www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

I currently have VA5000 and am thinking of upgrading to VRPC. However, this is a considerable expense and so I would like to check a couple of things.

First, there is the question of speed. I am (somewhat foolishly but I have no choice) running VA5000 under Wine on linux. This works fine, but it currently slow (too slow to use). Is VRPC significantly faster on the same hardware? For example have people tried running Vantage under VRPC?

Second, do any other people out there have any other suggestions for increasing performance under linux? Does VA use DirectX and/or OpenGL? I'm not currently running either (haven't installed the NVidia driver because it has issues with my monitor and large screen modes) so if that definitely helps, it might be worth persisting with the nvidia driver. (FWIW, I'm running a CVS wine from mid-August, with lots of files from Codeweavers CXOffice copied across so that VA works.)

On the same machine VA5000 and VRPC will run at roughly the same speed. VRPC offers you more memory, higher resolution displays, better sound and networking support.

VA uses basic features of direct draw (part of DirectX) which do not require any 3D acceleration. Depending on your VA settings it may ask the graphics hardware to 'stretch blit' and if this can't be supported in hardware VA will run very slowly. Make sure you have 'hardware scale' turned off in the VA display options panel.

Hope that helps,
Graeme

I find that VA5000 (which I currently have) gets slower the larger I make the screenmode. For example, I get ~30fps (quite usable) at 800x600x256 (too small to be usable) but ~10fps (not usable) at 1024x768x16 (almost usable).

Does VRPC also show this slowdown with larger screenmodes? Is there any way to mitigate this slowdown?

As for "hardware scale", I don't see this option in my copy. I do have "Auto window resize", which might be the same thing?

Thanks
John

Are you using the latest version? Make sure you have downloaded all the patches from the website.

Certain things will be slower in larger screen modes, mainly because you tend to shift more data around. However, if you're not actually doing anything, the latest versions of VA5000 and VRPC don't bother blitting to the screen so it shouldn't slow down by much.

There may also be some dependency on the type of graphics card you are using.

Graeme

I'm now running 1.4 (I wasn't before) and I now see this option

Anyhow, it's also much faster now, which is good But the mouse is fubared. The pointer used to follow the mouse fine, but since upgrading from 1.2 (from my CD) to 1.4 (including all the system and Boot upgrades, plus the UPD beta), it's stopped working. It moves left and right kind of OK, but not up or down (and leaps down every so often, making selecting anything hard). It also ignores mouse clicks much of the time, and misses button releases (e.g. grab a window titlebar and move it, I couldn't get it to drop the window!).

Oddly, it did none of this before upgrading VA so I assume it's related to the upgrade rather than my wine installation (a build from 16th Oct).

Any ideas on this one? The apparent speedup (I now get Mips of ~40-60, Fps of 30-40 and Sys of 22-24 in 1024x768x16 screenmode, which seems usable in general) means that I can now contemplate VRPC, if I can solve the remaining problems with VA5000. And it would also mean that I could use Prophet easily again, which would make my life a lot easier.

John

A possible solution is to turn off the sound. Switch VA5000
to a Window, and go to TOOLS and then OPTIONS.

Now go to the AUDIO tab, and untick the ENABLED button,
now click APPLY then OK.

Now quit an reload VA5000

I'd already tried that and no joy

Any other possibilities?

Is there any way to downgrade VA5000 to previous versions so that I can see where the mouse problem came from? It takes ages to install VA so I'd rather not have to go through that repeatedly.

Sorry no, there isn't. Unless you keep a backup of each build as
you go.