QDOS4Amiga on Amiga 600

[Peter]

The execution speed of Basilisk did not depend on the Linux version. Note that UQLX emulated the 68K CPU, while the Q40/Q60 version of Basilisk did not. Hence the speed.

Did you port Basillisk tomtge Q40/Q60?

Not me, Richard did. Back then, I hoped to even run Basilisk without Linux on the Qx0 someday. 68K Mac Software was amazing, shows what was also possible on QL-style hardware.

[Peter]

Why not use the already established Dhrystone executable? http://qdos.free.fr/files/dhrystone21.zip

I wanted to improve upon it.

What would you like to improve?

[Derek_Stewart]

Not me, Richard did. Back then, I hoped to even run Basilisk without Linux on the Qx0 someday. 68K Mac Software was amazing, shows what was also possible on QL-style hardware.

Pity this was not available when I wax trying market the Q60.

I have a Mac Mini G4 which I installed Mac OS9, looked not bad. I have used OS7, OS8.

[bwinkel67]

What would you like to improve?

Dhrystone, in part, is based on the optimization a compiler does. Some optimizations you can force, or do yourself (i.e. like remove double jumps). So I want to see if I can at least get it up to the best Dhrystone run so far for the QL. Note that this is all for fun so if the argument is that it's not worth it, well, that's true about anything for fun This will be one of my projects when school is out. This summer I plan to do some fun coding projects

Another project I'll look at is to recompile MacUAE 0.6.0 for 68K Mac under ThinkC. The current code base is done in Codewarrior DR7 but a) I've had a hard time finding it and b) I used ThinkC for all my projects back in the 90's and it was a pretty decent compiler. I want to see if I can't improve on the dismal performance of the MacUAE for 68K platforms...again, completely pointless but fun.

In fact, just getting these to compile in a different compiler is challenging. I got Dhrystone to compile in Digital C SE last summer and found a bug in the compiler. I want to contact the creator (he's on GitHub) to see if I can get some pointers as to how I'd fix it. Plus, I also want to recompile Digital C SE on my BBQL (it's written in Digital C SE)...also pointless fun

[bwinkel67]

My 33Mhz 68030 PowerBook 180 running the MacUAE Amiga Emulator...with some magic. It does not run this fast

Mac68K_Boing_300x20.gif (3.44 MiB) Viewed 5271 times

[Mark Swift]

680X0 emulation on recent Mac hardware...
QDOS classic running in FS-UAE on an M1 2021 MacBook Pro (MKGP3B/A).

GCCdhrystones measures 324675 dhrystones/sec.

[bwinkel67]

680X0 emulation on recent Mac hardware...
QDOS classic running in FS-UAE on an M1 2021 MacBook Pro (MKGP3B/A).
GCCdhrystones measures 324675 dhrystones/sec.

The original MacUAE is literally unusable for emulation. The 68K emulating a 68K just isn't workable. Before you ended up with QDOS classic, did you have a slower 68K emulated version? Just curious if you were confronted with a slow emulator and went the better route you did.

The GIF posted is a result of a video speedup (just wanted to see if the animation is smooth...plus it looked kind of neat). I'm guessing the Dhrysone mark for it will be under 50 :-/ I'm going to try and run SysInfo on it to find out as I'm really curious if Dhyrstone reflects the speed I have observed.

[bwinkel67]

So you can't run SysInfo, or any Dhrystone progra, on the 68K MacUAE (v0.6.0). It doesn't matter on which platform you run it, i.e. a fast 68K Mac emulator (Basilisk II on my modern Windows 10 machine) that runs MacUAE about as fast as an Amiga 1200, or my PowerBook 180, that runs it about 50 times slower than a true Amiga. In both cases, SysInfo claims it runs at 1034 Dhrystones (at about 2x faster than an Amiga 600).

I discovered why. When you type the "date" function into the Amiga's command shell, about 30 seconds apart, the clock only advances by about 1 second. So instead of getting the real system clock, it computes it internally and if it's running really slow, seconds stretch out to half a minute or more. That is simply a bad choice. Should poll the system clock of the Mac (a simple system call) to get each second. This will be one of the first thing to fix if I can get it to compile.

[Mark Swift]

I suspect that the poor performance that you see on the 68030 PowerBook 180 is due to UAE having to emulate both the processor and the Amiga Blitter.

Before you ended up with QDOS classic, did you have a slower 68K emulated version? Just curious if you were confronted with a slow emulator and went the better route you did.

No, the Amiga QL emulator has always run 680x0 code natively.

By the time I got involved - around May 1990 - it was fully formed and working well, albeit with a few bugs.
https://dilwyn.qlforum.co.uk/docs/magar ... ay1990.pdf

My main contribution was to modularise the code, moving hardware dependent code into peripheral ROMs.
This made for more stable releases with fewer bugs. It also made it easier to port to other hardware.