CT60 First Impressions

A diary extract from CiH

21 November 2003
The following update might be of some interest to you...

My CT60 is now running :-)

It is at Stimpy's at the present, and it has been successfully installed in the Nemesis Falcon, that is, my original machine. He reversed the Nemesis install, and that is now available for re-use, if anyone is interested ;-)

It works fine at 66 MHz, but didn't appreciate being asked to go at 72 MHz, so I guess I've got one of the 50 MHz 060s. Stimpy did boost the bus to 25 MHz, and that seems to be fine as well. It even looks like that the persistent keyboard fault may have vanished on that machine at last?! (I'm keeping my fingers crossed on that one, it could have been something to do with the Nemesis, but he also mentioned that the keyboard connector had got mangled somewhere along the line?!?)

You might also be interested to know that it is in the original Falcon case, and he re-used the original 40 mm Falcon cooling fan directly over the CPU, by shaving a little bit of plastic off the keyboard (it was a low-profile fan to start with.) On/off and reset buttons have been put in at the back. The 030/060 toggle re-uses the switch position at the side of the case where the Nemesis RGB Videl switch used to go ;-) It sounds like an elegant piece of work, vis the original Falcon casing, and it will almost be a shame to recase it, (but I'm sure we will have to, when the SuperVidel is ready).

It seems to be very stable in operation, Stimpy commented that it felt more stable than his own! It ran for two hours, playing an MPEG in Aniplayer without crashing (and this in an ST-RAM busting hi-res RGB TrueColor mode.) You can also add FlaySID, the GEM-based SID sound player, to the list of compatible software now ;-) This is also good news from a DSP communication point of view.

All we need now, is the CT60 compatible version of ACE! The Highwire browserwas described as loading "in the blink of an eye".

It is running on a "borrowed" fast RAM at the moment, it will be 100% ready for collection by Monday/Tuesday next week when the proper RAM board turns up, so I'll be off to his place by mid-week at the latest.

28 November 2003
We're getting things into an "interim" shape at the moment, not quite at the fully loaded Jinnee-based gorgeousness of my CT2 desktop environment, but I'm slowly getting there. 

The box itself, yes, a standard Falcon case, Stimpy has replaced the original keyboard with something that is still Atari issue, but has a nicer tactile feel, it doesn't feel as worn-in as before. The power supply is an ugly brute of an ATX, which is umbilically joined to the CT60, so I have to be very careful if and when I travel with this machine! Not to mention the mess of left-over unused cables emitting forth from the ATX ;-) He has done a nice job with the reset/shutdown buttons on the back, and the 030/060 mode select lever on the side feels chunky and solid.

I like the idea of a machine that can take its own temperature, and this one holds steady at around 40 degrees C, even when left on for a while. Booting up is impressively quick. There are warnings about using XBoot and creating user-defined sets, so I tend to change things as and when I need them, or not, on the fly.

There was an early issue with MagiC randomly crashing a short way in, always when I was moving the mouse. I had a look at the AUTO folder running order, and the stuff that was in the CPX, and got rid of any duplications. I don't think there were any really serious issues with the AUTO folder, double checked the patches, renamed one of the "old" files left behind by the MagiC patch to something less likely to be picked up by mistake when MagiC boots? And I think that might have cured it?

I only had one crash last night, as opposed to it constantly going down on the first night, and several hours of trouble-free operation since that last event. Standard TOS seems to be pretty stable, whatever.

The other issue, which I'm asking the wider CT60 owning public about, are there possible timing problems between the CT60 and DSP when running audio streaming (MP3) from Aniplayer 2.20 and FalcAMP? Aniplayer mostly works, and can replay MP3 without the DSP, just that it kicks most of the CPU time in the head doing so, unless you compromise with reducing to mono. Running it on DSP reduces the overhead impressively, to a sub-10% figure, but there is a tendency for Aniplayer to "stick" in mid-tune. You can pause and resume, so the error handling is good in that case. Poor old FalcAMP starts off well enough, then stops on a DSP time-out error message (generated by the program). Indeed, I'm not even sure if these programs are supposed to work with CT60 and the DSP together, like a classic Falcon does, or not? I might add that I did get Aniplayer to successfully complete one of the downgraded MP2 soundtracks from the T.O.Y.S EIL demo, which was lower KHz, mono, and MP2 replay is entirely a DSP-based process. The average CPU load dropped to 1-2%! Further investigations to follow...

