In the previous article “part 1″ I have introduced you shortly the Sonnet Crescendo 7200 G3 accelerator in my Amiga 4000 and I focused mainly on benchmarks. In this part 2 I am going to show you Sonnet in action so for the best demonstration I recorded some videos. There are plenty of games, demos, benchmarks and programs which have been patched to run with Sonnet and I will show you some of them. Lets start with AMP2 and see how Sonnet works with the video MPEG2 player.
Now moving to software rendered voxels called Voxelspace from HaagePartner. Its a flyby benchmark where you change various parameters with function keys. I tested 320×240 and 640×480.
First game on my list is Earth 2140 (demoversion). I am a Napalm game fan I love Earth 2140 as well. This game has even a mission pack which means dozens of hours of fun in advance. Game runs with Sonnet quite fine, but still there are some problem with sound and sometimes with performance.
I know guy, who just love playing Doom on every platform it was ported (officially or unofficially). So especially for him I would begin the first person shooter games with ADoom. This game port has been patched from the WarpOS version. When playing ADoom in 320×200 the fps counter shows 35 constantly so to see what is the real framerate we have to run game in timedemo mode. I measure not less then 110 fps. When the framerate in 320×200 is over 100 fps why not to try higher resolutions? Well with Sonnet the ADoom is nicely playable even in 800×600. Hey Mr. Carmack who said Amiga is too weak to port Doom for it? Check this out!
Next game Quake is also from ID Software and for me personally it was a blast when it was firstly ported to PowerPC. After the terrible experience with Clickboom´s Quake “running” on my 040/33 then with PowerPC version I could finally play the same game in acceptable framerate and fullscreen. Of course on Blizzards PPC I could play it just in 320×200 or 400×300. But G3 has way more power and as you will see in the video below this game is still smooth in 640×480 and even playable in 800×600. Please note this is all software rendered.
Quake evolved to Quake 2. Most of the people knows this game only in accelerated mode, but this game also supports software rendering. Of course 320×200 looks like Minecraft these days, but in higher resolution game looks much better. Lets see how G3/400 fights with software rendering in Quake 2.
When Heretic 2 was released for Amiga it was the most power hungry game of all games ever made for this platform. Our local Amiga club bought one copy of this game and some of us who had already PowerPC equipped Amigas could start enjoying this game. I had the lowest configuration from them (603e/175 MHz + AGA) so I could play this game only on software rendering 320×240. Even though I enjoyed my 10 – 15 fps gameplay including local network deathmatches which we played with others. So how the software rendered game works on Sonnet? Lets check…
OK this is all for today even when there are few more plain 2D games I could show you. You can guess what will come next. YES I will finally show hardware accelerated games and demos, so you can see the power produced by G3 + Voodoo3 in classic Amiga.