Details for the next generation of Flickerfixers from Individual Computers

[lolof]

Originally Posted by Mr B

People have issues with Jens products, and their reliability. 3 out of a unheard total number is not a high return rate, and on top of that, the returns weren't even DOA's, but mostly user error.

Which % of the owner are waiting for the config tools to be able to start to use the indy ?????? So, we will speak about real number return when the config tool will be finished. And for the customers, this number is even not important. What is important for me is to get my device to work, it means to get the config tool. The number of sales and return has no importance for me. Personally, I could use the indy with dvi vga adaptor but the image is really not good. Indy wait in box, I finally did not return it hoping to see soon the config tool. And I think a lot of people have indy2 waiting in a box. If this is so, it is normal that there is almost no return.
I do not want to offend someone, but people should think...

That say, I very much hope that the config tool will come in a near future.
Maybe Jens should not spend so much time to post on forumS, I think he has something else to do. I also would like to fit it with the bvision in myA1200, seems that I will have to cut it a bit and I would like to test it fully before to do this and loose my warranty :-) and again, this can't be done without config tool...

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

roy bates, Leffman, others,

Although I am the developer, ...

Following photo is for the developer...

Good continuation.

[Mr B]

Originally Posted by lolof

Which % of the owner are waiting for the config tools to be able to start to use the indy ??????

Pretty much 100% of the owners are waiting for the config tool, to a: get more use out of their hardware, or b: get any use out of their hardware. this is a known fact, i fail to see your point?

Originally Posted by lolof

And for the customers, this number is even not important.

No, returns based on the lack of software, is, like you say rather irrelevant.

Originally Posted by lolof

What is important for me is to get my device to work, it means to get the config tool. The number of sales and return has no importance for me.

Of course the return factor is relevant. If a third of the units have been returned due to hardware failure then there is a design, component, or handling problem causing it, and even if "my" unit seams good, i'd want to know about it. Now, there isn't such an issue, Jens said he's seen 3 units returned, and i believe him.

Originally Posted by lolof

Personally, I could use the indy with dvi vga adaptor but the image is really not good.

Quality shouldn't be affected by the DVI->VGA adaptor, as far as i understand it. There is the vertical banding issue, which may, or may not be fixable with the software, There is a centering of the screen issue, black borders and all, and there is a issue where some screens don't see a valid input at all.

Originally Posted by lolof

I do not want to offend someone, but people should think...

I completly agree with you, however, i fail to see why you are talking about yourself in third person.

Originally Posted by lolof

Maybe Jens should not spend so much time to post on forumS, I think he has something else to do.

Yes, Jens should sit in a dark room, meditating, twiddling his thumbs, and pull the software we need out of his rear end, after a long hard nights drinking... Orange juice, of-course, i don't condone software produces on addictive substances.
Um, you must have missed the part where Jens informed everyone that he's got someone hired for the software works, so he can do hardware designs, and wet-work... No, wait, to much Borderlands 2 here, no wet-work.

[Retrofan]

Getting off topic of your topic and inside the topic... I never have had an Indi but this. Now I can use HighGFX very well, just a little to the right of the screen. What I don't know if there's a way to force native screens to use the indi. In other words: Will I always have to be changing with the remote between Hdmi and Ext?

[lolof]

@Mr B

My god! You seems to be someone who is always right and other wrong seeing your posts as Jens defender
You re right again, I should think before posting crap

[paulo_becas]

As a computer tecnician and in some odd way developer (of many things) i guess that there shouldn't be no one more frustrated than people who are trying to get the tool out.

Come on guys, everybody knew that it wasn't going to be perfect at first, and, ok, you can say that we didn't knew that we were going to wait so long for the tool, but, come on, let's try to be a little constructive, i don't believe, and allow me to say that, i think, no one believes that Jens and the staff at individual computers were going to release indi if they knew that there was going to be so much complain about it. If they knew, probably, we would be bitching about when indi was coming out.
Come on, how many of us are using the amiga for work???? It's not some life or death thing.

Let's try to be "even" more patient about it and let's see what we can do to help out. I don't think we're helping by complaining so much.

If you're not patient just return the damn thing.

