538 replies to this topic

[Gazoo]

RXB, on Sat Dec 17, 2011 4:49 AM, said:

<snip>
That Sector read/write you talked about was mentioned by someone long ago but I never saw it used.

Look at LOAD/SYS or SCSI/SYS or DISK/SYS for the Geneve as examples of reading sectors.


Gazoo

Edited by Gazoo, Sun Dec 18, 2011 6:06 PM.

[RXB]

Ok there it is as I never owned or used a Geneve. Thanks....

[OLD CS1]

I have an old 2GHz P4 Dell with 2GB RAM and a video card with S-Video on my entertainment system. I decided to try out Windows 8 on this machine, and I am fairly impressed with its performance, though after a a couple of days of sleep/wake/sleep/wake along with Flash-based video streaming and DVD playing it requires a restart.

Anyway, I decided to put Classic 99 on it and it runs just fine in my tests of the included cartridges. Though when I left "Car Wars" running for about four minutes Classic 99 simply terminated -- no error, no pop-up, just gone.

Full-screen does not work well at all. I cannot recall if that was intentional (removed as Tursi was planning before) or a problem with Windows 8. Just thought I would drop that on ya.

[Tursi]

I haven't changed anything to do with Full Screen, nor am I aware of any crashes at this time. Could be Windows 8, could be you are just hitting a bug. As for full screen, it's never worked well on some systems, so hard to say if it's Windows 8 or not. The 15-bit rendering mode it uses is way, way, WAY out of date though. Should see a nice improvement in rendering performance if I ever get it rewritten.

[TEXAS_JOE]

As silly as it sounds, it might make a difference if you drop the colour depth down to 16-bit.

I'm running a linux machine at the moment and Classic99 works wonderfully except you can't copy and paste text into it. (Vice works fine with clipboard as do others, but it's a Wine issue, not a classic99 issue I suspect)

My full screen works better in linux than it did on windows .... the mind boggles.

[Willsy]

Full screen works fine on my 32 Win 7 box. Aint tried Win 8 - probably buy a new laptop for that - but I'm gonna run this laptop until the wheels fall off as I love it to death (Toshiba Tecra M5 in case you were wondering).

I've noticed that Classic99, out of all the emulators, is the 'hungriest' in terms of CPU utilisation. Is that due to the video rendering routines?

Mark

[Tursi]

Willsy, on Tue May 1, 2012 2:18 AM, said:

I've noticed that Classic99, out of all the emulators, is the 'hungriest' in terms of CPU utilisation. Is that due to the video rendering routines?

Can't say for sure, I haven't looked at the other emulators. But most likely. Classic99 renders the screen in a device-independent fashion and makes Windows handle the translation to your actual display settings. 15-bit was fastest on my VooDoo2 back when I did it, so that's why it uses that. I believe Classic99's the only emulator that does it that way (since having the emulator render for the screen is faster). These days 32-bit will likely be the fastest as most graphics cards are rendering at that depth internally now.

[RXB]

Classic 99 works fine on my Mac Pro under Windows 7 and I can run 4 at once with no effects on my performance even while using Itunes, IE, Hypercam and Skype.

[OLD CS1]

It severely impacts my Core2Duo 1.66GHz XP x64 laptop during certain tasks, in particular during paste, and especially when running it at maximum performance. The latter I expect, though it does lock up other tasks in Windows.

I can, however, run three or four instances on this computer under regular performance with no problem.

[Tursi]

Don't use maximum performance -- no, I'm not being trite. It doesn't work. On most machines it's slower than CPU Overdrive (sometimes it's not). The problem is that the emulator sort of runs away internally in most cases and gets hung up on itself. I'll get to it eventually. It can even crash the video driver if the vendor doesn't deal with being hit really hard with updates (that's sort of an old problem that is rare today)

Paste however, doesn't run the core loop any differently than normal, so I would expect that performance differences noted during paste, especially severe ones, would be circumstantial -- that something else is actually causing the issue. Also, I've had several reports of issues particularly on laptops. Again, I suspect it's the mobile video drivers, because Classic99's performance is really heavily tied to how well the video driver can convert the video frames. That's been an issue since day 1 on Windows, really. I expect that to change when I change the rendering engine, but I haven't started that yet.

[unhuman]

Well - Paste does automatically turn the emulator into Overdrive.... It was a feature request I made and you honored. It rocks.

[RXB]

Tursi, on Wed May 2, 2012 1:17 AM, said:

Don't use maximum performance -- no, I'm not being trite. It doesn't work. On most machines it's slower than CPU Overdrive (sometimes it's not). The problem is that the emulator sort of runs away internally in most cases and gets hung up on itself. I'll get to it eventually. It can even crash the video driver if the vendor doesn't deal with being hit really hard with updates (that's sort of an old problem that is rare today)

Paste however, doesn't run the core loop any differently than normal, so I would expect that performance differences noted during paste, especially severe ones, would be circumstantial -- that something else is actually causing the issue. Also, I've had several reports of issues particularly on laptops. Again, I suspect it's the mobile video drivers, because Classic99's performance is really heavily tied to how well the video driver can convert the video frames. That's been an issue since day 1 on Windows, really. I expect that to change when I change the rendering engine, but I haven't started that yet.

Well even Microsoft will no longer support XP so everyone will have to move to Windows 7 soon and that will fix many problems as a minimum of 4Gig is required for Windows 7 and single processors running Windows 7 are sloooooow.
Besides Windows 8 will be out shortly and will make minimum of 4 CPU chips the standard. Tied into this is that all video cards will be 1Gig minimum and should handle anything Classic 99 and do.

[Tursi]

Overdrive during paste -- that's true. I guess that could be a cause at that!

As for the system, well... yeah, more or less true, but expecting hardware to catch up was never a design goal. Classic99 has always been a little hungrier than the other emulators. I remember back in the early days recommending a P2, and having one site post that with "I hope that's a joke". I went in and clarified that it actually did run fine on a Pentium-133 (and it did), but that my recommendation was higher due to the variances in systems.

[OLD CS1]

RXB, on Wed May 2, 2012 1:17 PM, said:

Well even Microsoft will no longer support XP so everyone will have to move to Windows 7 soon and that will fix many problems as a minimum of 4Gig is required for Windows 7 and single processors running Windows 7 are sloooooow.
Besides Windows 8 will be out shortly and will make minimum of 4 CPU chips the standard. Tied into this is that all video cards will be 1Gig minimum and should handle anything Classic 99 and do.

The minimum requirements for Windows 8 are 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM for 32-bit and 2GB RAM for 64-bit, and a Direct-X 9 compatible video card. Windows 7 and 8 both run surprisingly well on some older hardware. I have upgraded a number of machines with fairly low specifications to WIndows 7 with a humanly perceptible increase in performance -- over both Windows XP and Vista. You can see my previous post for my equipment specs, which both meets and exceeds these requirements.

We have two more years with XP (XP x64 will be retired with Server 2003, as they are the same) and I can pretty much guarantee there will be hold-outs well after that. Pretty much the same types of people who still use either 98SE or 2000 these days. And, of course, they'll bitch and moan when various packages stop supporting them. hehehe Try telling someone running 2000 or older that, no, there are no anti-virus programs which you can run. And when Firefox decided to drop XP SP2 and older, the shyt really hit the fan.