A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

Hi,

they aren't probably as much code related as the others but I think coders are the right persons to answer it ;-) I'm quite new to amiga so please excuse my blindness :)

1. What is the minimal Kickstart and Workbench version to run at 68060? I mean, in Atari world, we've had to patch original TOS 4.04 to run at 68060. Is Kickstart 3.1 (from Amiga 1200) better in this way? Or I have to use AmigaOS 3.5 (3.9?)

2. What chips are used for current "newskool" demos? I mean, in case I don't care about cycle-exact emulation for old a500 stuff and just want to run latest demos from TBL, what I have to implement into emulator? As I think now it applies to both the demos and start of Kickstart/Workbench so:
a) what hardware is used by Kickstart/Workbench? I don't think there's anything special except CPU, DMA, floppy controller and maybe Copper but please, tell me :)
b) what is used by that demos? In Atari world, we use just Videl (your AGA), CPU :), DMA+DSP (your AHI I suppose), Blitter maybe (your Copper), VBL and some timer maybe. Did I forget something?

3. Is there any list of HW registers for A1200? I can't find anything better than "How to code 7" but this is far incomplete. Something like this (for Atari): http://ihrisko.cyberio.org/~mikro/docs/Memory%20Ma ps/FALREG.TXT

Thanks for any help.

1) I am not following these kind of requirements to closely, so take my word with a grain of salt. But my A4000 was running Kickstart 3.0 with a 68030 when I got it. I then bought my 68060 based CyberStorm Mark I accelerator card which required some 68060.library to be installed to the system in order to run properly. And I think that was it. There might have been all kind of improvements over the last 10 years but I tended to ignore them and my Amiga works happily with its 060.

3) HTC7 is great, but for the hardware registers you might want to read TFAs hardware guide which is available as part of the Asm-One installation. A quick Google search brought up Genetic's HTML version 1.1b of the guide. Can't tell if it is complete but it is definitely a start for you.

My sure-fire way to detect if the 68060.library software is installed ok is to run the demo ride from skarla. if the start runs in 25fps then it's installed ok, else there is something lacking and it will crash or run slow.

@mikro:
hi! Just a little additional question: is the aim of your question to run demos or to code demos? And if it's for running: what do you mean by "implementing into emulator"?

As for your first question, i don't think that 3.5 (and 3.9) add anything which makes demos run better. I believe that 3.1 kick+workbench is all you need.

hello guys,

thank you for your answers.

To sum it: I've got pretty strange idea -- to make Amiga 1200@060 emulator for Atari Falcon@060 machine. You say, impossible, it's way too slow for emulation (100 MHz max) !

But there's a way (at least in my naive eyes ;-) -- look how works linux/m68k on amiga and atari. There's some thin layer which makes unite access to both amiga and atari hardware. So let's say linux says "hey, I want framebuffer 800x600" and this layer write good values at good place in memory (AGA in amiga, Videl in atari).

After this, everything is the same -- you can compile anything under amiga, then take it, load to atari and voila, we've got binary compatibility since linux binary application just calls linux and linux calls that thin layer.

This approach forced me to think a little -- what if I make some thin layer which will translate access to amiga hardware to atari hardware? Everything else will stay intact -- amiga os/applications will have whole memory and cpu for them, only thing we need is to remap hardware area in memory using MMU and make correct "translator" from amiga to atari.

This is the reason why I ask about that custom chips -- the less I have to "translate", the better. And of course, I'm not stupid, I wont write emulation of AGA, Copper etc form scratch -- [Win|E]UAE is free and does its job pretty well.

I think this could work but in the start everything seems easy :) If I take it from opposite side, for Atari Falcon "tranlator" it could be really very easy -- if I don't count DSP (this could make some troubles), 99% of demos and games don't do anything more than set video using Videl, set some timers and VBL, load some stuff from disk and than just copy pixels to video ram :) I suppose current Amiga demos don't differ very much.

However, I'm still not sure about one thing: it's possible to start amiga applications on harddisk without workbench? I suppose workbench needs maybe more hardware than Kickstart only and as far as I know, Kickstart contains core of AmigaDOS, Intuition and Exec as well. But I don't know amiga very much..

This is also reason why I asked about 060 compatibility to AmigaOS 3.1 -- If I take 3.1 ROM and try to load it under 060, should I expect it to work?

So.. what do you think? It's possible at all? :)

yes but may be very messy... most demos depend on "setpatch", which is a workbench-provided executable, and also on 68068.library to emulate FPU sin, cos and all that, but anyways your falcon system should already have the proper support for that part. kickstart has the whole layers and graphics library which translates high-level orders into the actual hardware access.

there is also some code somewhere (maybe aminet) by fabio bizetti (a coder from the group ram jam) to setup mmu mappings and trap chipset registers accesses, I think he was trying to catch and soft-emulate the amiga chipset at some point in the past.

2. What chips are used for current "newskool" demos? I mean, in case I don't care about cycle-exact emulation for old a500 stuff and just want to run latest demos from TBL, what I have to implement into emulator? As I think now it applies to both the demos and start of Kickstart/Workbench so:
a) what hardware is used by Kickstart/Workbench? I don't think there's anything special except CPU, DMA, floppy controller and maybe Copper but please, tell me :)
b) what is used by that demos? In Atari world, we use just Videl (your AGA), CPU :), DMA+DSP (your AHI I suppose), Blitter maybe (your Copper), VBL and some timer maybe. Did I forget something?

Blitter (copying memorychunks and a lot more) and Copper (beam control and feeding HW-Regs with data directly). So you probably need both. If you want to run an AmigaOS on this emu you'll need to port the Blitter because it's very frequently used by the OS to draw the windows 'n stuff ;)
The AHI is more a software thing contributed to the OS releases. Only a few demos (f.e. Multiverse or the latest stuff by Kiero offer AHI choice).
Usually the sound still gets yanked out of the Paula (Ports And Audio).