PI 5, best PI for Atari ST emulation?

[@jrherita]

Im really surprised the 3B+ struggles considering the ST was decently emulated on a Pentium Ii from 1998. Regardless I like this video a lot!

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

Glad you liked it. I was a little surprised at the 3B+ performance, though I'm unsure that the pentium II was as good as you remember. The devs recommend a 1GHz or better CPU and the Pentium II peaked at 450Mhz. But.. We all have rose tinted glasses when looking back. Using real Atari hardware often feels slower than I remember. Probably because we keep comparing it to emulators running with 32Mhz virtual processors :-) That's why I love making this content, the pull of nostalgia is very strong.

[@jrherita]

@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit that's fair. I suspect though the old ST emulator I was using was more hand coded assembler and probably less accurate than what is running today. It definitely couldn't run everything.

[@jrherita]

A little more, article from back in the day - Gemulator 98- Gemulator runs Atari ST software in real time using only a 486/33 computer. Due to the much faster speed of Pentium based computers, Gemulator typically runs faster than Falcon and Atari TT computers. On a 300 MHz Pentium II based computer Gemulator runs over 25 times faster than the original Atari ST, making it faster than any 68030, 68040, or 68060 Atari clones from Germany.

[@slaapliedje]

@@jrherita Yeah, Gemulator just emulated a raw 68k and GEM, didn't support any of the ST specific hardware, so would only really run desktop apps.

[@kevinabraun]

Telling is not the same as teaching, this video and presentation style is very good indeed.

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

Wow, thank you!

[@dazealex]

Atari ST was a computer I saw, and wanted badly, but couldn't get. Was a mere child... But enjoyed the video thoroughly! Keep making these videos! I wish there is a Baremetal install or at least a distro of Hatari I could run with demos and games (where copyright has expired, or is abandoned)... Any ideas? Always feel there is little out there compared to Amiga channels. Still, I rock on with my Atari 130XL computer. And the various things I can now pair with it, like the Atari SIO2SD, etc.

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

What platform are you on? If it's Mac or Windows have you had a look at this? kzbin.info/www/bejne/h6uXmniebaqWeNE Ames and apps are relatively easy to find with a google search

[@slaapliedje]

It will be interesting to benchmark the V4SA vs the pi5 at some point.

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

My hardware budget has just been sunk into a 3D printer :-) Though this device looks interesting. I more keeping an eye on the $99 MisterFPGA project. THat's something i'd like to get.

[@slaapliedje]

@@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit the MiSTer is cool, also, welcome to 3d printing! I have both a resin and FDM printer. The work being done on the V4SA would be perfect for your channel, but for sure, it is a bit pricey. Such a cool device, and it looks like the future for anything related to the Atari ST and Amiga.

[@ernestuz]

I am lucky enough to live close where they have their shop, so I could buy my Pi 5 the day after it was launched. About overclocking, most of the freezes of mine came form the video core overclocking, if you only overclock the CPU core it should be okay, although I could overclock mine up to 3.2GHz without overvolting it, and passing a 2 hour stress test done stressing it with s-tui, when I measured the arm clock with "vcgencmd measure_clock arm" it only gave me 3GHz, so I have only overclocked to that frequency. Nice to see the Atari emulators running here.

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

Thanks for that I'll give it a go using CPU only overclocking, thats the most important criteria for Hatari after all.

[@terminalterminus]

Thanks. I have a Pi 4 4GB and found running Hatari running a custom Falcon setup to be a bit clunky. Would be interesting to try running Hatari on something like the Banana Pi BPI M7 and see how well it performs there...

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

It would be interesting to run it on a Banana PI, or even one of those small intel devices EtaPrime is so enthusuastic about.

[@dnielv]

I can't believe how badly optimized is Hatari then. The 3B+ is able even to emulate PSP games at full speed with no FS, then why can't emulate a humble 8mhz Atari ST. Also RB 3B+ are often used with PiStorm emulators giving an incredible perfomance, and it not only emulates an ultra fast CPU but also RTG graphics, networking, ram and other stuff. Either there is an incredible lack of optimization in Hatari, or something wrong with its ARM port. Even factoring in the fact Hatari doesn't use JIT, it should not be so slow. Taking in mind how fast performance degrades are resolution goes up (I really doubt loading geneva uses more cpu than Xenon 2) I suspect it may be related with the video system in Hatari or the distro which is executing it. As the resolution increases also does the frameskip. Obviosly, this increase in CPU time used in the emulation is normal...but not in such way. Maybe Hatari is running in a software framebuffer driver so the ARM cpu has to do all the drawing and buffer swapping by software? Perhaps running Hatari as a core in Retroarch may help.

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

Hatari is a cycle exact hardware emulator, it sacrifices performance for accuracy. There is no JIT in it for that reason. Your comment on the 3B+ and PSP emulation is definitely at odds with mine :-) I remember chains of Olympus crawling along!

[@danielktdoranie]

I wonder how it would on one of those Orange Pi 5 Pro 32GB RAM SBC

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

That's a good question. On paper the performance looks to be pretty much the same. The Orange pi has more cores, but for emulation that's a pretty moot point. However it's not a thing I can measure.

[@CFalcon030]

Wait the Falcon emulation on the Pi4 was with DSP or not? How did it perform when you put it to do something, like play a mod/mp3? My Phenom II would choke when running Hatari with DSP, but it had no issue with TT. Also, why not try with a VGA monitor and some more colors?

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

I was running with dep off or set to dumpy, so I don’t know. I’ll give it a try on the 5 at some point and let you know.

[@mrsvcd]

I did the same test on my Macmini3,1 1.0/Intel Core 2 Duo P7550 (2) @ 2.261GHz and that machine did not give me a FS of more than 0 (zero) but I have a feeling that is because the CPU emulation core is made for x86 and not arm. I could be wrong.

[@samuelbanya]

I wonder how the newer Mister clones will emulate the Atari computers.

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

I would imaging pretty well. though I'm not sure if the Falcon DSP is implemented properly.

[@jrherita]

Lol I was on travel and couldn't order until like 8 hours after it was announced. Still waiting :)

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

I just got my zx spectrum next today. That’s over 2 years late!

[@samuelbanya]

Also, is it possible to output the Pi 5 to a VGA monitor?

[@espasphalt]

So I’ve used adapters, not the greatest, but on both lcd and crt it worked pretty well the only issue i had was it would resize the window incorrectly every once in a while on boot

[@samuelbanya]

@@espasphalt is that using an HDMI to VGA adapter? Or are you using the VGA666 adapter?

[@espasphalt]

@@samuelbanya i’ve had success with both, just not a huge fan of pihats. Now that i think about it Ive only used the vga666 on pi4 my bad

[@danielktdoranie]

I assume the frame skip is zero on your Mac

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

Yes. I have an M1 Pro, macbook pro and I just maxed it out for a test, 1024x768 in 16 colors (extended VDI), TT system at 32Mz on a 68060 processor, frame skip = 0. I think i'd be devastated if it wasn't like that to be honest!

[@EnjoySynthSounds]

Have an Amiga mini with Pandory but the Atari ST Emulator doesn’t work. This pi would be a good choice.

[@commodoreisnottheonlyfruit]

It certainly is. I have an A500 mini, I might lookinto how good an ST it can be, in the new year