Re: The best way to upgrade your IIGS

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes...

>Lim <limtc@imedia.com.sg> wrote:
>
>>Supertimer wrote:
>>
>>> In every case, the facts -- speed is NOT 100Mhz like Lim claimed.
>>
>>Ad I have mentioned, it feels like "100MHz" to me. It blows me
>>away. It is faster than real GS ever was. That's the point.
>>I neve say in any articles that I do any benchmarking, just that
>>it is really really fast. (btw, do you really trust benchmark?
>>My 9Mhz GS is not really 3 times faster IMHO)
>
>Have you actually used a 15Mhz GS?  A 15Mhz GS is quite a
>bit faster than a 9Mhz GS.  Yes; for Zip accelerators, speed
>tends to level off at some point, but 9Mhz is not that point. Run
>the GS self test at 15Mhz compare it to 9Mhz and the difference
>is pretty dramatic...

    I have to agree there, I made the jump from an 8 MHz GS to
a 15 MHz GS and the difference was like night and day. I found
at 8 MHz, the operation of the GS is smoother -- the sluggish
feel is gone and things finally feel responsive. The word
"fast" didn't come to mind, just "smooth".

    When I finally upgraded to 15 MHz a couple of years later,
the GS the actually felt like a _fast_ computer (except of
course when math intensive calculations were required, then
whether I was running at 2.6 or 15 MHz, the GS was still quite
slow in that area. Example: decompressing JPEG images, heavily
modifying a sound waveform with rSounder, etc).

>>And Rastan is totally unplayable. I have to speed nanny (slow) down
>>the virtual GS to do anything useful (like playing games).
>
>SO?  DuelTris is unplayable on a 15Mhz ZipGS!

    Is it? I find it plays no differently whether my accelerator
is disabled or active (fortunately it's a game where you wouldn't
benefit from acceleration, it plays smoothly regardless).

    Off the top of my head, the only games I can think of which
become unplayable at 15 MHz are Thexder, Ultima 1 GS and perhaps
Battle Chess. OTOH, there are many games which finally become
playable at that same speed where they were not before. In Dungeon
Master, you can actually move around in real-time without waiting
for the CPU to "think" a couple of seconds when you advance one
space. With Ancient Land of Ys, the scrolling is very much like a
video game console, whereas before it was painfully slow. Even
things like Zany Golf and The Immortal scroll beautifully, which
is not really the case if you look back at them today running at
2.6 MHz (back in those days they *seemed* smooth, but were not).
The intro in Silpheed is another example of things that didn't
just benefit from acceleration, they required it. :)

    The bit about Rastan under Bernie is interesting. On my 15 MHz
GS it is noticably faster than it was at either 2.6 or 8 MHz, but
it is still playable (it just scrolls much smoother and faster).
If not for the lack of a dual-scroll, it looks, feels and sounds
pretty much identical to the arcade version. :)

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca