Sonnet 7200 PCI programming

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by Hedeon

Partly working. And it wasn't a sonnet you see in the picture.

I'm suddenly a lot more interested in this thread

[grelbfarlk]

Cross posting from the other thread, new Q3 version is a lot faster and soon-to-be-released-version is stable on the maps which it was not before. Compliments to the mighty Cowcat.

[Wrangler]

Out of interest Hedeon, have you discovered from Elbox what the purpose of the Master jumper is?

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by Wrangler

Out of interest Hedeon, have you discovered from Elbox what the purpose of the Master jumper is?

No, but haven't asked either. Let's do that :-)

[nexus]

the master is for the mediator to have master over the system during boot

so with the master we are supposed to be able to boot the card where slave is as it is now a agent on the bus
so basically amiga os 4.1 ability

the docs tell you this

[url]http://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=1375[/url

Master open: Use SharkPPC (unreleased) as the computer busmaster
closed: Use Amiga's processor as the busmaster

[strim]

That much we know, but how is that done technically? What does the jumper really do? We've tried messing with it before, but it changed nothing in behaviour of Sonnet. I'd expect this to use Buster's bus master capabilities to access the Amiga main board from PCI side of the bridge...

[Cego]

hmm, i have installed Descent Freespace, but right at the title screen it crashes. Hyperion Video at the beginning will be played though. Whats causing this?
I have installed a Freespace Update package for PPC too.

When i start the game in window mode i get an PPC Exception and another Output Window says "Context creation failed"

Task name: 'Media:Freespace/Freespace.exe_PPC'  Task address: 711C23E0  Exception: Instruction Storage
SRR0: 083B0000    SRR1:  4000F030     MSR:   00003030    HID0: 0000C0A4
PVR:  000C0209    DAR:   0823A110     DSISR: 40000000    SDR1: 0BF0000F
DEC:  000509F8    TBU:   00000003     TBL:   3F03EC7E    XER:  20000000
CR:   40000044    FPSCR: 00000000     LR:    708884A0    CTR:  70D59FBC
R0-R3:   70878064 713A9D08 70650A20 00000000   IBAT0: 0000003E 00000002
R4-R7:   083B0003 00000018 00000024 70921A88   IBAT1: 620003FF C2000002
R8-R11:  706F0000 70660000 713AFD64 FFFFFFD0   IBAT2: 7020003F 00200002
R12-R15: 40000044 00000000 00000000 00000000   IBAT3: 00000000 00000000
R16-R19: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000   DBAT0: 0000003E 00000002
R20-R23: 00000000 70660000 00000000 00000000   DBAT1: 620003FF C2000042
R24-R27: 70660000 00000001 70660000 70660000   DBAT2: 7020003F 00200022
R28-R31: 08D459E4 70654B30 70660000 00000000   DBAT3: 00000000 00000000ÿ

[nexus]

well it goes to the 1st cpld under the oscillator 5th pin down from the left
which i think is pin 11 of that cpld

im guessing it controls the bus enumeration and clock interrupt signals for 33/66mhz etc so the sharkppc could control the bus

either they had plans on running everything on the pci bus like a sbc with backplane or was able to also use amiga side


also just noticed some mediators have 66mhz oscillator while my mk3 black has 33mhz

[Cego]

found the problem. Do not use Paula! Always AHI

[Cego]

i just want to leave a quick note regarding cooling.
I have installed a fan onto the heatsink of the G4. Now temperature will stay at 44-45 °C
Without fan i had 58-59 °C
Thats quite a difference. The overall heat of the case dropped as well. Those temperatures were of course measured under heavy CPU usage (Heretic2, Payback, Wipeout, Freespace)

[Cego]

small update

i replaced the 40mm fan on the G4 with an 60mm one. This one is a bit louder but temperature now stays at 37-38°C. Now this is what i call Ki Control!
my A4000 finally tapped into Mastered Ultra Instinct

[grelbfarlk]

I mean that's fine and all but 45C is not really that hot. It should even tolerate 59C unless you were having crashing. Obviously if it's no effort to get that down you should, but no need to go crazy with it. But if I had a G4 Sonnet I would baby it too. And regardless, unless you're pushing that hot air out of the case (reversing the air flow) it's all going in the case anyway whether at 59C or 37C. Just random thoughts.

[Cego]

i have been playing around with ffmpeg a bit and tried to convert a 720p video down to a Sonnet "compatible" format, something like 640x360 mpeg2.

Problem is, that the video will get out of sync 10-15 seconds later, depending on how much is happening in the video.

this is my command line to convert to the respective format:

ffmpeg -i "Inputfile" -vcodec mpeg2video -qscale 5 -s 640x360 -acodec mp2 -aq 5 -ac 2 -ar 44100 "Outputfile"

Any ideas how to improve encoding options to make it work on a G4/400MHz?
Sadly theres no Altivec supported player

[grelbfarlk]

I don't recall exactly what options are best, one of these days I'll save it on the wiki. -ar 22050 for sure. Also like you said before "always AHI" but with frogger actually audio.device works better as I remember. Try a lower (?) qscale maybe? You might also try reducing your framerate with -r 24. Also set your audio rate with -b:a 128k.

[Cego]

btw, do we have the possibility to improve Warp3D and WarpOS software? I ask because i wonder if we are pretty much settled with incompatibilities regarding existing PowerPC stuff released years ago. For example there's a PPC demo like Kheshkhash which doesnt work. FPSE neither (very old version). Frogger and AMP2 could need some improvement too (Altivec and generel optimizitions). Is it possible to port mplayer or VLC over to WarpOS?

