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Thomas Richter · 03 August 2023, 17:53

Apparently, wiz12 was faster than myself. (-: But yes, indeed, P96 3.4.0 was just released.

Maybe the highlights first. First, there is emulation for the Extra Half Bright mode on graphics cards that offer a chunky mode (thus, almost every card).

Then, we have a couple of new drivers. First, the RainbowII, which was also marketed as FrameMaster both by BSC and Elaborate Bytes. It cannot do much, only TrueColor in PAL or NTSC resolution, progressive or interlace. There are a couple of jumpers you need to set, and the tooltypes have to be set accordingly (or use P96Prefs for that).

Then, we have the A2410, CBMs one and only graphics card. This card is really an odd-ball and surprisingly hard to interface, which makes the driver slow. A working MMU and the mmu.library is required to make it work. The present driver can still do a lot more than CBMs own a2410.device. First, the resolutions are configurable and not limited to 800x600 and 1024x768. However, there are only two oscillators on the board, and thus available pixel clocks are very limited. For example, you can also use the card at 640x480 with 85Hz.

The driver supports a hardware sprite, panning and (tada!) screen dragging. The latter is however severely limited as the card has only 1MB of video RAM, and thus, only two 640x480 screens fit on the card simultaneously. It is too tiny for 2x800x600, leave alone 2x1024x768. The card has a "blitter" (sort of) which is even used, but still everything needs to be drawn twice by the CPU (sigh).

Then, my third party tools P96Prefs, P96ScreenCX and Native are part of the distribution now, so you do not have to go fishing in the Aminet. You still find them there, and they will remain to be available there as well.

We also have the option to configure the monitor dimension (in millimeters, yes, I like metric units) to set the pixel aspect ratio correctly. This is best done with P96Prefs.

Finally, I want to thank Javier and Samir for the spanish and italian translation!

There are many additional bug fixes I will probably report separately. wiz12 already provided the full list, but I may explain a bit more on this in separate posts.

03 August 2023, 17:53	#593
Thomas Richter Registered User Join Date: Jan 2019 Location: Germany Posts: 3,223	Apparently, wiz12 was faster than myself. (-: But yes, indeed, P96 3.4.0 was just released. Maybe the highlights first. First, there is emulation for the Extra Half Bright mode on graphics cards that offer a chunky mode (thus, almost every card). Then, we have a couple of new drivers. First, the RainbowII, which was also marketed as FrameMaster both by BSC and Elaborate Bytes. It cannot do much, only TrueColor in PAL or NTSC resolution, progressive or interlace. There are a couple of jumpers you need to set, and the tooltypes have to be set accordingly (or use P96Prefs for that). Then, we have the A2410, CBMs one and only graphics card. This card is really an odd-ball and surprisingly hard to interface, which makes the driver slow. A working MMU and the mmu.library is required to make it work. The present driver can still do a lot more than CBMs own a2410.device. First, the resolutions are configurable and not limited to 800x600 and 1024x768. However, there are only two oscillators on the board, and thus available pixel clocks are very limited. For example, you can also use the card at 640x480 with 85Hz. The driver supports a hardware sprite, panning and (tada!) screen dragging. The latter is however severely limited as the card has only 1MB of video RAM, and thus, only two 640x480 screens fit on the card simultaneously. It is too tiny for 2x800x600, leave alone 2x1024x768. The card has a "blitter" (sort of) which is even used, but still everything needs to be drawn twice by the CPU (sigh). Then, my third party tools P96Prefs, P96ScreenCX and Native are part of the distribution now, so you do not have to go fishing in the Aminet. You still find them there, and they will remain to be available there as well. We also have the option to configure the monitor dimension (in millimeters, yes, I like metric units) to set the pixel aspect ratio correctly. This is best done with P96Prefs. Finally, I want to thank Javier and Samir for the spanish and italian translation! There are many additional bug fixes I will probably report separately. wiz12 already provided the full list, but I may explain a bit more on this in separate posts.