I am pretty happy with my Lenovo laptop which I bought 10+ years ago. This one has 32GB of memory, which are onboard and I doubt they can be increased but I find it plenty for a laptop.
It also has a 16" screen with 2560 x 1600 resolution, AMD Ryzen 7 3.2 - 4.7(boost) GHz and an AMD Radeon 680M gfx chip.
When I buy a laptop my price range is around 900-1200€ with the plan of keeping it for a long time. That's what I paid for the one that I still have and use all these years.
I'm sure what they mean by not too expensive, but a MacBook Air M1/M2 certainly wouldn't go amiss and you probably won't get anything better in this price range. From 900$
However, this LapTop is a bit small and whether it could cover your needs I don't know. We already know that the M1/M2 is very fast and would be perfect for Qemu.
On the other hand you could not use Linux, but there is already a project called Asahi Linux which is making a lot of progress and runs natively on Apple M1. I have already tested it myself, it works via dualboot and the most important things already work very well. The installation of Asahi Linux is very simple and automated.
If this would be interesting for you here is some information about it:
Of course Linux ARM can also be virtualized under MacOs via third party software e.g. UTM. Which is really very fast and convenient, so you can use well known Linux distributions. Here is a selection of what is currently supported by UTM.
As for QEMU the faster single core performace is the better which may be hard to find in a laptop where energy efficiency is usually more valued than performance. And to have all that not expensive may be difficult. You know the saying: good, cheap, fast - pick two. But maybe some gaming laptop could have good performance but then not cheap or practical as a laptop so maybe you have to live with lower performance but otherwise convenient usage.
@Hans For WinUAE and/or QEMU the best will be the one having single core to be fast as possible. Like 4ghz or so, but so far i for myself found only notebook with 3.5ghz single core which doing things fine.
Through, now i thinking about maybe getting the other one : the one having 2 gfx cards, and second one to be in something which will works with RadeonHD/RX drivers, and which then i can use as passthrough and have fully hardware accelerated emulation with all stuff like warp3dnova, etc. working.
This kind of emulation (with passthrough) will help to understand if we have issues with speed with w3dnova/ogles2 in some parts because of hardware, or because of drivers. At least it should point on something after some tests.
@all Thanks for the suggestions. Of course it's going to be a trade-off. Especially with budget restrictions.
I don't need the world's fastest AmigaOS on qemu setup, though. Something a good step up from my current Core i7 laptop's performance would be welcome. Booting takes just over 1.5 minutes (from pushing enter on the bootloader menu), and everything feels sluggish.
[quote] Core i7-6700HQ @ 2.6 GHz. I've got 24 GB of RAM, so there should be no issues with running low on RAM.
Qemu 8.0.0.0 downloaded from the QEMU website.
If you use Qemu on Windows, there is also ready binary on https://qemu.weilnetz.de/w64/ Qemu 8.1 RC0 is already available there.
It may not change much that it is slow on your machine, but Qemu 8.1 includes some optimizations. Also the assignment of the correct CPU is omitted.
That Qemu Peg2 AmigaOs4.1 takes over a minute to boot on your machine is a bit unusual, compared to my machine which takes about 4-6 seconds to load AmigaOs4.1 and is fully usable after 10 seconds.
@Hans My system is slower than yours and it doesn't take so much time boot.
Which version of the SM502 driver are you using? If this is 53.10 and above then that has a delay in booting, because as Max explained to me,
Quote:
from version 53.10 the driver uses udelay(10000) after reading some data from DDC, maybe the emulator doesn't implement correctly udelay
Are you using FFS or SFS on your system partition? I created a small FFS partition that has the amigaboot.of and then I installed the system on an SFS partition, and that seems to work quite well.
That's about the time it should take you to boot Qemu from BBoot. The fact that I'm running it on a Macos shouldn't make much difference. On x86 it should be the same. On an old laptop where I can't even capture the vodeo image properly it takes maybe 10-15 seconds more.
Check your Qemu installation , AOS4 installation , operating system or llaptop computer.
ps A little HOWTO on how to run AOS/Qemu from an icon under macOS in the simplest way. Maybe it will be useful for someone.
@hans There are also some Windows build here: https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9028 which are currently older but will likely be updated for QEMU 8.1 when it's released. Unlike the "official" wilnetz builds these are actually from QEMU upstream whereas Weil's build are from a fork so maybe a bit different. Maybe worth trying different builds to see which one runs better on your host. The best is building your own and maybe also rinning it on Linux instead of Windows.
@Maijestro Are you using own QEMU builds? Is there any options that you use such as extra cflags or lto or something when building that may help @MartinW on the M1 laptop? Although maybe that's just a slower CPU.
Are you using own QEMU builds? Is there any options that you use such as extra cflags or lto or something when building that may help @MartinW on the M1 laptop? Although maybe that's just a slower CPU.
Yes, I build my own builds, that's what I've had the best experience with. I build all Qemu sources with:
That's about the time it should take you to boot Qemu from BBoot. The fact that I'm running it on a Macos shouldn't make much difference. On x86 it should be the same. On an old laptop where I can't even capture the vodeo image properly it takes maybe 10-15 seconds more.
What are the specs of this old laptop? And what's the boot-time using the original amigaboot.of?
@Hans It's probably best to compile QEmu from sources yourself, especially --enable-lto seems to make a difference.
Also make sure you are emulating something supported by AmigaOS 4.x, for example -cpu 7447 or -cpu 750cxe, which are the 2 CPUs used in real Pegasos2. Even it it works using -cpu g3 is wrong as well since it's no CPU ever used in real AmigaOS 4.x hardware and the kernel (and some of my software) uses the PVR register to check for exact CPU models, not just some CPU family. The default (and -cpu g4) is, or at least was, a 7400 CPU which isn't supported by AmigaOS 4.x and probably shouldn't have worked at all. Somehow using an emulated 7400 CPU still works - but with several problems.
Unfortunately I do not have that laptop to hand. I will have it on Monday - 4th generation. If you want I will write you how it looks like with pegasos.rom
I had the 6th generation at hand. You have the details on the side with Neofetch. Now it is probably 13th generation ? ( please correct me if I am wrong ).
I booted the system from a strego backup from a zenwetrzrz disk. There is an old Qemu (7.2.94 <= 8.0-rc4 ) , so take that into account too.
Time from write to boot is about 28 seconds. As I wrote, take into account the old qemu and the system on the external disk.
As you can see you must have something wrong with your laptop.
edit: hmm... you have a black screen all the time before the graphics card initialization ? maybe you didn't replace siliconmiotion502.chip with the one from before UP2 update ? It remembers that the system loading time then increases terribly.
walkero wrote:@Hans Which version of the SM502 driver are you using? If this is 53.10 and above then that has a delay in booting, because as Max explained to me,
Quote:
from version 53.10 the driver uses udelay(10000) after reading some data from DDC, maybe the emulator doesn't implement correctly udelay
I forgot it was true. The siliconmotion502.chip from the Sam460 installation CD version 53.10 delays the boot process. Instead you should use siliconmotion502.chip version 53.9.
Also under BBoot there is a delayed start of the boot process of at least 20-30 seconds.
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