If the answer is yes, then you may like to help me with some easy benchmarks.
It's some real-life related stuff, like print characters, load files, and so on.
If you would like to help me to do some easy benchmarks, then please PM me.
Also other computer systems are welcome.
Sure, I have a 1040STf that I bought off ebay several weeks ago and not done anything with apart from test it works and get a scart for it (as it came with a black and white monitor). Mouse should be arriving in the next week or so.... I also have a Commodore 64 if that helps?
What are you preparing? :) I do have STs and Amigas, but they're tucked away; if it's something interesting though,...
Being a mad retro collector I own the following:
AMIGA
- Amiga 500: 68000, OCS, Kicksart 1.2, 512KB RAM
- Amiga 500: 68000, ECS, Kickstart 2.04, 512KB CHIP RAM, 512KB FAST RAM
- Amiga 500+: 68010, ECS, Kickstart 3.1, 2MB CHIP RAM, 8MB FAST RAM and a CF-IDE adaptor
- Amiga 1000: 6800, OCS, soft-boot Kickstart, 512KB RAM
- Amiga 1500: 68000, ECS, Kickstart 1.3/3.1 switchable, 1MB CHIP RAM, 4MB FAST RAM and CF-IDE adaptor
- Amiga 1200: 68020, 68881, AGA, Kickstart 3.1, 2MB CHIP RAM, 8MB FAST RAM, 4GB CF drive
- Amiga 1200: 68020, AGA, Kickstart 3.0, 2MB CHIP RAM only, 1GB HDD
- Amiga CDTV: 68000, ECS, Kickstart 1.3, 1MB CHIP RAM only, knackered CD drive :(
- Amiga 600: 68000, ECS, Kickstart 1.3/3.1 switchable, 2MB CHIP RAM, 2GB CF drive
- Amiga 600: 68000, ECS, Kickstart 2.05, 1MB CHIP RAM only
ATARI ST
- Atari 520STFM: 68000, TOS 1.04, 512KB RAM
- Atari 520STE: 68000, TOS 1.04, 4MB RAM, external ACSI 1GB hard drive
- Atari 520STF: 68000, TOS 1.02, 512KB RAM - dead :(
.... I have too much time on my hands
I also own the following, if any of these are of interest
- Amstrad CPC 464 with DDI-1 and FD1
- Amstrad CPC 6128 with external 3.5" drive
- Amstrad GX4000 - somehow this is dead! PSU works, I get power, but no picture (just a black screen)
- Spectrum 48K with composite mod
- Spectrum +2 (grey)
- Commodore C64c
- Acorn BBC Micro model B
- Acorn Archimedes A4000
Other than that, I have consoles, but not sure if you're interested in Sega or Nintendo stuff
WoW!!!
Well, sorry for the delay, now what is it about? Usually benchmark tests are very specific and tell about the CPU performance or the drives performance. But in all this cases the measured values don't represent the regular working condidions (for example games, wordprocessor, compiler... music player...whatever).
Now I compiled a very basic set of functions like load a file of defined size or things like that... they will tell us more about the real-life performance of a computer.
Please take a look at the attached file...
You can use the system clock or a stop watch in the hand for measuring time. It you repeat the test at least three times, then you get a better result.
Don't hesistate to ask me questions if something is not clear.
And if you decide to do some or even all of the suggested tests, please tell me which computer (exactly ;-)) has been used).
Thanks' a lot for your help in advance.
If you start testing a certain system, please post it here, so others will not do the same :-)
(I already did them all on the CPC).
PM or post results here.
Guess c64 and speccy are also of interrest, CPC is not supposed to be the last ;-)
I own an A500 and a pair of Atari STE (one with 512k and one with 1024K).
I rarely turn them on to be honnest.
While A500 is an impressive "multimedia" machine, the non standard 3"1/2 disk drive despite enabling more Datas on disk (like 800K ?) than the common 720K... is non standard, so on the very long term (retro, 25years later) it wasn't a good move.
I managed to repaire both my STE by cannibalizing an old 520STF unit that didn't worked at all, could take the keyboard, the upper casing, and the disk drive... thats a great point, such parts were re-usable right into the Falcon generation. a nice and clever move 25 years later.
The STF is somewhat rustic but comparable to Amstrad CPC6128 but in 16bit.
Average every where so not really flawed anywhere.
The STE is like the PLUS, too little too late, yet I found the fact it was never really exploited so interesting.
Also it is a bit more betterly upgraded from the basic ST than the PLUS is from the CPC, IMO.
