How fast is an Amiberry Amiga?
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I've been playing a couple of the higher end Amiga Games like Gloom Deluxe and Alien Breed 3D recently. Back when these games were released you'd need a fairly powerful and expensive Amiga to run these on high settings. I got to wondering how fast is Amiberry, what spec of Amiga is it comparable to?
Amiberry has an option to emulate a 25mhz 68040 Amiga but it also has a 'Fastest' and a 'Turbo' setting. What speed of Amiga will these represent on a Raspberry Pi 4 (overclocked to 2100mhz)?
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Difficult question. Using workbench, amiberry JIT, picasso96, on a raspberry pi 3 it may well be as fast/or faster than an 060.
Without JIT running a game/demo that requires cycle accurate emulation, it will be much slower.
On a Raspberry Pi 2, many games and demos are full speed. But something like the game Lionheart with its intensive use of the copper etc are not. Nor demos like Arte with lots of copper and bitplane fx.
Lionheart is a good test for emulation. It runs well on a raspberry pi 4. I found a raspberry pi 3 to handle most games and demos at full speed. I can't remember how Lionheart ran, but I think it was ok.
A raspberry Pi4 running something OS friendly on workbench, with picasso96 gfx, will probably be faster than any "real" Amiga. Although compatibility won't be as good.
Not sure if this answers your question, as it's a difficult one to gauge. I may be better with a more specific question.
Also I shall use this opportunity to mention/spam my old Amiga and computer music website ;-)
(It's safe for work)
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I do confirm what @BuZz stated above. On a stock Pi3B+ most games will run full speed including Lionheart. Notable exceptions are "doom-like" titles like Gloom or Alien Breed 3D. They won't work well even by reducing window and resolution. Also Jim Power intro screen will slow down but the game itself will run full speed. On a stock Pi4 everything is running full speed.
As always I do recommend to rely on the settings provided by the "whdload.xml" which comes along with Amiberry. This will ensure best experience. Please note @midwan fixed the "fastest" CPU setting few days ago making the "turbo" setting obsolete (reference).
I second the mention to Exotica :)
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@nemo93 haha. Thanks :-)
Jim Power. A good test for an emulator! Awesome game too (love the music).
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Since I got the settings right I've not had a problem with any of these games, even Alien Breed 3D 2 which apparently runs at a fairly pedestrian pace even on 060 Amiga hardware. Gloom Deluxe runs well even in 640x512 on an emulated 030 with turbo and JIT enabled. Graphical improvements are minimal in 640x512 so I wouldn't bother changing the resolution.
I don't think Amiberry has a built in FPS counter so it is difficult to determine how fast games are running. I also have no way to calculate if 030+ processors or increased RAM are being accurately emulated in terms of speed. To be honest I can't think of any practical use for knowing if they are beyond my idle curiosity. @nemo93 I'll be sure to check out the changes to turbo/fastest options as soon as possible as well as the changes that have been made to amiberry.conf.
Thanks for the tip offs for Jim Power and Lionheart.
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@nemo93 didn’t want to create a new topic just to ask, is it correct that AB3D will not run right on 3b+ but will on 4? It runs real slow on my 3b+ and this might seal an upgrade for me :)
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It runs well enough on my Pi4.
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