First steps with the ATW800/2

[Darklord]

Excellent! It really is amazing to watch DOOM perform like that on
our old Atari systems.

Like you, I'm sure it will progress from it's current state but what I
really like about seeing this is exposing the sheer potential of the
ATW800/2 card in the right hands.

Looking forward to much more, down the road... :)

[rubber_jonnie]

Excellent! It really is amazing to watch DOOM perform like that on
our old Atari systems.

Like you, I'm sure it will progress from it's current state but what I
really like about seeing this is exposing the sheer potential of the
ATW800/2 card in the right hands.

Looking forward to much more, down the road... :)

I'd like to play more with Helios a lot more, wondering if I need to get some TRAM modules to make it a bit faster in X Windows?

Have you tried X at all, how does it run for you?

[alexh]

wondering if I need to get some TRAM modules to make it a bit faster in X Windows?

I don't imagine so. They are actually slower than the virtual one in the FPGA. T800 TRAM modules have hardware floating point but will that really be the limiting factor? I would have thought Blossom (gfx chip) RAM bandwidth is the limiting factor.

[Steve]

Have you tried X at all, how does it run for you?

What do you mean when you say it runs slow specifically... I can load apps and move windows, everything is snappy that way. Of course running a Fractal in Xmandel takes a while, but other than that its ok for me.

[rubber_jonnie]

wondering if I need to get some TRAM modules to make it a bit faster in X Windows?

I don't imagine so. They are actually slower than the virtual one in the FPGA. T800 TRAM modules have hardware floating point but will that really be the limiting factor? I would have thought Blossom (gfx chip) RAM bandwidth is the limiting factor.

I did a little more reading after posting, and I think you're right, though I still might look for modules just because :)

[rubber_jonnie]

Have you tried X at all, how does it run for you?

What do you mean when you say it runs slow specifically... I can load apps and move windows, everything is snappy that way. Of course running a Fractal in Xmandel takes a while, but other than that its ok for me.

I suppose slow is in the eye of the beholder, and it is a bit odd.

When I start it opens a terminal window. That seems snappy and can easily be moved and it was nice to see that apart from when resizing, it didn't need to turn the window off and just show a frame, it moved the whole thing quickly and easily with the contents showing.

Thats fine and running some of the demos is very fast, but when more than one thing is going at a time I get lockups and crashes. And yes I'm using the packs you suggested.

Also whe I try to do things like resize windows when other things are running it'd very hard to open the menu and do so. Same with killing windows, it's just often is very slow opening the menus on clicking and hard to do anything with two windows open.

Maybe my expectations are too high? BTW I am using 256 colour modes only and I see this even at the lowest resolutions.

[Steve]

@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.

[Darklord]

I'd like to play more with Helios a lot more, wondering if I need to get some TRAM modules to make it a bit faster in X Windows?

Have you tried X at all, how does it run for you?

As others have pointed out, and as far as I know, the onboard hardware is actually faster in
these instances? That is, if my understanding of how it works is correct.

Helios and X work okay here on my Mega STe. It's a touch slower than the regular desktop
IMHO, but that's all.

[Darklord]

I tend to run my ATW in 1024x768 in 4:3 aspect ratio. Sometimes 800x600 if I need to read text :)

Totally agreed. I usually run in 800x600 x 256 colors, running up to 1024x768 when needed. It's
absolutely easier to read everything that way (old man eyes). :)

[dml]

As others have pointed out, and as far as I know, the onboard hardware is actually faster in
these instances? That is, if my understanding of how it works is correct.

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.