Subject: Random Fast Eddie thoughts
From: [email-masked] (Avi Drissman)
Date: 25 Dec 1996 00:05:43 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2,comp.emulators.apple2

Yesterday I downloaded the Fast Eddie beta, and tried out a few thing.
All this is on a PowerMac 7100/80AV through the AV video out.

I unpacked FE and read the directions. I have a ROM 1 so I decided to get
the rom images from it. I moved the file over to the Mac, and FE gave me a
screen of blinking crud. Try again. Nope. I checked the file, and it was
essentially all zeros. Hmmm?

OK, now I try saving each bank of rom in a file, and catenating them on
the mac. It looks fine, but FE still isn't happy. Damn. Finally I got sick
of trying to extract the roms, so I ripped a copy of the ROM 3 roms out of
GuS (shut up!). And FE booted.

Sound is apparently turned off until you explicitly turn it on (or I might
have broken the auto-sound-detect feature). Sound _does_ slow it down
considerably, and the speed of FE isn't too great to begin with. (More on
that later.)

Since I already play with GuS, the only unique feature in FE is the sound.
So I popped in the FTA's X-Mas demo. Nope, died, but I don't think it runs
on a rom3. Hmmm.

Pom's disk 49 didn't want to boot, but 50 and 51 didn't care. The music
sounded nearly identical to my real GS nearby, but was about 2-3 times
slower, turning the songs essentially into dirges.

Noise Tracker was next, and I got to the main screen. Then either it froze
up or I got too impatient, so I restarted. (BTW, there's a bug in FE I
found there--if you had a HD disk formatted for 800K (like I did a lot)
and you put it in FE, FE dies real quick.)

Diversitune didn't really like FE either.

I then mounted the 6M disk image I use for GuS, and booted FE into System
6 without a problem. A bit of work needs to be done with the boot. The
time estimate--the thermometer--was constantly too fast or slow. Then I
ran One Arm Battle. With sound, it kills GuS, so I tried it with FE. It
works, but is horribly slow. Turning off sound speeds it up a bit, but GuS
is far faster.

So I decided to test the speeds of FE and GuS. I used a program called
"CPU Speed" 1.2 by a Robert Claney. On my real GS, it's fairly accurate,
and the speed figures vary in the hundredths place.

On FE, the speed reported was wildly varying, bouncing all over from about
1.6mhz to 3.5mhz. In GuS, the speed hovered in the 19mhz range,
occaisionally dipping to 16mhz. It must be emphasized that these
measurements _are not real_, because emulators really can only be tested
under load, but they serve as an interesting comparison between emulators.

For the record, FE was version beta 1 and GuS was 1.0d3e74.

Avi

copyright 1996, all rights reserved.

--
Avi Drissman                      Preferred address: [email-masked]
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
              http://www.science.wayne.edu/~adrissmn/
And we'll have fun, fun, fun till my daddy takes the keyboard away...