[hatari-users] hatari on Asus EEE

Eero Tamminen eerot at users.berlios.de
Fri Feb 27 20:36:38 CET 2009


Hi,

On Friday 27 February 2009, Tony Smolar wrote:
> >>>> Version 0.80 works ok, but the sound seems slow and sometimes out
> >>>> of sync.  I was hoping it might be improved in a newer version.
> >
> > Well, I guess after version 0.95 Hatari only got slower since it
> > emulates much more details than before. So if you got speed problems,
> > version 0.95 might be worth a try.
>
> I got it working by using gcc 3.46, rather than the default gcc 4.1.2 on
> my system.
>
> You might be amazed to know that hatari 1.20 works close to perfect on
> the Asus EEE.   No speed issues in anything I tried so far, and the
> sound sounds right.

Well, I've used old Hatari versions (for ST emulation with frameskip) fairly
satisfactorily on P133, P166 (both with good 2D acceleration) and P333
laptop, but those were around version 0.50.

I've also used Hatari v0.80-1.0 on 400Mhz N810 with TI Omap2 and there it's
actually noticeably slower than on P333.  I assume this is because N810 has
no graphics acceleration, slowish memory bus and Omap2 has small CPU caches.
On 500Mhz TI Omap3 Hatari v1.1 performs pretty OK for ST/E emulation and
even for some Falcon emulation without DSP.

(OK = needs auto-frameskip, spec512 & borders are disabled and using lower
sound frequency. For N8x0 one needs also to disable "Compatible CPU"
setting for Hatari to bearable.)

Currently I'm using 1.4Ghz Athlon XP and it has never any problems with full
settings for everything as long as DSP emulation is disabled.


> Hatari 0.80 had slow, choppy sound, though  the emulator itself ran
> fast.   0.95 was an improvement in that the choppiness was gone, but the
> sound was still a bit slow.

Nicolas rewrote the YM sound handling for Hatari v1.1 and it was changed
from 8-bit mono into 16-bit stereo sound.  When profiling Hatari, I've
noticed ALSA etc. may take even third of Hatari CPU usage, maybe
because they're resampling/antialiasing the Hatari sound output to some
other frequency that the HW supports.

From Wikipedia:
"The earliest Eee PC models used a 900 MHz Intel Celeron M processor 
underclocked to 630 MHz. Later models shipped with this processor at normal 
speed. Newer models use a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor. The Atom is a simple, 
scalar, in-order execution microprocessor that is significantly slower 
per-clock than the Celeron M due to its microarchitecture. Still, 1.6 GHz 
Atom-equipped Eee PCs tend to perform similarly to their Celeron-equipped 
counterparts, due to the higher clock speeds and Hyperthreading."

Which EEE PC model you have? SDL_mixer/ALSA handles the sound in another
thread so hyperthreading might have helped here.  Have you updated your EEE
kernel or system libraries in the meanwhile?  (they migh have improved
issues related to sound / threading)


Another explanation could be that Hatari v1.1 has automatic frameskip and
it's enabled by default (you can see your current frameskip setting from
the statusbar).


	- Eero



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