Performance on Amiga and C64

Peterw

Hi all

I've finally got around to installing the latest version of Batocera on a usb drive to try and relive my youth and give an old Acer ZG8 netbook a new lease of life.

The machine has an n270 1.6 GHz atom processor with just 1gb of ram.

I've put a few games on and so far, zx spectrum and MAME titles like Ghouls and Ghosts work fine (some don't load, but that's likely just a dodgy ROM image)

My problems appear to be with Amiga and C64:
1. Amiga runs, but slow (I'd say 70% speed) and I can't figure out how to make the adf files load faster than at real floppy speed
2. C64 runs really slow, the sound is poor and the load speed is very slow

I think I've turned off any shaders etc to remove that overhead. At first I just assumed the performance was due to the hardware simply not being up to the job, but the fact it runs MAME titles ok, makes me now think otherwise?

Any thoughts? Do I just need more ram or use a better laptop, or are there some optimisations I can try?

Thanks in advance
Pete

Peterw

At risk of answering my own question, I thought I'd share my findings in case anyone else has the same issues.

For the Amiga performance issue, I created a config file called Default.fs-uae in /user data/system/configs/FS-UAE/Configurations

I then added the following lines to it:
[config]
accuracy = 0

By doing this, the Amiga 500 emulator so far runs fine. I understand that it might impact compatibility with some software, but so far so good.

For the C64 vice emulator I noticed it ran fine if I disabled the sound from the f12 menu, so I edited the /user data/system/configs/vice/vice.conf file to set SidEngine=0 and SidModel=0

I'm assuming that turns off a more advanced Sid emulator as I now can have sound and run C64 games and they work fine.

Also, finally on the vice emulator, you can speed up the loading of games by hitting alt w for warp mode, then hit it again when the game starts to run. They're still not massively fast, but better.

So there you go, hope that is vaguely useful to someone. Also, if anyone has better ideas how to improve performance please let me know!