Issue 44: Jun 2004
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | CT60 First Impressions
- | Bird Box
- | The Falcon Project
- | CCC
- | One Year Of CT60
- | HATZ: Party In The Middle Of Nowhere
- | CT60 Essentials
- | Developer Talk
- | SuperVidel Graphics
Review
- | Fast Falcon
| One Year Of CT60 by Anders Eriksson At the time of writing, the CT60 is now shipping in its second batch. It's time to look back and see what all the fuss has been about, why our precious forums, on-line mags and news sites a have been filled with articles about this little add-on. One year ago It has been a year since the first 30 (approximately) beta developer cards were shipped. The problems emerged instantly. The beta cards had quite a lot of firmware bugs. Unfortunately Czuba-Tech wasn't very clear about the shipment, so the majority of the developers weren't aware about them being a beta-tester. Quite some complaints all over the place, which must have been rather frustating for Czuba as very few seemed to realize this wasn't the final product. To clear up some mess, and to centralize the discussions we opened the CT60 part of dhs.nu, including a discussion forum. This part of the site is (still) maintained by Deez of Evolution. New firmware upgrades arrived steadily, with one bug after the other ironed out. Luckily Czuba-Tech had chosen a programmable logic so the upgrade of the accelerator could be done via software, a very elegant and painless solution. At the point where Czuba couldn't find any more bugs in the firmware, things were still working really bad at some places (including mine). Programs with a size larger than 70 KB crashed during execution! This was a real mind-bender and everything was weird to say the least. In the end I downgraded HD Driver from 8.0 back to 7.x, and voila, all problems were gone. Those 30 seconds of a job to install the older HD Driver had caused weeks of debugging and head-scratching. Ah well, I suppose that's life when you're beta testing new hardware. Now, the known problems were all in the past, and we're around late July 2003. Czuba-Tech started to ship the boards to everyone. Shipment in progress The cards were shipping at long last, and just a couple of weeks after the deliveries had begun, a new firmware bug was detected. Now, this wasn't very good. Non-beta cards had been sent, and they needed firmware re-programming. I think everything went fairly smoothly thanks to the beta testers who already had the knownledge and tools (JTAG) to re-program the chips, luckily only a handful of cards had left with this bug intact. Things calmed down and the cards were delivered one after the other. We heard stories about installations from all over the world, with surprisingly few issues reported (compared to older boards such as the CT2). New 68060 chips! During late fall 2003, Czuba-Tech surprised everyone by reporting a new 68060 chip which was much more tolerant to high frequencies than the old revisions. All developers were offered the chance to replace their old CPU chip with this new one. We started to see 100 MHz and faster Falcons just a few weeks after the announcement. Some maniacs went above 100 MHz with water-cooling systems! 2004 - more CT60s? Before even all of the CT60s had been shipped, talks about a second batch were happening. In February the next batch was announced, 80 new boards were to be built, giving a total of 230 CT60s out there. And that's where we are today, the first shipments of the new CT60 batch has arrived and we could possibly say that the CT60 has been stabilized in the Atari community now. CT60 specific programs? These are rare, except the CT60 configuration tools that is. To date we haven't seen any applications specifically for the CT60, only a few patched programs. Now why is this? First of all, and the most important reason is that 68060 code is backwards compatible. Which means a CT60 game would also run on a 68030 or 68040 Falcon, but possibly much worse. One of the never-ending benchmarks is Quake. Sure it will launch on a bare Falcon, but you can count to ten seconds between each screen update. It's clear that one is not designed for a bare machine. Still, these programs do not count as CT60-specific programs, even though they are practically only usable with CT60. Other programs such as pixel-painters, soundtrackers, text editors, assemblers, word processors and so on work as-is on the CT60, and these kind of applications need no special 68060 fancy routines. They just work faster. Much faster. So, how about demos? Demos always find a way to use the new hardware in some way the normal applications just never succeeds. To date there are zero, nada, no demos at all made for the CT60 (not counting a few smaller intros). Why, oh why is that? One of the major reasons is of course that only a few of all those who bought the CT60 seems interested to make a demo for it at all. Long-time Falcon coders who bought CT60 have been dissing it becuase the only "true" coding is on a bare Falcon. This leaves only a few behind who don't care for these ideologies and just wanna code for fun. Another reason is that the entry level quality of a CT60 demo is expected to beat everything previously made on the Falcon, preferably by miles. Both in design and technical aspect. We have all seen the latest and greatest Amiga 68060 demos, right? Tell you what, this is no easy thing to have on your throat when you're coding on new hardware for the first time. The Amiga fellows have had nearly a decade to learn the 68060 chip and how to tweak the most performance out of it. Needless to say, the Amiga coders have also had the chance to do the "modern" style demos for a much longer time with complex 3D scenes and the likes. It will take a long time for us to play catch up with that. If the bar was lower, I'm sure we could have seen some simpler demos out already, like we did for the original Falcon. Many of the early ones were ST code beefed up a bit. But somehow the expectations seem sky-high and that's an important reason why (the few) CT60 demos are yet to be seen. The future The time will come, when the CT60 demos appear for real, that's a promise. If you visited the Outline 2004 party, you could see an early preview of the upcoming Evolution demo for the CT60. Take a seat, and hold on to your hats, there will be action. Some other intersting ideas for the future come from the land of Amiga. Namely, porting Amiga demos to CT60. Ephidrena seems interested to try this, and TBL has been investigating as well (including trying out Atari compilers). If the Ephidrena and TBL productions make it, we have some near-impossible benchmarks to match. TBL and EPH are years ahead of anything we've yet seen on the Falcon. With extremly talented 3D graphic artists (something the Falcon scene is completely missing out on). Their 3D scenes look very impressive even if the underlying code is on the same level as what we (will) have on the CT60. The art of modelling in low-polygon detail is a new world for many Atari artists to try. A few toruses, spike balls and cubes just don't cut it any longer. So in short, the future looks quite bright, possibly with some very impressive things happening, either from the Atari coders or from the Amiga ones. Will the only breathing 68K platforms become more united than ever? Why not, as Synergy said back in '93: Diversity brings chaos.
Useful link
Dead Hackers Society http://www.dhs.nu
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