Amazing news from Daniel Müßener:

Here’s a fresh video from the Tower57 Amiga port front.
You may probably think that it doesn’t differ too much from the previous latest videos, but I suggest you to take a closer look, especially at the shell window at the bottom right…

Yes, that’s Tower57 running on an A1222 Tabor system 🙂

And if you check out the fps counter you’ll notice that it runs pretty fast, actually quite a lot faster than on a sam460ex (of course on an X1000 or X5000 it runs much faster than on both, often above 100 fps).

Here you can see the power of the Tabor if fed with an executable compiled natively for its (SPE) CPU.
Tower57 is some kind of special case though, primarily because I do pure software rendering inside this Amiga port, so the program doesn’t have to comunicate floats directly to other libraries, roughly spoken.

Special thanks to Sebastian Bauer of the AmigaOS4 dev team for updating adtools so that I could compile myself a SPE aware cross-compiler with ease 🙂

Note: of course the final Amiga Tower57 port will be faster than all that in general. Right now I stopped optimizing because the original coders are not done with the game yet, so chances for SVN conflicts are simply too high. And real deep optimizations can better be done once the game logic is really complete and release-candidate-bug-free.

Addendum: The “normal” Tower57 FPU build works too on the Tabor btw. In that case, as with all other FPU-using programs, the OS’ current compatibility backend kicks in and “translates” each and every FPU-opcode into something the Tabor likes. Interesting enough: even then the Tabor is so powerful that it’s still playable (about 20fps where the sam460 reaches about 30fps).