A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

TheWinuae website mentions support for 68030 and 68060 for their next version (estimated release may 2007).

I always wondered why both those cpu's weren't supported in earlier versions. What makes them special compared to the others.

Having used Winuae a lot for A.D.A., i always had the impression that the early aga demos from 1995-96-97 (the 68030 area) were the most difficult to get running inWinuae so this is hopefully good news.

I always thought the 030 was pretty much the same as the 020 but with higher clock and bigger cache.

I know the 060 is a lot more complicated chip due to it's super scalar design but instuction set was fairly similar to the 040 ?

I've always wanted an option to lock the speed of it to an unexpanded 1200 like the A500 option they already have.

A full 030 also has an MMU, and the associated instructions.
A full 060 has a handful extra instructions, but is missing a whole bunch of instructions which are present in 020+FPU through 040.

68030/68060 compatibility probably means that WinUAE will have 030/060 as selectable configuration options, and when selected, WinUAE will then emulate the nuances of those processors (mainly exception handling). It will only make a real difference to software which is doing systems level work.

@Kalms: off-topic but too curious not too ask. Any particular reason why you decided not to release anything at easter (first time since 2001). No time?

Ofcourse, you could always do the impossible and dare what few would: compete at Assembly for a second time. Just the thing that TBL would dare to do :o)

@z5: It's a group effort, and we did release a PSP demo. If I had had the time, my first priority would have been to help out on that one. I'm usually short-changing friends, family and skipping on long-term interests & obligations in favor of fulfilling momentary wishes, but this year I'm letting ordinary life take precedence.

@Kalms: thanks for the info. You've been doing high quality demos year after year which means we've been spoiled too much i guess :) As long as you don't loose interest in doing amiga demos (which is what i wanted to know with this question in first place). Maybe we'll see another kick-ass demo next year! I hope you enjoy this other way of living but please comeback at some point :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftc54OVo4mc

Check out TBLs PSP release. Very cool :0) Kalms are you a games developer ?

toffeeman, occassionally (mainly during summertime) but usually I'm studying (maths / cs / ee) .. blah

emulation of A1200 with 060 at the right speed would be great :)

@Kalms

So you are a full time student or studying Maths is your job ?!

It's a shame you weren't round on the demo scene in the hardware hacking days pre 95. I'm sure you would have come up with some routines like Roots 16*16 tilting/rotator, 102 zoomer etc.

toffeeman, full-time student for now - I just work during the study breaks.

Cycle exact 060 emulation would be awesome, though I suspect that it is a long way away. We'll still need to keep our 1200s alive for doing the performance tuning... unfortunately :)

In the meantime, winuae 1.4.2 is out and offers support for 68030 and 68060. I'm wondering though if this will make any difference when running demos?

The new processor options are probably not useful for running demos (unless the demo specifically checks the processor type). But they might come in handy during demo development.

One of the differences between 040 and 060 emulation will (supposedly) be that 060 emulation omits the instructions that the 060 does not have, such as 64-bit mul/div and transcendental FPU instructions. This means that you will need to install the 68060.library (and appropriate SetPatch) for the system to work properly, and it probably also means that you can run OxyPatcher and the like to patch the emulation (by the Amiga, not by UAE) of the missing FPU instructions. This way, you can test compatibility of your demo with OxyPatcher, which is occationally an issue.

I am much more intrigued by the new "Windowed fullscreen" capability. Emulated Amiga running fullscreen on one monitor, Windows desktop on another. Now that's nice. :-D