Post by miragu in Bad Apple (Amiga AnimPlayer- AMOS) comments

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Hello, as a fan of Bad Apple running *everywhere* I thank you for this effort. Unfortunately I found that the RAW version, while working in A500 HDD, is too slow for A600 internal IDE because it lacks DMA.

On the other hand, I see that you have continued the development of Amos Anim Player on another dedicated page, and still produce Bad Apple examples there, but they're too slow for 68000 CPU.

So, I'd like to ask you, please consider creating a version sufficiently optimized / compressed / resized / whatever-it-takes :) to get the video (with proper vocals, not mod) running as good as possible on stock Amiga 600's internal IDE/CF. Thank you!

ELECTRIC BLACK SHEEP38 days ago

Hi,
For time to time there will be further updates on this project i am sure of it, but:
- further (delta) compression couses rapid (exponential) degradation in quality.
- using compressed data and decompress it in runtime also hard on the cpu.
- the IDE speed can't be faster by adding some magic code! :)

For the meantime you can try our "vector player" (https://electricblacksheep.itch.io/vectoranim-player).
it is much faster. it can stream ".iff" sound files from hdd wich is significantly less data than a full screen animation. The 2-color vector-anim & iff-music of Bad Apple will probably play faster.

miragu38 days ago

Hey, thanks for the reply! I tried VectorPlayer but crashes immediately when launching, both 2-color and 16-color. Tested in fs-uae with settings equivalent to my A600 (2MB chip, 4MB fast, stock 68000, tried KS/WB 3.1 and 2.0.5).

I (kinda) understand the difficulty of implementing this, so no pressure, I was just trying to put the stock A600 on your radar, hehe. Cheers!

ELECTRIC BLACK SHEEP37 days ago

There is an other version uploaded "BadAppleFasteranim.zip". It should be more friendly with slower IDEs.

miragu36 days ago

Thank you, the new version is almost perfect! You made it! :)
I only have to report that there is sometimes some audio pops and even repeated audio (circular buffer replaying I think). However, the image never slows down (that I can notice) and the audio never goes out of sync, even with the small errors I noted.

It is curious that the filesystem type makes a difference. My data partition is PFS3AIO and here the audio skips are quite noticeable. But in my system partition which is FFS it plays very well, with only the small errors I mentioned. The most critical section is around 58 seconds when the winged character is cut in half. Tested both in emulador (drive image, not virtual folder) and real hardware (A600+IDE with CF card), the symptoms are exactly the same.

As a mere test, I tried to convert the IFF from 11khz to 8khz (sounds awful but was just a test). Used audacity to resample and ft2-clone to convert wav to iff. Unfortunately the player didn't load with this iff, so I don't know if it would have made a difference.

So, as it stands, the faster version IS playable and enjoyable on A600 with FFS partition at least. If you can squeeze just a little more bandwidth, or maybe adjust the audio buffer, it would become perfect. I should note that the "normal"/RAW version has the opposite problem: audio is perfect, but with extremely lagged video.

TL;DR: Thank you again, you cracked it! I will showcase the fast version tomorrow on our monthly gathering of Associação Inércia in Portugal :)

Sövény Imre36 days ago

Hi!

If You are a speed maniac... You can play the whole from Ram Disk.

Further size reduction in the PAL version, as the FPS has been reduced from 30 to 25. (now the anim is only 4MB)

Another tip is that if you have enough free fast ram (1,6MB, equal to the audio file), the player stream the audio from there and not from the HDD (a lot faster). The PAL audio is converted to 8khz. The audio is in principle handled in the standard format, but ...if you want to try, the conversion will definitely work with GoldWave.

From NTSC to PAL sum => 7MB to 5,6MB in size.

Enjoy.

miragu35 days ago

Good news, it's *almost* perfect now with FFS partition! Just a couple of small stutters in the whole video (one in the middle, another in the last few seconds), but it's far better now with PAL. And it's perfect for PAL systems like mine :)

In PFS3AIO partition it's now similar to what the NTSC version was with FFS, meaning it has some stuttering here and there but is watchable.

I tried 8khz and back to 11khz, no difference in performance! The bottleneck is elsewhere now. I do have 4MB fastram and I think it's preloading the audio because it takes about 5 seconds to load and start playing. Since 11khz has much better quality in practice, I'll stick to it.

I presume this is as good as it gets without significant changes to the engine. But I wouldn't worry too much, as long as people have a FFS partition things work really well.

Thank you again so much for making this possible! Looking forward to showing this off around here :)