Had the Amstrad PLUS featured a few extra tuff like better fully "pointed" sprites (not the tiles you upload into the ASIC), with no height limitation... and perhaps one extra sound channel designed to run samples... and a little blitter to ease the CPU... could have been huge 8 bit.
Falcon is also unexploited and almost killed at birth by the Tramiels... but is also a great machine.
the main flaw from the ST/STF/STE series is the 16 colours limitation.
as the "hardsprites from the STE are "half hard", I mean done by the blitter, not really Hardsprite I guess, they share the same palette as the rest of the screen, couldn't find things on them.
This is a good point with the PLUS, the sprites do have their own extra +16 (15+transp) palette...
A500 had the 32 colour mode, that lessen such method.
Something I wished the ST had was the "overscan mode" as it is on the Amstrad... this would be really cool.
But hey, on those computers, you often had a real monitor able to resize the picture, so you could have no border on the screen.
still the fact the CPC and not the monitor get to do it, and the CPC do it by putting extra pixels (not bigger pixels) is awesome.
The STE is to me a machine of choice to do some Demo.
Because of its unexploited nature, you can only surprise peoples.
A500 is overly too commonly used.
All those machines are good.
Amigagas often bitche the other because it "sucks at gaming", but they forget it is a computer that can also only be used to "work seriously".
On the other hand, my first PC was an AT286 EGA with 640K, HDD, 2x HD diskdrives (5"1/4 art 1.22megs and 3"1/2 at 1.44meg) and 12mhz, full of fast DMA disk accesses.
It can really laugh out loud at those pathetic 8mhz or less machines.
but yeay, only beeper and EGA had a lots of flaws too.
And games couldn't exploit my PC because they also had to run on fucking CGA in less than 8mhz and only 512K and simple DD 720K or 360K disks...
QuoteAmstrad GX4000 - somehow this is dead! PSU works, I get power, but no picture (just a black screen)
have you tried both video out ? the "PLUS monitor" one and the peritel one ?
Impressive :)
Hope to get some results after one weekend :)
I've got an A600, A1200 and A4000. Also got an Atari 520 STE with 1 MB and waiting for 4 MB to arrive. Only the Amiga 4000 is currently set up.
Some benchmark tests from that machine would be great :)
I've recently got an AtariST 1040STFM (not so recently, but I've only recently fired it up cause I used to have only monochrome monitor and recently found a TV cable to use it for demos and stuff) and really love it, reading 68000 assembly too these days :)
I used to have an Amiga500 and 1200 but not anymore.
I love benchmarks. Is it something not so hard I could try? What have you prepared? PM me and hopefully if it doesn't take time to test and my time is fair I'll try soon.
I have an A500 Rev6 upgraded to A500+ 2MB and an A600 modded to the extreme: Overclocked, 8MB RAM, 8GB HD, LAN, W-LAN, USB, S-Video, Internal HxC. I doubt these are suitable for any benchmark, they are too far from the original standard.
Bryce.
Why not? Would be interesting to see their results too. Especially in thing like 'loading a file' it can be interesting to see differences - or not.
Looking forward to get results here. Up to now..... well, patience is a virtue ;)
Atari Falcon also looks like a fine piece of Hardware built in pure Awesomnium.
Basic Interpreter benchmarks 1986 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrgE_C-ZMpY#)
Reviews: Which C For Me? START's First C Comparison (http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv1n2/WhichC.html)
BASIC Benchmark - CPCWiki - The Ultimate Amstrad CPC Community & Encyclopedia! (http://cpcwiki.eu/index.php/BASIC_Benchmark)
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=615523 (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?p=615523)
http://www.gloub.com/musee/bench.phtml (http://www.gloub.com/musee/bench.phtml)
(http://kronos.lutece.net/benchs.jpg) (http://kronos.lutece.net/benchs.jpg)
Well, that kind of benchmark is exactly what I don't want, because it tells you right ... nothing :o Because it tells you nothing about usability and real life working efficiency.
Please refer to the attached document (see one of my posts before).
Hi again!
Well, a lot of posts, a lot of people who have those machines - but sadly nobody who did do only one single benchmark. As I always say, if you want it done then do it by yourself!
Hi TFM/FS,
Sorry, I had to pull an all-weekender to meet a deadline a few weekends back then a couple of days later my Dad was diagnosed with multiple clots on both lungs so have been helping ferrying him to and from the hospital and the GP and catching up with work in my spare time. I'll try to get back to this soon.
Beaker
Hi TFM/FS,
I've only managed to do a couple of tests on my STf with the following results. Not sure how I can either generate files to a specific size or copy a files over as I don't have a PC with a floppy disk drive anymore? Let me know if there's anything else on your list I should be able to do? I've also taken a screenshot with some system info.
