What is it with emulators?

[RichardKAthena]

I know that the Ameo throttles the CPU back (but I'm not happy with having PHM installed all the time, as I don't trust it to properly slow the machine down), but why do so many emulators fail on the Ameo?

Pocket Plus/4 is really, really choppy and unreliable.
Pocket Atari seems to work sometimes, but at other times I get speaker popping and no functional emulator.
Pocket C64 is just useless and doesn't support the keyboard, it seems; and setting up the controls seems to cause fuss for the sound, too.

This is supposed to be a fast machine, so I'm baffled by the apparent slowness when it does run an emulator. Pocket Plus/4 especially drops to 4% speed; I thought the CPU was supposed to catch up to the demand!

[RichardKAthena]

And tried with PHM anyway, still no better.

I just tried the exact same installation of Pocket Atari on the Universal with WM6 installed. It's working quite well; I'm currently playing Rescue on Fractalus (XEGS ROM).

Is it a memory management thing, or Microdrive, or something else?

[LTxda]

And tried with PHM anyway, still no better.

I just tried the exact same installation of Pocket Atari on the Universal with WM6 installed. It's working quite well; I'm currently playing Rescue on Fractalus (XEGS ROM).

Is it a memory management thing, or Microdrive, or something else?

On the Universal you probably installed it to the SD? If so, have you tested it on the SD of the Athena? I also noticed a few slow downs on my Athena and I have a Universal also to compare to. I have to redo my Universal because it's running very slow so I can't compare at the moment. I have read on the forums that users have noticed a performance increase with some WM6 installs. This could be a factor but I also think that the SD card is faster than the microDrive. Try it on the SD if you already haven't and see how it goes.

[RichardKAthena]

On the Universal you probably installed it to the SD? If so, have you tested it on the SD of the Athena? I also noticed a few slow downs on my Athena and I have a Universal also to compare to. I have to redo my Universal because it's running very slow so I can't compare at the moment. I have read on the forums that users have noticed a performance increase with some WM6 installs. This could be a factor but I also think that the SD card is faster than the microDrive. Try it on the SD if you already haven't and see how it goes.

I don't have a miniSD, I tried it on internal memory (which I'd expect to be fast) with exactly the same results.

Broken Sword demo runs beautifully from Microdrive; maybe a bit of lag on audio. PocketAtari should be less reliant on the Microdrive than any large game.

I definitely think WM6 feels snappier (though my machine did get sluggish; perhaps the memory leak issue mentioned), but there are some WEIRD glitches going on here. One of the most telling things was when messaging popped up; directly before corrupting PocketAtari's screen with a notification, the messaging application's "activation" caused PocketAtari to run at full speed.

I think there must be some CPU "optimisation" going on within the WM5 build on the Ameo, and I don't think PHM actually cured it for me (I tried forcing the CPU fast for PocketAtari, and just forcing the CPU fast overall).

[LTxda]

I don't have a miniSD, I tried it on internal memory (which I'd expect to be fast) with exactly the same results.

Broken Sword demo runs beautifully from Microdrive; maybe a bit of lag on audio. PocketAtari should be less reliant on the Microdrive than any large game.

I definitely think WM6 feels snappier (though my machine did get sluggish; perhaps the memory leak issue mentioned), but there are some WEIRD glitches going on here. One of the most telling things was when messaging popped up; directly before corrupting PocketAtari's screen with a notification, the messaging application's "activation" caused PocketAtari to run at full speed.

I think there must be some CPU "optimisation" going on within the WM5 build on the Ameo, and I don't think PHM actually cured it for me (I tried forcing the CPU fast for PocketAtari, and just forcing the CPU fast overall).

Wow, sounds like it's a CPU scaling issue indeed. Have you tried to disable the internal scaling using something like PHM? Not allowing it to manage the speeds but just disable the internal system and see what happens.

[RichardKAthena]

Wow, sounds like it's a CPU scaling issue indeed. Have you tried to disable the internal scaling using something like PHM? Not allowing it to manage the speeds but just disable the internal system and see what happens.

Yep, still choppy as anything. Thing is it appears that if I disable scaling and leave it at that (and don't let Scale Engine run), then it stays at 104MHz! But even running at 624MHz - surely plenty for a 1MHz 6502 machine to be emulated - it's running at 4% speed!