-XI- has his own compatibility list on satantronic.atari.org, which has both of these working okay? So I'm wondering if he's got a freak machine, or I have? I might add I did test FlaySID (the SID sound emulator/player) successfully. I did test both FalcAMP and Aniplayer under 030 mode (increasingly to be known as "diagnostic mode"!), and they were fine then. I will try the latest Aniplayer 2.21, to see if that is any better.

Aniplayer was one of the tested programs that gave me a good impression of the underlying power. The DSP has no problem with JPEG depacking, but Aniplayer is quicker if you turn the DSP off! It is a good idea to select some really large JPEGs to notice the difference though! For one such picture, I finger-counted to four when running with DSP (which seems to have no problems in this instance). Loading again without, I just got within a finger count of two!

I managed to get on-line quickly, my STinG installation transferred without a hitch, NEWSie, CAB and HighWire 1.5 are all working a treat. aFTP and AtarIRC will need some more setting up, when I'm less tired and over-excited.

The other place where I'm getting a good impression of the extra performance, is with the speedier operation of the internet. This is a good thing, as it is my main daily use CPU-intensive operation. Even a slow old dog such as CAB showed a great improvement over how it performed before, even compared with the CT2. HighWire was even quicker. HTML page formatting was virtually instantaneous. It wasn't too bad a performer before on CT2, so the difference was less obvious. The graphics loading in both cases was greatly improved too. Now it seems the only thing slowing down the web, is that 56 K piece of string connection!

Saying that, it is still great to get an internet connection more responsive than the old Wintel box at work! (Ancient 150/200 MHz Pentium hooked up to a server and running web from there). It takes a-a-a-a-a-ges to put any large pictures on a page on-screen.

Extended screen modes seem to be okay. I have managed to copy my existing Centscreen settings over from the CT2 machine without having to make any adjustments. I assume that the bus speed is near-identical to the CT2, which would help. This works without comment under MagiC, which also handles resolution changes, say to extended 640 x 480 TrueColor mode without complaining. Centscreen produces a spectacular crash (with the CT60 exception handling messages) on plain TOS, but then goes on to accept the mode change and boot the rest of the way from there as if nothing untoward had happened?!

I had problems getting Smurf 1.05 going at first. It loaded okay, but crashed out when trying to display a picture in plain TOS. However, it works fine under MagiC, and I did have a little fiddle with several of the effects modules. What a nice fast response they've got, even with a larger picture to work on!

There is still quite a bit to check out. I got the "Jam" multi-format GEM-based music player to load, but I've got to scrape some music files together to test it, likewise with Megaplayer. The ST-chipmusic "SND-player" does work. I think a couple of mod-file players have been ported over to the CT60, and I am looking forward to CT60 compatible Graoumf Tracker, and CT60 compatible ACE Tracker!

I've taken a look at a tiny amount of demo stuff. I'm personally amazed that anything written prior to CT60, can work on this, but the Dead Hackers' 4ktros work. I've got the early version of the Orneta 4ktro, which is not framerate-synched and runs like the clappers, but I think it has decided to run as a 66 MHz 030 in that case!

I tried the two big demos from the second EIL party, the T.O.Y.S "Wait" demo looks for ST RAM, and refuses to go on mine as it is out of memory (I've got a 4 MB ST RAM board in) but I understand it does work. The Dead Hackers' "Don't Break the Oath" gets about a third of the way in, then stops, which matches what is supposed to happen in the report I've seen.

Oh yes, the Alive diskmag shell seems to be happy on 060!

I've still yet to try out a couple of the heavyweight applications, that is, Quake, and the Joysoft Atari 800 emulator. Now that will be for slightly later on!

MyAtari magazine - Feature #3, June 2004