Amiga 1200 : Life without an FPU? Let's see.

[@piyushkhengar]

Q, don’t be so hard on yourself. I don’t think your channel is poorly or under produced! I love your videos, and I especially love the uber produced intro sequence. Keep up the good work!

[@HoldandModify]

Thank you! I do try but I think I’ve grown to like it’s “underproduced” feel. :)

[@daishi5571]

Having started on an unaccelerated A500 with 1MB with Sculpt and then moving to Imagine the speed at which they rendered was incredibly slow but it was enough for my friend to be able to get his first job raytracing. That in turn had him get an accelerator for his A500 (020 w FPU and fast RAM) and the speed difference was incredible (comparative) but later when I got an my A1200 with an 030 at 1st then 040 the difference was such a step up it truly made it a pleasure to use.

[@HoldandModify]

That’s a great story! Love it and been through all that myself back in the day!

[@SledgeFox]

Did I spot a DCTV left of your Monitor! 😁 That was some strange tech... Great video, thank you very much!

[@HoldandModify]

Yup! Sadly busted. But it’s a fun looking bit of kit. :)

[@manueljesus3147]

Man... even back in the day I plunked down some serious coin for the 060 CSPPC card and even THAT was too slow to run Lightwave. I was crushed when I learned there would be no PPC Amiga Lightwave version. I moved to a Dual Pentium Pro and NEVER looked back. The Vampire is the only thing that's tickled my fancy as it at least gets me to the speed of a decent first gen Pentium. But I still just take the Lightwave 3.X Amiga OS CF card and take that over to a laptop and let that render frames out using an emulator if I want to use vintage LW. Thanks for the videos....

[@HoldandModify]

Yea for frame rendering I absolutely suggest WinUAE or Pi. I mentioned this in previous video. :)

[@TemalCageman]

Hehe... remember the first Accelerator card I got for Amiga was the M-TEC 1230/28MHz and 8MB ram. It had slots for PLCC fpu as well as PGA FPU. I bought the PGA FPU running at 50MHz, and some operations done in Photogenics went from 5 minutes to 10 seconds. :D

[@HoldandModify]

Wasn’t that great back then! Loved the speed boosts.

[@TemalCageman]

@@HoldandModify Oh yeah... I even had an 060 with SCSI controller and 256MB ram.... I also had a 040/PPC 603e card that I sometimes played around with... EDIT: But I see the same thing today with LightWave 2020 native render-engine. I have a 64/128 thread Threadripper, and it feels like I am using a couple of GPUs with Octane. :D

[@HoldandModify]

@@TemalCageman actually someone did a test on one of those and the 64/128 is as fast as a single 2080TI in Octane. So yes, this is true! :)

[@TemalCageman]

@@HoldandModify Haha... I was "feeling" it since I only used Octane with a single 1080. So... a couple of them then. :D EDIT: With all the bitcoin mining going on, how the f* can you get hold of any decent GPU within "not arm and a leg" sacrifice? :D

[@alexanderwingeskog758]

I had a Amiga 500, loved it... got a 80 Mb SCSI hard drive and love it even more.. After that I got the A1200 and it was awesome, better graphics, faster and 2 Mb chip ram... Loved it, after that I got a 68030 with a 68882 at 50 Mhz... and it was just awesome... The AmigaOS had so much power with the 68000 and with the 030/882 it was just mind blowing at the time... The OS (yes single user) would be awesome run still to this day....

[@8bitwidgets]

Great video! I'm going to try out the soft-fpu option as I only have the TF536.. I'm ok with LW 3.5 as a limit but yea i'm glad you showed a solid demonstration of fpu-less performance. I'm hoping that the soft-fpu can eat some of the 50mhz of the 030 will be a net gain..

[@HoldandModify]

Thank you and if you get Soft FPU working you can at least run LW5 and get some of its improved features. Both in Layout and Modeler.

[@8bitwidgets]

@@HoldandModify absolutely. i'm definitely curious about the improvements.. though i'm actually kinda excited to learn the original version of lightwave.. i look at stuff like the original video toaster ending video showcased.. kzbin.info/www/bejne/iKbGaHR8np5jbsk

[@robertomeloni3095]

@@HoldandModify where can I get this “soft-fpu”?

[@HoldandModify]

@@robertomeloni3095 no idea. That’s why I asked for folks to post here. :) sorry!

[@cullmaster7361]

Good vid. So I take it you are also using the correct libraries for the CPUs you were demonstrating with? Any difference if you use THors MMU lib 68x libraries?

[@HoldandModify]

I’ve only used the Libs that came with the 3.2 install. I did try some others a while ago linked to from the FB group but had some wacky issues. Worth looking in to some more.

[@vertigoz]

The fpu of 060 is leagues ahead of those previous fpus. The difference in speed is massive from my experience back in the days

[@HoldandModify]

Oh yes for sure. Good stuff!

[@SledgeFox]

Indeed, the 68882 @ 50 MHz did about 0,5 MFLOPS, the 68060 @ 50 MHz something around 35 MFLOPS. The 060 was a beast!

