Shogo has been tested on a wide variety of Amiga configurations. However, there might still be some problems with certain combinations. This guide should give you a bit more technical insight into Shogo and help you get the most performance out of the game.
Sound
General
Sound Support in Shogo is implemented via either AHI or a special DMA sound driver. While the AHI sound driver offers the most compatibility to sound cards, we still highly recommend the DMA driver for performance reasons. The major point is that the DMA sound driver directly goes through to the sound hardware, avoiding all sorts of context switches. This requires a normal Amiga, i.e. one with the AGA Customchips, but it offers the best performance, outperforming the AHI driver. On the other hand, the AHI driver offers better sound quality, and compatibility with sound cards.
Streaming Sounds
Streaming a sound from disk means that only a small portion of the sound will be loaded to memory at any one time. This saves a lot of memory, but has the drawback of requiring disk access. Due to the dual-CPU nature of current Amigas, this means additional context switching while data is loaded from disk. Therefore, streaming sounds do have a noticable impact on performance, more so since some of the ambient sounds (that is, background noises like wind, street sounds, starship engine etc.) are also streamed from disk. Some levels (like High and Low) are very heavy on these. The launcher will allow you to disable some of the streaming ambient sounds, it is recommended that you do that unless you have a very fast disk (UW-SCSI). This is especially true for IDE disks.
Memory
Shogo is very memory-intensive. There is a lot of textures and sound data that is loaded. Shogo may be told to employ a mechanism for memory reduction that is called Caching. This works by unloading data that isn´t used at the moment when the amount of free memory has dropped below a certain level, or rather, if the memory used by a specific type of resource (texture or sound) exceeds a certain limit. The launcher lets you select the size of these caches (in kilobytes), or disable them completey (if size is set to 0). Note however that disabling caches is not recommended unless you have 128 MB or more.
Shogo will run in 64 MB only with caches set to a reasonable size (approx. 3 MB for textures and 4 MB for sounds). It is highly recommended to add memory to your machine. Even with caching, the constant allocation and deallocation of chunks might lead to fragmentation, which in turn will have larger memory allocations fail even if the sum of these fragments would be large enough. Unfortunately this problem is inherent in a system without a virtual address space.
Loading Speed
At the start of each level, a lot of data is loaded from disk in order to avoid loading it later during the game. This means that loading a level can take a considerable amount of time. To cut down loading times, the Launcher lets you select the type and amount of resources that will get preloaded in the game, as well as buffer sizes for these loading operations.
The process of preloading the data is called Precaching. There are four modes to pre-caching data: Precache everything, models only, to cache limit, or nothing at all. It is highly recommended to select at least to cache limit, since everything else will result in very heavy loading during the game itself.
The default values for the file buffers are reasonable and should not be modified. Generally, the more the better, but it will also eat more memory if you raise these. Refer to the online documentation in the Launcher for more info.
Graphics
Shogo was designed with 3D hardware in mind. Therefore, the best results will be achieved with a Warp3D compatible graphics card. The software renderer, while compatible with all graphics cards, is inferior in every aspect. If possible, use the hardware renderer.For both hardware and software rendering, a 15 or 16 bit screen is required. Note also that the software renderer requires a bit-endian screen mode - little endian (or PC) modes won´t do.
When you start the game for the first time the launcher will ask you for a detail level. The choice of detail level highly depends on your system, generally only highend systems like 604/200 should use the high detail settings at all. Some of the advanced features can be changed individually, for example it is highly recommended to disable shadows and environment mapping, as they will severely slow down the game.
You will have to experiment a bit to find the best balance between looks and speed.