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tonioni / WinUAE

WinUAE Amiga emulator
http://www.winuae.net/
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Feature: Startup speed #251

Open torkildl opened 1 year ago

torkildl commented 1 year ago

Is it possible to improve startup speed by skipping segments of the startup procedure (e.g. hw integrity checks)?

If so, an option to decrease the startup speed would be great to have. An example use case is cross-platform development, where one often starts new instances of WinUAE/FS-UAE and cutting a second or so from the startup would be beneficial.

emoon commented 1 year ago

Under Input, select Configuration 1. Click Remap, and then the key you want to use. Select Warp Mode in the drop-down list that appears. With this you can toggle the emulator to run in warp mode which allows you to start up much faster.

torkildl commented 1 year ago

I know about Warp mode, and it is very useful.

Here I was really thinking about letting the Amiga skip parts of its startup procedure, in order to start up faster. I don't know what is possible, but IIRC there are integrity checks for the original hw in the startup procedure. Could those be skipped?

tonioni commented 1 year ago

It isn't possible to skip (part of) hardware init, at least without it becoming KS version specific which is not acceptable. Better (and compatible) way would be to have mode where warp mode is enabled at reset and automatically switched off when booting starts. I'll think about it, it should be relatively trivial to implement.

tonioni commented 1 year ago

"warp boot" mode added. warpboot=true in config file. Emulation start to "insert disk screen" takes about 0.5s in most compatible A500 mode. Hopefully this is acceptable solution :)