[@glennbojones777]

I love working on my Amigas but when it comes time to render a complex scene or animation , I have to move to emulation for the sake of my patience. I do want that FPU card but they have a three month lead time once you order from AmigaKit

[@HoldandModify]

I render animations with emulation as well to protect the Amigas. Get that FPU makes a big difference.

[@SuperVstech]

I have a few 1200 accelerators. 030 and 040… both with fpu… I understand the 060 isn’t as compatible as the 030/40 chips… 080 is the beast… but a good 030 expansion really wakes up the 1200… it’s so annoying commodore went with the ec020 on the 1200… I mean, it came out AFTER the 4000 did… the least they could have done was use a real 030… or at least a real 020…

[@HoldandModify]

Yes. When we got the 1200 in the store we were very baffled by the cost saving in the 1200.

[@binarybond007]

I see you have a DCTV. I have two DCTV modules. I have never been able to get them to work with my PAL A1200. Obviously I've tried switching to NTSC mode in early boot menu. Both DCTVs have no color. I only have a PAL A1200 and no other Amigas to try. Do you know if the DCTV can work with a PAL A1200?

[@HoldandModify]

Sorry to hear. Sadly my DCTV also does not work. Which is why it’s sitting as decoration. I believe the DCTV works with PAL or NTSC. It has two adjustment dials. Maybe you can find information about those? Good luck!

[@glennbojones777]

DCTV came In two flavours , PAL or NTSC and you need to have the one that matches your Amigas native mode, either PAL or NTSC, mine will only work properly with my NTSC 2000 and only black and white on my PAL machine hope this helps trouble shooting, the knobs are for adjusting the image but won’t fix that issue.

[@8bitwidgets]

he wasn't sure if i missed it but you showed that 8mb card w/ fpu rendering faster than without.. but what was the render time of the stock 1200 vs the 8mb / fpu configuration? obviously it's going to still be much slower than the 060 of course.. i also wonder how well an 060 would render with software fpu.. i wonder for all those non-fpu 060 owners, if they could use a soft fpu.. and see an overall improvement over their 060 without fpu.. or if this would outperform an 030 with fpu.. i'm skipping 040 in this consideration mostly because there are so few of those in circulation.. and no modern accelerators taking advantage of 040s.

[@HoldandModify]

I left that out with a quick one liner about it being so slow it wasn’t worth showing. The stock 68020 without FPU was looking at around 40min a frame! It’s just not practical. I don’t have access to any softFPU but I can tell you something like that would most likely only allow is the running of software that requires an FPU. There’s really no way for it to find any more performance when it can only execute as fast as the host CPU.

[@8bitwidgets]

@@HoldandModify yea i see what you mean. as for the soft fpu i'll dig into it as it's a must for me as i have no practical affordable A2000 FPU options. Even my ACA 1233 is FPU-less on my A1200. Muadib3D said the soft-fpu thing works but yea i'd just like to put it to the test. it may be a wash.. I'd do it now, but I have a few other fixes to apply and test. My A1200 is pretty much out of commission as it's tucked away to sell after i get the A2000 working next month with some parts on order.

[@HoldandModify]

The card I showed from AmiKit is not too much money considering the state of Amiga gear. As I said, $60-$100. But I understand everyone’s available cash is vastly different. :) I do look forward to your findings though!

[@HoldandModify]

@@8bitwidgets ohhh, right. Like the Firebird. Yeah. Ugh.

[@8bitwidgets]

@@HoldandModify yea i hope the talk of a TF big box card comes around.. but i'll be honest i'm just not that stoked about 060 without fpu.. and $500 chip.. again.. just a bit too rich for my blood.. really really hopping buffee turns out to be a solid option.. though it has no ide bus but i guess the plus is it means real scsi would work with it? unlike the TF cards

[@boydpukalo8980]

And that is why Amiga's sucked donkey balls when 3D became realistic-that and and the lack of chunky pixel formats. Still amazing to see what could be done on the machines but they were a creature of the 80's. Advanced when they came out then languished with machine after machine being basically the same system re-released over and over while other architectures made generation leaps and strides.

[@FuZZbaLLbee]

Now go watch a video of Blender Cycles with RTX On. We have come a long way 😀

[@HoldandModify]

Yup! I made my intro video in Octane. :)

[@KC-nd7nt]

Pull the card out and blow on it . Always works betrer

[@retrounit7082]

Lol. Yes fpu please!

[@another3997]

I had several Amigas and I loved them, but rendering Lightwave images on ANY Amiga is never going to be fast. I'm not knocking them, but to put the speed of the old '060 in to perspective: A 2010 'Netbook' with an Intel Atom N450, (a power efficient, but agonisingly slow single core mobile CPU, even by the standards of the day) running Lightwave via WinUAE, will render faster than the fastest '060, and at least as fast as a Vampire. You can pick up a used one for the price of a Starbucks coffee. A Core 2 Duo will at least quadruple that speed, and any modern x86 PC will easily quadruple that again. Seconds instead of hours. So, create on a real Amiga, but maybe render on an emulated Amiga. 😉

[@HoldandModify]

I always recommend to my viewers to do all final rendering with an emulator. For many of the reasons you’ve listed as well as protecting the Amigas for the heavy wear and tear.