Hello Mnt Team, I have two questions, firstly the game Dark Forces runs much slower for me and many other ZZ9000 users than under AGA. And secondly, if I use an AHI mode of the AX card and the program (e.g. ScummVM) crashes, this paralyzes the whole computer and only a cold start helps. I have already mentioned the problem in the a1k forum and tagged you, unfortunately without any reaction, but tomsoniq reacted and replied: “No, what’s stuck is the ZZ9000 itself. It is currently not completely reset during a warm start. If there is an interrupt that is no longer handled by any driver, everything hangs.
This urgently needs to be improved so that a warm start at least switches off all interrupts generated by the board.”
Will there be an update? And is there an explanation for the slow downs in dark forces?
Hi, the interrupt behavior used to be different in older firmwares because I had experienced freezes myself, so the interrupt was just a short-lived pulse to the Amiga. But some Amiga experts told me this was not the way to go, and that it would make ethernet less performant than it could be—so i switched to a behavior where the interrupt stays up until it is acknowledged. It seems there needs to be a timeout anyway or one can’t recover. I hope to be able to improve this soon.
About dark forces: what’s special about this game compared to other games like Doom? Has anyone read the source yet to investigate? Surely other people could try do do that first instead of me.
Thanks for the answer, I am only a user and not a programmer, so again in simple language: if I use a program which uses an AX AHI unit, and the computer crashes, then no reset / warm start helps, then the computer must be switched off and on again. Is this problem known? if so, is there a solution, if not, are there plans to find a solution?
About Dark Forces, in the EAB and A1k forum there have been several reports that Darkforces runs much slower on the zz9000 than on pure AGA or other graphics cards.
Is there any interest on the part of MNT to get to the bottom of this?