[NovaCoder]

I trust that Jens will deliver.

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by lolof

Following photo is for the developer...

BVision is a rare unit. And there may be more products that Indivision AGA MK2 does not fit with. I've tried a lot, but it was not possible to avoid BVision with this kind of connector. Any other connector would have increased the cost a lot. There are a lot of possible expansions in an A1200, and Indivision AGA MK2 is avoiding a lot of those already-occupied spaces. However, I can't avoid them all - there's no point in arguing with physics.

On another note, your ground cable is dangerously close to the capacitor just below it. Two of the three return cases I talked about earlier had exactly that user error. I removed the cable (which was pushing on the capacitor), the unit was back to working (not blocking the power supply any more), and everyone was happy. Please rotate the cable a little to the side, so it won't cause a short with that capacitor.

Yesterday's work has taken us a good step forward: The FPGA core now recognizes all screenmodes and reads config data from the configuration space in the flashrom. The screenmode is displayed in clear text in the OSD, so we can already demonstrate that this part (the screenmode recognition in hardware) is working properly. Our next step is to introduce all the counters that make Indivision AGA MK2 as flexible as we need it to: For every screenmode that the unit can recognize (that's currently 22), the user can set the following parameters:

- start of the Amiga-picture (X/Y coordinates)
- size of the Amiga picture
- horizontal sync front porch
- horizontal sync length
- horizontal back porch
- left padding area (black border, can be zero)
- right padding area (black border, can be zero)
- vertical front porch
- vertical sync length
- vertical back porch
- upper padding area (black border, can be zero)
- lower padding area (black border, can be zero)
- output pixel clock

Out of these parameters, simply *everything* is possible: Changing frequencies, position and size is all possible, but kind of hard to do if you have no idea what all these numbers are about. We will therefore provide Presets and add menu items that let you enter more human-understandable parameters like "move screen to direction X".

Now that we're merging the two parts (new core and config/flashtool), we're finding bugs that are true showstoppers. One of them (solved yesterday) was that the tool was compiled/tested with way-too-high-CPU settings, which would have broken compatibility with lower-end machines like the CD32 or un-accelerated A1200s.

The attached screenshot is using Super72-interlace as a source, so the OSD appears bigger for the photo (size is half for PAL/NTSC screens). The screenshot shows something that I am expecting will confuse a lot of people who do not like to read manuals (this has happened a lot with the previous versions of Indivision): The tool lets you configure every screenmode individually, no matter what screen it is currently running on. Even though Super72 is the current screenmode, the tool is set for editing the output mode of Euro36-nonLace.

The flash/config tool is still *very* engineering-like, as it's a multi-step process to generate a full config:

- configure all screenmodes
- generate unique core ID numbers
- gather all the cores, generate a 1MByte flash file
- flash the file

...and it's nothing we can release at this point, because those who have paid close attention have already seen that the tool is still showing two picture size parameters, where there's only one needed.

I'm hoping that it's a bit clearer how complex this development is. It's not just about editing a few numbers, but to fill a large area of pointers with life. We will continue on this path, but there is still no date for a release that I can promise.

Jens

[paulo_becas]

More clear than that is impossible.
Thank's, Jens, for the explanation and for the patience.

[Retrofan]

Thanks for explaining what the short was. I didn't know how I could had a short. It seems easy to have it if you don't pay close attention to it. I better put some tape there.

[lolof]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

BVision is a rare unit. And there may be more products that Indivision AGA MK2 does not fit with. I've tried a lot, but it was not possible to avoid BVision with this kind of connector. Any other connector would have increased the cost a lot. There are a lot of possible expansions in an A1200, and Indivision AGA MK2 is avoiding a lot of those already-occupied spaces. However, I can't avoid them all - there's no point in arguing with physics.

On another note, your ground cable is dangerously close to the capacitor just below it. Two of the three return cases I talked about earlier had exactly that user error. I removed the cable (which was pushing on the capacitor), the unit was back to working (not blocking the power supply any more), and everyone was happy. Please rotate the cable a little to the side, so it won't cause a short with that capacitor.