Payback for example is slowing down pretty heavy, because of some hardware banging of Paula afaik. Is it possible to fix that? Does this depend on changing Sonnet related libs/software or is a patch for Payback needed?

I'd love to suggest a bounty for some key software titles.
Stuff that comes to my mind right now:

- AmiSSL/OpenSSL PPC
- FPSE for WarpOS
- Mplayer/VLC
- Freespace 2 PPC port (from MorphOS version maybe?)
- Netsurf / OWB for WarpOS
- Sheepshaver/iFusion PPC
- Warzone 2100
- Other game titles

I really hope that we'll see a renaissance in Classic PPC with the new Rapture cards. With MorphOS and OS4 we do already have a newer and updated PPC software pool. Interest in Classic PPC might become a lot higher again.

What do you think?

[trixster]

Go for it!

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by Cego

btw, do we have the possibility to improve Warp3D and WarpOS software? I ask because i wonder if we are pretty much settled with incompatibilities regarding existing PowerPC stuff released years ago. For example there's a PPC demo like Kheshkhash which doesnt work.

I'm not sure what you mean with incompatibilities (to what?) but there's a list somewhere floating about that it also doesn't work on MOS and AOS4.

Did you try it on a CSPPC and Warp3D V4? I can't find the list but the incompatibilities stem from Warp3D V4 + StormMESA. Did you try it with Warp3D in v3 mode?

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by Cego

btw, do we have the possibility to improve Warp3D and WarpOS software? I ask because i wonder if we are pretty much settled with incompatibilities regarding existing PowerPC stuff released years ago. For example there's a PPC demo like Kheshkhash which doesnt work. FPSE neither (very old version). Frogger and AMP2 could need some improvement too (Altivec and generel optimizitions). Is it possible to port mplayer or VLC over to WarpOS?

Payback for example is slowing down pretty heavy, because of some hardware banging of Paula afaik. Is it possible to fix that? Does this depend on changing Sonnet related libs/software or is a patch for Payback needed?

I'd love to suggest a bounty for some key software titles.
Stuff that comes to my mind right now:

- AmiSSL/OpenSSL PPC
- FPSE for WarpOS
- Mplayer/VLC
- Freespace 2 PPC port (from MorphOS version maybe?)
- Netsurf / OWB for WarpOS
- Sheepshaver/iFusion PPC
- Warzone 2100
- Other game titles

I really hope that we'll see a renaissance in Classic PPC with the new Rapture cards. With MorphOS and OS4 we do already have a newer and updated PPC software pool. Interest in Classic PPC might become a lot higher again.

What do you think?

Well I do have the bounty out there. But maybe it's all too hard/no one cares/not worth the time it would take.

-AmiSSL: I don't know that this is so demanding that we gain anything from running it on the PPC, but how card could it be?
-FPSE: Is actually closed source which I found out recently. So unless someone bribes/begs/gets Amidog to share it or he does it himself this seems like a no-go. But there are other PSX emulators, see problem 1: below
-MPlayer: I actually did some work on this but got to the point that I couldn't get around problem 1: FFPLay should be doable but with the same problem
-Freespace 2: Don't know anything about this, if the source is open and it's Warp3D based maybe it could be done
-Netsurf: I think we have most or all of the supporting libraries that we'd need for this, but maybe need newer GCC for the actual program
-Sheepshaver: I got a lot of this compiled but pthreads needs porting, and who knows what other issues will arise if pthreads is working.
-Warzone 2100: Don't know nuffin about this
-Other game titles: I've done six or so in the last six months (some trivial, some stupid shit), with more to come but there's problems:

1) Need a newer G++, which I whine and cry at Hedeon about every six hours about, he got so tired of my whining he's been working nonstop on it for a while now, which showing a lot of progress. Maybe 2-3 more time units worth, then a lot of stuff should start working
2) Maybe we need even newer than version 4.4.5.
3) Even with all that we're still kind of limited by sound, Paula DMA works great but the performance penalties seem to stack up quick if we use 16-bit audio, then it all goes through the 68k version of AHI and turn into a stutter fest. The exception being that Cowcat has some arcane spell that gets around this in Hexen 2-for some reason.

If anyone knows someone who knows how to code and would actually like to work on WarpOS stuff let us know, I'm sure we can work something out.

Even if we throw out a bounty with cash I don't even think we'll get a bounty hunter that wants to do it.

[Marlon_]

I think GCC 4.4 or 4.5 would suffice for most things, but getting up to at least 6 would be awesome. Also, getting a cross toolchain working would be ace.

Compiling on older CPU's, while pretty cool, it's damn slow. I can compile MilkyTracker in parallell for OS3, OS4 and MorphOS without problems on my dedicated Amiga dev environment, and it takes less than a minute from start to finish.

The GCC 4 (3.10 SDK) environment for MorphOS works just as well as the GCC 6 environment for AmigaOS 3.x in this case.

[grelbfarlk]

I guess I should have been clear all the work that's going on to getting a better dev toolchain is for the MOS2WOS package or MorphOS GCC4->WarpOS. Currently GCC 4.4.5 works fine, it's just G++ 4.4.5 which is the problem as newlib or glibc and stdc++ need porting/compiling for WarpOS.