Description | Time 1 | Time 2 | Time 3 |
Format a disc of 80 tracks, doublesided | 01:40 | 01:40.5 | 01:40 |
Copy a disc: 80 tracks, one drive only | 02:41.9 | 02:42.6 | 02:41.7 |
Beaker
The first results!!! Thank you so much!!! :) :) :)
Quote from: beaker on 22:53, 11 August 12
Hi TFM/FS,
Sorry, I had to pull an all-weekender to meet a deadline a few weekends back then a couple of days later my Dad was diagnosed with multiple clots on both lungs so have been helping ferrying him to and from the hospital and the GP and catching up with work in my spare time. I'll try to get back to this soon.
Beaker
Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. I send your dad my best wishes to get healthy soon.
I've got the 16Mhz MegaSTE if that counts? (also have an Amiga 4000 but that gathers dust on a shelf due to lack of space to set it up and run).
Sure it counts :) Why not? As long as you can describe the hardware (which is what you already did :) )
QuoteI've only managed to do a couple of tests on my STf with the following results.
is it easy to connect an Atari STF on such a flat screen ? is this a VGA monitor or a TV ?
no issues with the 16/10 ratio ?
Sorry, it is hot summer, I can't do anything, nor connecting my 16bits at the moment...
but one of theses days I will have a look at some mods for my STE like upgrading into 16mhz, adding IDE port and HDD perhaps, if possible...
This is really a machine i like.
Well, to feed you some informations, AND TO MOTIVATE YOU TO DO SOME BENCHMARKS :) :) :) here the first results... THANKS TO BEAKER!!!
I Disc management
-----------------
I.1 Format a disc: 40 tracks (Data) or 80 tracks (Vortex, 720 KB MS-DOS or AtariST)
o--------o----------o--------o---------o----------o----------o--------o-------o----------o
! Test ! FutureOS ! X-DDOS ! DoMagic ! CP/M 2.2 ! CP/M 3.1 ! UTOPIA !Windows! AtariSTF !
! ! ROM OS ! on ROM ! PD Prog.! bootable ! bootable ! on ROM ! 2000 ! 8 MHz !
>--------+----------+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------+-------+----------<
! Data ! 16 ! 17 ! 18 ! 33 ! 33 ! 43 ! n.f. ! n.f. !
>--------+----------+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------+-------+----------<
! Vortex ! 64 ! 65 ! n.f. ! 65 ! n.f. ! n.f. ! 104 ! 100 !
o--------o----------o--------o---------o----------o----------o--------o-------o----------o
I.2 Copy a disc: 40 / 80 tracks, one or two drive(s)
o--------o----------o--------o---------o----------o----------o--------o-------o----------o
! Test ! FutureOS ! X-DDOS ! DoMagic ! CP/M 2.2 ! CP/M 3.1 ! UTOPIA !Windows! AtariSTF !
! ! ROM OS ! on ROM ! PD Prog.! bootable ! bootable ! on ROM ! 2000 ! 8 MHz !
>--------+----------+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------+-------+----------<
!40 track! 20 ! n.f. ! 42 ! 66 ! 63 ! 71 ! n.f. ! n.f. !
!1 drive !1 change* ! !1 change*! 7 changes! 5 changes!9 chang.! ! !
>--------+----------+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------+-------+----------<
!2 drives! 20 ! n.f. ! 42 ! 69 ! 69 ! 69 ! n.f. ! n.f. !
>========+==========+========+=========+==========+==========+========+=======+==========<
!80 track! 77 ! n.f. ! n.f. ! 257 ! n.f. ! n.f. ! n.f. ! 162 !
! 1 drive!5 changes#! ! !45 changes! ! ! ! !
>--------+----------+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------+-------+----------<
!2 drives! 76 ! n.f. ! n.f. ! 207 ! n.f. ! n.f. ! n.f. ! n.f. !
>--------+----------+--------+---------+----------+----------+--------+-------+----------<
* This copy was made with a minimum of 224 KB free expansion RAM.
With fewer free RAM, you must change the discs more often.
# Copy with 432 KB free E-RAM. Less E-RAM -> more disc changes.
This isn't *really* helping, as this is based on 20 year memories, but the standard disk copy on the Amiga was dog slow but IIRC, X-Copy took around 42 seconds for 2 drives and about 42.1 seconds for 3 copies if you had 4 drives!
