Re: sQLux v1.0 (The Xmas Turkey)
Posted: Sat May 21, 2022 1:46 am
Hi all !
As one of my two QLs is no longer booting and the other one is still confined in the Alps, I decided to fall back on emulators in Raspberry Pis. I have a Pi Zero W running an old raspian, that I use for QL emulation with uQLx (and also for a Ceres-Oberon 1984 workstation emulator which I like very much). But I decided to try also (at last) sQLux ! And I installed it following the excellent user guide from swensont.
On my Pi Zero W, it works... however, I find it terribly slow (and I mean TERRIBLY !).
So I tried also to install it on a faster Pi Zero W2 running Pi-OS (because it does not support raspian), and it works better, but still slower than uQLx on both machines.
This is the '.ini' file that I finally put together :
As you can see, I use no FILTER, because I chose to adopt WIN_SIZE = 2x (for crisper resolution and maybe some gain of speed compared with MAX or FULL screen). Because I noticed that what slows the emulation is essentialy the graphic screen management. How did I find it ? I usually estimate speeds of my Conway FORTH program that alternate two tasks : 1/ determine the living cells of the next generation (pure computing) and 2/ refresh the drawing (plotting into the display screen). With uQLx these two tasks take more or less very comparable times, whereas with sQLux the drawing task is much slower than the computing task.
May I ask if you find what I tell seems normal or (maybe I did something wrong) would it be possible to better it ?
As one of my two QLs is no longer booting and the other one is still confined in the Alps, I decided to fall back on emulators in Raspberry Pis. I have a Pi Zero W running an old raspian, that I use for QL emulation with uQLx (and also for a Ceres-Oberon 1984 workstation emulator which I like very much). But I decided to try also (at last) sQLux ! And I installed it following the excellent user guide from swensont.
On my Pi Zero W, it works... however, I find it terribly slow (and I mean TERRIBLY !).
So I tried also to install it on a faster Pi Zero W2 running Pi-OS (because it does not support raspian), and it works better, but still slower than uQLx on both machines.
This is the '.ini' file that I finally put together :
Code: Select all
SYSROM = MIN198.rom
ROMIM = TK232.rom
RAMTOP = 4096
PRINT = lpr
CPU_HOG = 0
FAST_STARTUP = 1
DEVICE = MDV1,/home/pi/Sinclair/qxl.win,qdos-fs
DEVICE = MDV2,/home/pi/Sinclair/qxl1.win,qdos-fs
DEVICE = MDV3,/home/pi/Sinclair/sqxlux.win,qdos-fs
DEVICE = MDV4,/home/pi/Sinclair/mdv4/,qdos-like
DEVICE = MDV5,/home/pi/Sinclair/mdv5/,qdos-like
DEVICE = MDV6,/home/pi/Sinclair/mdv6/,qdos-like
WIN_SIZE = 2x
FILTER = 0
FIXASPECT = 1
KBD = US
SOUND = 1
SPEED = 0.0
May I ask if you find what I tell seems normal or (maybe I did something wrong) would it be possible to better it ?