Its been almost a year since I posted last article about Sonnet Crescendo running on Amiga. If you haven’t noticed, recently Cowcat published two new game ports for WarpOS and I will cover them in this article as well as some other interesting stuff.
Lets start with FPSE emulator of PSX. WarpOS version discontinued even before author added sound support. FPSE is in very early version, only software rendering works (Warp3D is very buggy and experimental), but anyway I wanted to compare FPSE gaming performance while running on Sonnet against CyberstomPPC run. Result is way better then with 604e, but games are still not 25fps. Next time I will check some 2D PSX games, but now check how Colin McRae Rally and Tekken3 runs on G3/500 MHz on Classic Amiga:
Next Game, Payback, is not as smooth as expected. The performance problem is caused by audio control. Payback unfortunately does not use standard AHI but instead utilize its own 12bit sound system. Generally speaking its playable but you will get much better game experience on CyberstormPPC and sound is glitchy on Sonnet as well.
Next game titles are pure pleasure to play and shows off real Sonnet power. Crossfire2 is not Warp3D game, but supports WarpOS and RTG which will be playable even for Radeon owners. Lets see how it goes:
Shogo time! This game was ported by Hyperion back in time and its well known as most hardware demanding game ever released for classic Amiga. Blizzard PPC users remember this game only as interactive slideshow and Cyberstorm PPC is required to get decent framerate but with Sonnet its completely different story. Check this out:
As announced, there are two new WarpOS game ports: Hexen2 and Quake 3 Arena. Hexen2 is available for MorphOS but now its ported to AmigaOS3 and it runs quite well even on good old Blizzard and Cyberstorm PPC cards. But again Sonnet brings it to different level with high framerate and supersmooth gameplay:
Iconic Quake3 Arena is gaming legend of late 90s and for many years it was just dream to play it on classic Amiga – until now! To be correct, there was OS4 port but running it on Blizzard or Cyberstorm PPC card and was more pain than pleasant game experience. With more processing power available to classic Amiga, thanks to Sonnet, the WarpOS Quake3 Arena port was born. Current version Alpha8 Release 2 is well playable and we hope the development will continue. So far game has extreme RAM requirement: minimum 192 MB. Current port supports single and also multiplayer games (LAN and Internet tested) and I will show you my game play with 2 bots in Q3DM1 map:
Its impressive how this project progressed from speedy Mandelbrot pictures to Quake3 Arena playable on Amiga 4000. Successful Amiga exploitation of this old piece of hardware originally produced for Apple Macintosh made it practically impossible to find and its price skyrocketed.
Hedeon’s succesfull attempts attracted more people and development team was formed. Opening Pandora’s box – Sonnet card running on Amiga via PCI was just beginning. Availability of suitable hardware holds back user base of the project and it was main concern of the development team so they went further. They found hardware suitable for Amiga Mediator which will take the Sonnet project “To infinity …and beyond!”
Early January 2018 team presented first results of running G4 based CPU card and they are impressive. There is chance for even more and faster cards being made Amiga compatible. Even more promising is that Hedeon recently informed that he successfully ran basic functionality of Sonnet card on his Amiga 1200 equipped with Mediator for few hours. Lets keep fingers crossed that this will advance similar way as on Amiga 4000.