Basilisk II Atari

[stephen_usher]

It now also boots under TOS 3.06 and HDDriver 10.10, at least off ACSI. I've yet to try SCSI (though the disk image will always have to be on ACSI).

Disk performance is OK, at 0.4 x a Mac Classic.

I'll now try booting from floppy image on a SCSI disk.

P.S. That works!

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[Badwolf]

Hi Anders,

The work with the lower case filenames now allows me to run Basilisk II from a VFAT drive (previously I couldn't).

I've had MiNT reporting over 2x disc speed, although I seem unable to reproduce this ATM.

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Reproducible figures for MiNT are around 1.4x. Under the same conditions TOS + HDDriver (with default buffers) is 1.1x and EmuTOS 0.25x.

I've not yet had a chance to try CACHExxx.PRG.

I've an idea about the disc speed -- I wonder if we're seeing fragmentation in the virtual hard disc as the first 2x figure was after I deleted a bunch of things from my old hard disc. The remainder was when I restored the disc from the ZIP and it barely has 1MB free.

Will try the tests with an empty virtual disc later.

Cheers,

BW.

EDIT:

Interestingly an empty second drive did yield slightly better performance (1.6x versus 1.4x under MiNT), but with just the single boot drive declared in the INF file and deleting the Illustrator demo, I can get back to ~2.1x. Which is excellent.

Conclusion: it looks like our disc speed comparisons need to have a standard virtual disc configuration, I'm afraid!

[stephen_usher]

Anders, what would happen if I put a line in the basilisk.inf:

floppy raw:a

:D

[Badwolf]

Anders, what would happen if I put a line in the basilisk.inf:

floppy raw:a

:D

I prepared a raw partition to play with but then realised Anders' note in the README disabled both that and block device access.

BW

[stephen_usher]

Beware Speedometer's disk speed test.

I set the disk cache under MacOS to "default", which for my machine became 1.4MB as I have so much memory available.

With the original 32K cache, 0.42, with 1.4MB cache, 7.93!

Oh, and I note that the Mac thinks that there's no FPU.

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[agranlund]

So cool to see that it works better now on different machines!

@frank.lukas So it looks like I forgot to remove a temporary 64MB limit I had in there.
I have uploaded a new version that should allow it to use all your memory :)

@stephen_usher regarding the FPU, do you by any chance use a basilisk.inf from before? I changed the settings a little so you'll need "fpu true" in there to make it use the FPU (if available)
Super happy it now works on your TT btw, especially that it also works on SCSI.

[agranlund]

I've an idea about the disc speed -- I wonder if we're seeing fragmentation in the virtual hard disc as the first 2x figure was after I deleted a bunch of things from my old hard disc.

Ah, yeah that makes perfect sense! when it has to jump around a lot any cache will have a much harder time.

I prepared a raw partition to play with but then realised Anders' note in the README disabled both that and block device access.

I was meaning to enable it now in the build that removed the 64MB ram limit but as I gave it a quick test I don't think it should go into a proper build yet. I'm happy to share one here though if you want to try it out.

The main issue is that the block device disks are "unblessed" if MacOS is not shut down correctly and that gets annoying real fast.
I'm not really sure why yet.
Speedometer disk speeds on these are at around 1x or slightly above, but startup speed and just general snappiness of the desktop appears to be better than disk images that score higher in Speedometer. I haven't actually timed anything to know for sure though :)

At boot, it reads mostly 512 byte chunks from a bit all over the place. Speedometer seems to be doing "large write", "small read", over and over a whole bunch of times to measure the speed.

[derkom]

@frank.lukas So it looks like I forgot to remove a temporary 64MB limit I had in there.
I have uploaded a new version that should allow it to use all your memory :)

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:dualthumbup:

FYI, my TT has no SCSI in play. It's got a Thunder IDE interface connected to SSD via a SATA bridge.

I have some unused partitions should you want me to test out some some raw stuff for you.

[stephen_usher]

@stephen_usher regarding the FPU, do you by any chance use a basilisk.inf from before? I changed the settings a little so you'll need "fpu true" in there to make it use the FPU (if available)
Super happy it now works on your TT btw, especially that it also works on SCSI.

Oh, OK. I'll add that to the basilisk.inf file. :-)

[frank.lukas]

Emulator in a Emulator ...

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... fast ! Works only under Black and White. But the Keyboard do not work.