Jens

I will rotate the gnd cable.
Would it be possible to have an adaptor to raise the indi2 a bit to solve the bvision problem?

And thanks for the infos.

[NovaCoder]

I think I spied a couple of cool things in that config screen-shot (fingers crossed that I'm guessing correctly).

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by paulo_becas

More clear than that is impossible.
Thank's, Jens, for the explanation and for the patience.

Slightly, (Ok, a lot) off topic, i took a look at your forum, and noticed the schematic for the 4 player parallel port joystick mod. i sense a new adapter board on the horizon.. Ok, back on topic, do love the MKII it desperately needs the native HDMI so i don't have to use HDMI to DVI adapter

[paulo_becas]

Originally Posted by kipper2k

Slightly, (Ok, a lot) off topic, i took a look at your forum, and noticed the schematic for the 4 player parallel port joystick mod. i sense a new adapter board on the horizon..

Still work in progress

[kipper2k]

Originally Posted by paulo_becas

Still work in progress

I created a board, it will plug directly into the parallel port, and doesn't require a cable. I created a thread in the Hardware section and put the eagle .brd file in there for people . If people want me to make one up for them it would be cheap (about $9.00 built)

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=66288

[Retrofan]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

- start of the Amiga-picture (X/Y coordinates)

Will it work before loading monitor drivers? Can it show a bootpic? AmigaSys, etc.

[roy bates]

i can see that this software will really help alot of peaple out with screen positioning etc.

am i right in thinking it wont get rid of the vertical lines or black screen problems.
im not having this problem as im only interested in the analogue vga side.
its for a friend but if its used in mine its ok(im not using the dvi socket at all)

[Schoenfeld]

Originally Posted by Retrofan

Will it work before loading monitor drivers? Can it show a bootpic? AmigaSys, etc.

Sure, the config is stored in flash and it's automatically loaded from flash whenever a screenmode changes - no drivers necessary. You can create your perfect setting for the workbench (for example in HighGFX), another setting for PAL and yet another setting for NTSC, which the flickerfixer will automatically load if you run a game - even if it's from floppy.

A bootpic is not planned. The flash is currently planned for up to eight cores and config data, and if we plan a bootpic, it would limit the amount of different pixelclock rates in a full config. I don't want to introduce such a limitation just for a picture that is shown for a few seconds.

Originally Posted by roy bates

am i right in thinking it wont get rid of the vertical lines or black screen problems.

"black screen problem" is an "unsupported mode" problem, and this should be eliminated by this software with the right settings. The "stripes" problem is caused by DVI lines not properly terminated by cheap DVI-I->VGA adapters. This will be eliminated if you disable the DVI signals in the config tool. You can also eliminate this by properly terminating the four differential pairs.

Jens

[roy bates]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

"black screen problem" is an "unsupported mode" problem, and this should be eliminated by this software with the right settings. The "stripes" problem is caused by DVI lines not properly terminated by cheap DVI-I->VGA adapters. This will be eliminated if you disable the DVI signals in the config tool. You can also eliminate this by properly terminating the four differential pairs.

Jens

ah yes,that makes sense i'll pop round my freinds next week some time and tell him.i havent seen him for a few months so that will make him happy.

thankyou.

[Retrofan]

Great. No, I "put" the bootpic (or AmigaSys, just in the s-s). I just need the Indi to work (to show the right screenmode) from the beginning, as you say it does. Great.

And so loading the configs as you say I won't have to use the remote, the indi will use all the screen modes. Great.

[Mr B]

Originally Posted by Schoenfeld

The "stripes" problem is caused by DVI lines not properly terminated by cheap DVI-I->VGA adapters. This will be eliminated if you disable the DVI signals in the config tool. You can also eliminate this by properly terminating the four differential pairs.

So some screens are more picky then others, and show these lines, while others doesn't? With the same DVI-I->VGA adapter. Is there any way to tell if one is terminated the right way, or could one be fixed? (Note to self, dig out the box of different DVI-I->VGA adapters and try em all on the screen that has vertical lines.) I'm sort of doubtful my TV will accept the signal with a change of adapter, but if i can get rig of the lines, i'll earmark that DVI-I->VGA adapter for the Amiga.