First steps with the ATW800/2

[rubber_jonnie]

@rubber_jonnie I suppose it is a bit clunky when it's running / actively calculating an app. That's pretty normal. Although I've only ever run it on a TT, not sure if the underlying disk transfer overhead between systems makes a measurable difference or not. You certainly shouldn't run it higher than 1024x768, it quickly fills the transputers memory and that can impact performance massively. I noticed you are running on a wide screen monitor and running high res on TOS, so perhaps this is the problem. In my opinion high res modes are a bit overkill on Atari since nothing scales and everything becomes too small to see. I tend to run my ATW in 1024x768 in 4:3 aspect ratio. Sometimes 800x600 if I need to read text :)

PS dml's raytracing transuper app *can* run at higher colour depths. I tend to run his app at 800x600x65K colours, the results are beautiful.

Since you mentioned 256 colour mode I have been running at lower resolution, no more than 1024x768x256 (usually lower) when I run Helios and the very hi res images were just me playing.

I will give DML's stuff a try soon, but am in the office today so not able. Perhaps tomorrow.

I guess it's just that X is a bit clunky and I need to spend more time with it.

Out of curiosity, are you able to exit X and jump back to the CLI?

If I try to exit X everything just hangs for me and I need to reset.

One thing that is working well is XBoot. I have multiple profiles so if I want to just run my MSTE as standard I just pick one of them and pick my ATW800 profile if I want to use that.

I'll try and get some more time on it and get my head round it better.

[rubber_jonnie]

@dml thanks for all that info, very interesting indeed 😁

[Steve]

I think it's CTRL & F9 to exit Helios.

[alexh]

Since the release of the ATW800/2 there has been a big spike in the prices of T80x TRAMs and even just the chips.

Only untested T425 chips are practical prices (£30) and then you'd have to make a TRAM board on-top.

I've been asking around the office (we were founded by one of the Inmos team) but only one person has any but I don't think they want to sell.

[Darklord]

This is correct for the simplest case but as usual, there is more to it depending on what you are trying to do.

The ATW's onboard Transputer is a 'fast' T425, I'd say about 2.5-4 times faster than a real one depending on tasks. It has a lot of fast memory and direct access to the video memory that is output to HDMI. So it is ideal for running the host OS, redrawing windows etc. for running Doom :) and also ideal as a host for managing other Transputers if they are added.

Despite being fast though, it has no FPU so any intensive 'math stuff' is going to be using a software floating point library and we know how that goes :)

Transputers were of course designed to be networked, running stuff in parallel so adding more of them can make things run faster. This is also true of Helios, when running more than just the desktop. The apps can be spread over other Transputers if things are configured correctly.

The graphics/raytracing app I have been working on does use a lot of heavy math stuff. A real T80x is basically a T425 with a 64bit FPU added and is 2-4x faster at this task than the onboard 'fast' T425. So the ideal config for running something like that is 3 Transputers - the onboard one and 2x real T80x in the slots. It will run with other configurations too but that's the fastest case for it.

So the onboard Transputer is pretty fast at most stuff but you can further turbocharge it by adding a couple of T80x for a bit of 80's style supercomputing.

Thanks for the explanation, dml - appreciated.

This brings up another question though, to my mind. If what's missing in the mix is the FPU, then can't the Mega STe's native onboard FPU
be used to help the ATW800/2 in those situations (or would it be considered a "lightweight" and of not much use)?

I'm only asking because it's looking more and more like acquiring "ready to go" TRAM boards is getting difficult and pricey.

Thanks! :)

[DoG]

...
I'm only asking because it's looking more and more like acquiring "ready to go" TRAM boards is getting difficult and pricey.
...

Geekdot wrote on discord that there is TRAM in the works with Nano20k on the back. Apperently running 2 cores. Not done by Geekdot. So there is hope. But who knows when they will be available and what the price will be.

[mrbombermillzy]

IMHO the biggest problem is not so much how many transputers are available, or going to be available.

I believe the problem is there are not many developers on board to code for these things. On top of that, the older code/SW is set up to run in a hardwired/fixed architecture setup or incompatible to the ATW800/2 way. This can be 'patched' but only by the people who can actually program transputers (although any SW coded in Inmos C may fare better from a programmer base perspective; i.e. a lot more coders are able to code C rather than Occam).

My own progress has pretty much ground to a halt for 2 major reasons, but Im very happy @dml has taken the initiative to code some SW for the ATW800/2. I could not ask for a better result, so thank you. :)

[dml]

(although any SW coded in Inmos C may fare better from a programmer base perspective; i.e. a lot more coders are able to code C rather than Occam).

This is true - I poked around with Occam a bit and the language - the chips were co-developed to make sense together - but I agree that C is the way to make some progress and that's the route I have taken so far.

My own progress has pretty much ground to a halt for 2 major reasons,

I hope you will be able to resolve that - you were making a lot of progress from what I could see.

but Im very happy @dml has taken the initiative to code some SW for the ATW800/2. I could not ask for a better result, so thank you. :)

:dualthumbup:

I will release some example sourcecode before long which might help others try some stuff out. It will depend on how many coders are interested though at the end of the day. For now I'm having fun with it.

[JezC]

I'm interested in programming the board and TRAMs (and even external Transputers eventually) - just not had any time for it yet.

I did a fair bit of programming them in Occam 2 in the 80s & 90s and then a bit with C after that (university and then at work) so I hope some memories are in there somewhere!

[dml]

I'm interested in programming the board and TRAMs (and even external Transputers eventually) - just not had any time for it yet.

:dualthumbup:

I did a fair bit of programming them in Occam 2 in the 80s & 90s and then a bit with C after that (university and then at work) so I hope some memories are in there somewhere!

Cool. We can compare notes then :) I'm just a newbie with this.