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We have some general guidelines: a minimum of at least a 25 Mhz 486 to run the products reasonably well, or any Pentium to run them very well. In general, people who just want the normal speed of an Atari ST or Mac Classic or Atari 130XE will do fine with a slow 486 computer or even a fast 386, while users who want extreme speed (such as to emulate the speed of the Atari TT or Mac IIcx) should choose the Pentium.
Since not everyone is in a position to go out and buy the latest Pentium computers, we gave some thought to the problem of what to do if you have an older 386 or 486 computer. Buy purchasing an "OverDrive" type processor upgrade, you can typically double or triple the speed of your existing 386 or 486 computer for about $100 to $200.
In January 1996 we purchased several CPU upgrade kits and installed them on our test machines. Then we measured the performance benefit of each upgrade by benchmarking Gemulator 4.11 and PC Xformer 3.3, the current versions of our emulators at that time. We also visited nearby computer stores to benchmark other processors, such as the NexGen 586.
For the actual benchmarks, all the machines were configured to run Windows 95 with 8 megabytes of RAM, in the standard 640x480 256-color VGA mode. This corresponds to the minimum requirements of Gemulator and pretty well the minimum requirements of running Windows in general.
For each emulator, we picked a set of bencharks. For Gemulator we used our own Quick Index 2.2, a utility written by us many years ago for testing the speed of Atari computers. To avoid the pitfalls of Norton-like benchmarks, Quick Index tests 4 different CPU benchmarks and 4 different video benchmarks rather than simply giving a single CPU number. We also used Ofir Gal's GEM Bench 3.25, a utility similar to Quick Index in that it performs many different speed benchmarks, and then gives average numbers for CPU and video. These two utilities were also run on a real Atari 1040ST. In fact, the same machine that we used years ago to calibrate Quick Index with! The numbers for each benchmark are a percentage relative to a 1040ST. The higher the number, the faster the benchmark ran.
For PC Xformer, we did not have an existing benchmark utility to use. Such a thing did not exist on the Atari 8-bit computers since all Atari 8-bit computers used the exact same hardware running at the exact same 1.8 MHz. So instead, we used two of the sample Atari BASIC benchmarks that we've had up on this web page before: the simple FOR NEXT loop which loops 10,000 times, and the line sweep, which draws 320 lines across the screen in graphics mode 8. These benchmarks were also run on a real Atari 130XE and the times normalized so that the 130XE times have a relative speed of 1.0. The times shown are in seconds. The lower the number, the faster the benchmark ran.
The Cyrix 386-to-486 chip is amazing. At about $180 (cheaper today), this chip converts a slow 386 computer that barely runs Windows 95 to something comparable to a low end 486 and runs Windows quite well. In our test machine, a 20 MHz 386, the Cyrix chip improved performance by about 2 1/2 times. It went from being slow to respond to being quite responsive, even for such things as using the Windows 95 desktop. Considering that we only paid $200 for the computer (which is worth more than that for its memory alone), we were able to for under $400 put together a very nice little Windows 95 machine that also makes a good entry level Atari emulator.
The 486 results also surprised us. Our 66 MHz chip runs about 80% to 90% faster than the 33 MHz chip. Not bad, but not great. However, the 100 MHz DX4 chip did quite well. First, it only costs about $200. Second, it runs cooler than the 66 MHz chip. Partly due to the larger heat sink on it, and partly due to lower power consumption. The DX4 chip also has double the cache (16K instead of 8K) of the earlier 486 chips, allowing it to reference memory less often. Clearly this is a win, because in the PC Xformer benchmarks, the 100 MHz DX4 really does run at triple the speed of the 33 MHz chip, and almost triple the speed in the Gemulator benchmark. Overall, it performs at about 3/4 the speed of the 90 MHz Pentium, putting it in the speed class of a 66 MHz Pentium.
The NexGen 586 chip was a real disappointment. After reading all the literature about it and how this was a Pentium killer, the real world results proved otherwise. The 100 MHz 586 ran at about the speed of a 75 MHz Pentium, not at double the speed as the salesman wanted me to think. This chip is not only slower than a real Pentium, it isn't even a Pentium clone. The name "586" is a total marketing scam, intended to lead consumers into thinking that this is a Pentium clone. It is not. It sucks. Avoid the NexGen chip.
Summary: If you currently own a 386 computer, there is no need to throw it away. You can more than double your computer's speed with a simple Cyrix 486 upgrade chip. We do not recommend the NexGen 586 chip, nor do we recommend clock doubled 486 chips such as the 486DX2/50 or 486DX2/66. If you really need to run your Atari software at 5 or 10 times the speed of your original Atari, then by all means go out and buy that super fast Pentium system.
The benchmarks below reflect the actual results obtained by running the Gemulator 96 demo which you can freely download. These results are intended to show the approximate speed of execution of Gemulator 96 on various PCs compared to the standard speed of either an ST (when 1.0 is highlited) or a TT (when TT is highlited). Since all PCs are slightly different "your milage may vary" as they say, so use these numbers only as a guideline.
If you compare these benchmarks with the ones listed above (which were performed in January 1996 using Gemulator 4.11) you'll see how Gemulator 96 is in some cases about 30% faster than the Gemulator we sold just a year ago!
Benchmarks were performed running the Gemulator 96 demo on either Windows 95 or Windows NT. Gemulator 96 was set to run either TOS 2.06 with no screen acceleration, or MagiC 5.0 with NVDI 4.11. The DMA, GEMDOS, and RPM figures can be ignored since Windows disk caching makes those benchmarks unreliable.
Below each screen shot is the description of that particular setup and the elapsed stopwatch time of each benchmark. Lower stopwatch time is faster. Use this to double check the results when using other emulators since MagiC PC and STonX are known to inaccurately calculate the percentages.
TOS 2.06, monochrome,
Windows NT 4, 200 MHz Pentium Pro.
Elapsed stopwatch time: 4.3 seconds
(Left side shows speed relative to an ST, right side is relative
to a TT)
TOS 2.06, monochrome,
Windows 3.11 with Win32s, 200 MHz Pentium Pro.
Elapsed stopwatch time: 4.8 seconds
(Left side shows speed relative to an ST, right side is relative
to a TT)
Note: this is the same computer as above, except running Windows
3.11 instead of Windows NT 4.0. There is a slight speed loss when
running on Windows 3.x.
TOS 2.06, monochrome,
Windows 95, 486DX2/50.
Elapsed stopwatch time: 37 seconds
TOS 2.06, monochrome,
Windows 95, 90 MHz Pentium.
Elapsed stopwatch time: 12.9 seconds
Note: compare these numbers with the 90 MHz Pentium numbers
listed for Gemulator 4.11 to see how much faster Gemulator 96 has
gotten!
TOS 2.06, monochrome,
Windows 95, 90 MHz Pentium.
Elapsed stopwatch time: 40.3 seconds
MagiC with NVDI 4.11,
monochrome, Windows 95, 90 MHz Pentium.
Elapsed stopwatch time: 6.4 seconds
phone: 206-236-0540, fax: 206-236-0257, email: info@emulators.com
Apple and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Microsoft, Windows, Windows NT, and/or other Microsoft products referenced herein are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft. Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged.
