OxyPatcher

Those of you out there with a lust for fast processors, will probably have noticed your 68040/060 not quite performing as fast as you expected.

You may also have noticed your Amiga's mouse jumping around the screen when you were rendering. It never used to do that did it?

Well fear not! Help is at hand for both problems and it only costs £15. What am I talking about? OxyPatcher.

Shortly after upgrading from a Blizzard 030/50 to an Apollo 040/33, I noticed strange things happening during my usual stint of over-night rendering. Don't worry, I wasn't seeing ghosts, it was much worse, my mouse was jerking around the screen whenever I moved it, just like a PC does.

But it wasn't just Imagine, it was also Vista and even Voyager- NG. Something was seriously going wrong with my new accelerator, after all, my Blizzard never did any of this.

Not only that but, software such as Imagine and Vista wasn't going quite as fast as I thought it should. while Sysinfo and AIBB reported my new accelerator running at about 3 times the speed of my Blizzard, but the maths intensive programs were barely going twice as fast

.

Don't get me wrong, that "twice as fast" was extremely welcomed, but I couldn't help feeling that I was missing out.

I was aware of the 040 and 060's problems long before I even had my 030, being a regular reader of "Under the bonnet" and other such features, but I never thought the problem was quite as bad as this.

For those of you who don't quite understand the problem, I'll try to explain it:-

To cram everything onto the 040, Motorola had to cut a few things out. These things were the trigonometry (hard maths) functions, it's like taking a page out of the dictionary. Older software that was written for the older processors who had that page, may use some of the words in it. Because the 040 doesn't understand those words, they have to be replaced by others which mean the same.

Now that's the basics over with, on with what actually happens inside our Amiga:-

When the 040 comes across an instruction that it doesn't understand, an exception occurs (basically, it crashes!). When this happens, it looks in the 68040.library to see if there are any other words which mean the same. When it finds one, it runs it instead.

All this takes time, during which your amiga doesn't do anything, hence the mouse jumping around just to keep up with you. Not only that, but the caches get flushed when an exeption occurs. Aggghhh!!!

Wouldn't it be nice if we could change those words quicker? Achim Koyen (the author) certainly thought so.

With OxyPatcher installed, your Amiga will fly! I've since clocked my Apollo up to 40Mhz as well. At last, quickrenders are actually quick! The difference it makes to Vista is excellent, a 63 second render only takes 37 seconds now! That's just because of OxyPatcher!

Installation is a little strange. there's no Installer script, and the patcher needs to be in WBstartup with another program in your C: to run it. Once installed and rebooted you'll be greeted by a short (maybe too short) colour flash every time you boot.

It also comes with only a standard MagicWb style tool icon (you know, the one with the hammer on it). The documentation is quite long and is only a plain text file. It would be nice to have it as an AmigaGuide as the only printed instructions were in German.

Another slight problem would be the disk itself. The one I received had both copies of the program corrupted, but a few retries soon sorted that out. Its good that two copies of the program are included on the disk though.

The patcher causes a reboot when first run, but shouldn't need to again, once it's in memory. It can be a little annoying, if like me, you also run FastExec, but they both work fine together.

I'm afraid that I can't compare it with CyberPatcher. I have ran the one that was on a cover CD, but I suspect that it only runs if you have a Phase5 board, because it seemed to make no difference at all.

It is worth noting however, that CyberPatcher only claims to patch the most common instructions while OxyPatcher claims to patch all missing instructions.

Problems

There's only one problem I've noticed and that is with QuakePlayer (I don't have Quake yet). QuakePlayer is extremely unreliable when using the -mmuhack option with OxyPatcher running, although it's fine without.

The author says that it also has some problems with Cinema 4D V4, so watch out.

To be fair though, a program of this nature can be expected to cause quite a lot of problems, and I believe the author has done a great job.

Supplier: Weird Science 0116 246 3800
Price: £14.99

Overall Verdict:
Strange installation and slight incompatibility problems. The best £15 you'll ever spend on your Amiga.

95%
FRANK MATHIESON (frank@massin.freeserve.co.uk)