If I ever manage to excavate my Amiga from the bottom of a big pile of junk and clear enough desk space to set it up again, I'll try to get some timings from it, but back in 1993 I had a "zero tolerance to pirated software crusade", so I might well have deleted X-copy anyway.. :o
You can use any copy-tool you like, just mention precisely the hardware and the software.
And I'm pretty sure you can download everything today from the net, like for CPCs too :)
Quote from: MacDeath on 16:51, 14 August 12
is it easy to connect an Atari STF on such a flat screen ? is this a VGA monitor or a TV ?
no issues with the 16/10 ratio ?
Hi, yup it's a plasma screen and I am using an RGB scart from Retro Computer Shack. At the moment I only have a couple of games that I've played a handful of times which seem fine in that aspect ratio but I'm planning on doing an internal ABBA switch and either installing my spare HxC in the case somewhere once I get my arse in gear and purchase a decent soldering iron or putting some connections on the case and use the external one....
I use a HP TFT2025 with my MegaSTE. Composite input for colour (games/demos) and I can also use VGA for a nice crisp mono display on a 20" screen. There's a composite switch box too and the SNES fits just nicely to one side :)
I'll do your tests over the weekend. Too much time tonight spent PC memory upgrading, BIOS updating and Windows updating - but like a noob, I did all three at the same time (d'oh!).
Quote from: MugUK on 21:31, 15 August 12
I'll do your tests over the weekend.
Great!!!
Happy weekend, happy CPCing. And now..... any help would be appreciated:
Just to remember, what the benchmarks are....
Reality Benchmarks
------------------
- Format a disc of 80 tracks, doublesided
- Copy a disc: 80 tracks, one drive only (Don't measure time to swap discs, because that depends on the human)
- Copy a disc: 80 tracks, use two drives
- Copy a file (40 KB) with two drives
- Copy a file (176 KB) with two drives
- Copy a file (400 KB) with two drives
- Copy a file (40 KB) with hard disc partitions
- Copy a file (176 KB) with hard disc partitions
- Copy a file (400 KB) with hard disc partitions
- Read a file (40 KB) from disc.
- Read a file (176 KB) from disc.
- Read a file (400 KB) from disc.
- write a file (40 KB) to disc.
- write a file (176 KB) to disc.
- write a file (400 KB) to disc.
- Read a file (40 KB) from hard-disc.
- Read a file (176 KB) from hard-disc.
- Read a file (400 KB) from hard-disc.
- write a file (40 KB) to hard-disc.
- write a file (176 KB) to hard-disc.
- write a file (400 KB) to hard-disc.
- Read a full directory and show it sorted on the screen - from disc
- Read a full directory and show it sorted on the screen - from hard-disc
- Erase 64 or 128 files at once - on disc
- Erase 64, 128 or 512 files at once - on hard-disc
- Load and show a file (40 KB) on the screen. / Tests a TYPE function
- Load and show a file (176 KB) on the screen. /
- Load and show a file (400 KB) on the screen. /
- Read and print a file of 40 KB on the printer
(No real print, just fill the printer buffer without wasting paper. Measure the time the computer takes)
- Display 524288 characters on screen (this is 256 * 2048)
Come on guys! Your help is really appreciated - and it's interesting for all of us!
Everyting you can do with Specci, c64, Amiga or Atari 800XL / ST is valuated!
Can you explain exactly what this benchmark is trying to prove? Floppy drive speed depends on the controller IC and how it's connected. The Paula IC in the Amiga or the 765 in the CPC have exact timing defined in hardware for reads / writes etc. Certain OSs may do more or less checks during formatting/copying which would effect the timing, but even for instance, if I connect a 765 to a 4GHz Pentium, it will still format at the same speed as it would connected to a Z80 (assuming that both CPUs can/are feeding the FDC as fast or faster than the FDC requires for full speed).
Obviously floppies connected serially (C64, Atari XL/XE) are a different matter.
Bryce.
Well, I explained ALL of that way before. But for you it's my pleasure to explain it again ...
We want to know how quick computer systems work in reality!
You talk about theoretical speed values of the hardware. That's nice for advertisments, but it has no value in real life if software is not supporting it or whatever.
BTW. You just focus on the FDC here. Did you know that different floppy-drives have different step rates, different RPMs, different HLT, HUT and other timing values which vary? They do influence floppy reading speed by 100%. For example you can run (write data) the 3" in the CPC old generation about 10% more quick than the one in the Plus if you write specialized routines.
As an universal mind one is supposed to see the complete computer system - this fascinating microcosmos at once.
The benchmarks here are providing real life data, and therefore they are important.
Please contribute here!