List of Games that profit from faster CPU speeds?

[arf]

Nowadays, many STs have an ICD AdSpeed, or Maxon Mach16, or equivalent 16 MHz speeder. Or have the main board overclocked to 10, 12 or even 16 MHz. Or other ways (PAK030 etc.).

Which games / gameplay profit from the speedup? Some are uncontrollable, in others you don’t notice anything, and some have smoother, faster screen updates. I would love to find a list of the latter.

[DarkLord]

I've got a folder named "Atari Game Lists" on my hard drive. There's quite a few there,
mono games, MIDI games, Co-op games, etc... but no faster CPU speed's list, sadly.

As a rule of thumb though, I'd venture from my own personal experience that most
3D/polygon style games will benefit from higher speeds.

Frontier I and II, for example, run much better on my 40 mhz '030 STacy. Someone please
correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Epic actually display a popup message if an 'O30 is
detected?

There was a short message thread at Atari Age:

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/26742 ... erated-st/

Also, if you're using the adapted games from sources such as Klaz, Dbug, or P.Pera, most of them
have been re-worked so that they will run on faster machines - although I'm not sure if they if
anything has been done to take advantage of them (I really don't think so).

HTH's.

[chronicthehedgehog]

Zero 5, Driller (I imagine all Freescape games), Substation, F1GP

[Jinroh]

Pretty sure Cisco Heat does, but that could just be the Blitter/STe code by dml. Seemed smoother to me 16mhz than 8mhz though.

[GCoons]

I have tested the following machines with accelerators with a variety of games:
-520ST with ST536, ST specific version of TF536 & Fastram
-Mega ST with TF536, with an ST compatible firmware & Fastram
-Falcon CT63, 68060 @ 70mhz & Fastram
-Falcon DFB1, 68030 @ 50mhz & Fastram
-1040STe with 32mhz 68k no Fastram
-520ST with 16mhz 68k accelerator & blitter no Fastram
-Mega STe @ 16mhz 68k

There are two categories of benefit
1 - Raw CPU speed
2 - CPU speed + Fastram


Type 1 accelerators:
-3D games like Frontier Elite and Stunt Car Racer benefit slightly from Raw CPU speed. For example running Frontbench a benchmarking version of Frontier Elite with a stock 8mhz ST will complete approximately 730 or so frames in NTSC while a 16mhz CPU will get approximately 780 - 800 frames (the absolute numbers will vary PAL vs NTSC but the relative gain is about the same)
-All other games - minimal to no perceptible benefit

Type 2 accelerators:
-Games that can run within Fastram will benefit greatly. Again using the Frontbench example, you'll see frame counts of ranging from 2000 frames all the way up to 6000 frames depending on the accelerator. Two other games I've tested extensively are Ultima VI and Civilization. Both run significantly faster with an accelerator combined with fastram.
-Games that don't run in Fastram benefit similar to Type 1 accelerators...a small uplift nowhere near the level of CPU speed differential.

[Marakatti]

Have to disagree here Been gaming with Atari Mega STe for decades. Side scrollers like R-type, Atomic Robo-Kid, Saint Dragon, even Shadow of the Beast etc. becomes much more playable and responsive with 16MHz. Also Turbo Out Run, Power Drift etc "scaler games" benefit greatly. They run very smoothly compared to stock STf.

[GCoons]

You got me thinking, so I booted up my Mega STE, 1040 STE.

I'll have to put a side-by-side video comparison together....love to test all those games you mention. Maybe I'm just getting old (which is definitely true), but I didn't see any difference (maybe a little) in R-Type between those two, so then I thought maybe it's the blitter difference and booted up a 1040ST and saw the same results. All had 4mb of RAM and were running from either a Bluescsi (Mega STe) or Ultrasatan (STE / STF).

I was switching between two screens (in the same room) so maybe if I had them side by side I could better see the difference.

[mikro]

@GCoons: there's a catch. MegaSTE boots into 8 MHz/no cache by default. So you have rectify that first.

[GCoons]

I did check xcontrol that cache and 16mhz was on.

Bigger boost in the 3D games like Frontier with the cache rather than just pure CPU clock speed. From around 720 frames to over 1,200 frames.

[stormy]

Then there's the real secret sauce option: using agranlunds special tf536 firmware which mirrors st-ram into tt-ram (or perhaps it's caching ST-RAM into tt-ram? I forget, don't kill me over the details)

This allows massive performance boosts in both ST-RAM games and especially with shifter access to RAM... Literally bonkers speed increase!

I've tested it on a few games but not many. I haven't come across any incompatibilities yet.