should run nicely and load fast. I'm sure I've used workbench 3 installed on VHDD in WinUAE while keeping the CPU set as 68000 but with kickstart 3.1. Correct me if I'm wrong, or I'll try it sometime in the next couple of days and report back.

I am really hoping at the very minimum for something like this. UAE4ALL on a machine like the pandora is really subpar, may as well stick with PSPUAE or UAE4ALL on the wiz.

 

[TitanUranus]

Right, I've just done a few checks on the compatibility of the 68000 chip with various combinations in WinUAE. For starters the bad news, you can't use kickstart 3.1 with 68000 as it needs 24 bit addressing apparently. That's the bad news. On the upside though, using an A600 ickstart rom, you can use an HDD image, and easily install workbench 2.1 on it - so WHDLoad should be able to run from that. Cause my memory is usually reliable I didn't quite believe it when it told me I couldn't run Workbench 3.1 on it though - and just for that lovely ego boost I needed I found out I was right. You can't install wb3.1 unless you have kickstart 3.1 installed and a 68020+ CPU - but AFTER it's installed to HDD, you can then just change back to the A600 kick rom with 68000 and WB3.1 boots just fine ***(wonder if XP would run fine on my 486 if I just installed it using my P4 chip first... HA HA HA)***. So there's the results for all of you who were interested - which is probably nobody. Oh, and ALL installing and testing was done with OCS only, so no ECS or AGA chipset is needed anywhere along the line - 2mb chip and 8mb fast as standard (which is going to be needed for running WHDLoad installed games).

In conclusion - PUAE/UAE with cyclone 68000 incorporated should be able to boot and run games from HDD without any problems, I personally can't wait till someone give it a shot! Contact me if you think I can help in any way, regarding testing or roms/software I used.