P96 3.0.0 (and later) news and support

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by Leon Besson

Not a daft question Bromigo! Only copied over the 68060.library to keep 3.141 happy

Ah! As fair as I'm aware the 68060.library in the MMULib package also needs the mmu.library present to function.

[Leon Besson]

Originally Posted by indigolemon

Ah! As fair as I'm aware the 68060.library in the MMULib package also needs the mmu.library present to function.

Will do a full install of Thors it was my next thing to try. I also notice it has a Bvision card fix as part of the install? So will try that also

[Leon Besson]

Originally Posted by Leon Besson

Will do a full install of Thors it was my next thing to try. I also notice it has a Bvision card fix as part of the install? So will try that also

So this is interesting. Powers up my tester system. No black screen anymore on startup. But I have introduced the highgfx monitor file into the mix and setup my AGA MK3 in 1024x768 display.

CVision monitor file also present in monitors.

Installed ThorsMMULib in Expert mode with SetPatch, MMU and Bvision card fix.

Now have P96 running and attached to the CVision Monitor file.

The presets for the resolutions such as 1024x768 and higher are way off. Luckily I have copies of my Mediator P96 settings which work.

Now playing around with getting the resolutions I need. Love the introduction of 32bit screenmodes which Cybergraphx doesn’t give. And hopefully now be able to use intuition V45 as well.

Will keep all advised on here if interested on how I get on

[Leon Besson]

Originally Posted by Leon Besson

So this is interesting. Powers up my tester system. No black screen anymore on startup. But I have introduced the highgfx monitor file into the mix and setup my AGA MK3 in 1024x768 display.

CVision monitor file also present in monitors.

Installed ThorsMMULib in Expert mode with SetPatch, MMU and Bvision card fix.

Now have P96 running and attached to the CVision Monitor file.

The presets for the resolutions such as 1024x768 and higher are way off. Luckily I have copies of my Mediator P96 settings which work.

Now playing around with getting the resolutions I need. Love the introduction of 32bit screenmodes which Cybergraphx doesn’t give. And hopefully now be able to use intuition V45 as well.

Will keep all advised on here if interested on how I get on

Yep all good Bromigos! Intuition V45 working well. Great job in introducing P96 drivers to the Bvision and CVision cards Thomas

Have now added a 1360x768 screenmode which looks sharp as anything

[Leon Besson]

Well I celebrated too easily

Now discovered a right weird issue. This could be my hardware, but it only started to happen after installing and setting up P96.

I have connected on my SCSI chain a SCSI multi card reader on ID 1. On this I have in DevsOSDrivers a CF0: that uses L:FAT95 and points at device=Blizzppc.device. Unit = 31 (ID 1, LUN 3).

On accessing the SD card the icons slowly appear then the wh9le system locks up

This does not happen with Cybergraphx.

Oh well, more diagnosing to do

[Thomas Richter]

First thing is that you should probably install the MMULib properly, i.e. with its installer. In particular, the PPC part likely requires P5Init to be run as part of the MMU-Configuration. This is all automatic by the installer, but if you are installing manually, you may have forgotten this step.

[Leon Besson]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

First thing is that you should probably install the MMULib properly, i.e. with its installer. In particular, the PPC part likely requires P5Init to be run as part of the MMU-Configuration. This is all automatic by the installer, but if you are installing manually, you may have forgotten this step.

Hi Thomas,

Tried again with another fresh rebuild with same hardware.

Installed AOS 3.1.4 then upgraded to 3.141
Made sure I had a 68060 library copied over from MMULIBs
Copied over HighGFX monitor and setup resolution with Indi AGA MK 3 as 1024x768
Installed P96 V3.31 went through the steps with Bvision/CVision as per expert on install.
(rebooted)
Installed MMULIBs in expert mode (always do this). SetPatch for 68060 etc.. BBPfix setup as “BBPfix Install 040 reboot >NIL:”, Fix for P5 SCSI, Bvision Monitor fix.

(reboot)

P96mode works, attached CVision monitor and setup resolution for 1360x768 x 32bit.

(Reboot)

Screenmode in prefs saved for Bvision 1360x768x32

Every time I access SD card on SCSI multi-card it begins to display the icons then freezes up the entire Amiga OS.

Next things to try are removing the P5 SCSI fix and retry.


Edit;

So downloaded 47.5 off Aminet.
Installed that over the old version (I know should do a fresh install but didn’t) all Expert mode on install.

Remove P5scsifix from user-startup and that sort of helped? But still got a lock up.

Now the interesting part. I’ve gone into the early BPPC menu (ESC key on power up). Under System there are 2 options;

no SCSI patch
No NCR SCSI patch

I’ve set these to SCSI Patch and NCR SCSI patch. Put the P5SCsIfix in user-startup.

Now testing. So far no lockup with the SCSI side…..Yet! Will continue to test and report back.

[Thomas Richter]

To follow up on this, in case of problems it is usually better to report this at the icomp forum as from there I can provide beta versions for you to test. Here you may get feedback from other users, but unfortunately I need to be sure that you have a registered version of P96 to get updates approved for you.

This being said, one particular issue that *may* happen here is that the interrupt of the card does not interact well with the interrupt of the SCSI, and the interrupt logic of the card can be disabled with the tooltype INTERRUPT=NO in the monitor icon. I am not sure whether this will help, though, as the interrupt server of the card is still linked into the exec chain, even though it should not. The latter I have fixed in a recent version, but that requires that Jens identifies you as a customer.

I hope you understand. (Again, not saying that this is necessarily related to your problem, but it may, and I cannot test).

[Thomas Richter]

As of today, the 3.3.2 release of P96 is available at iComp.

The major headline here is that there is first another graphics card supported, this time the GVP EGS 110, the "large EGS card" from GVP. The second important news is that the planar blitter emulation (e.g. for usage with the "Native" driver) has been speed up quite a bit, in particular on the 68060.

Here the complete list of changes:

- The init function of the Visiona driver used one wrong register. This did not do any harm as the erraneous register was populated with the correct value by coincidence.
- The Visiona driver did not initialize two pointers of the boardinfo structure and could thus not initialize the video RAM caching mode ideally.
- ReadPixelArray8() should be much faster now as it avoids iterating over lines but performs a full bitplane copy in one step.
- ReadPixelLine8() should also be faster in case the source rastport has no layer as several levels of the call tree are now skipped.
- Blitting from a chunky or planar screen with a min-term that combines source and destination into a high- or true-color screen goes now always through an inverse color lookup as otherwise the result is not quite what you would expect. Inversion, direct and inverted copy are still accelerated. For example, the locale preferences were broken in direct color modes (16 bit, 24 bit, 32 bit) due to this unexpected blit result.
- P96Mode now avoids creating interlace modes. If the vertical rate is below 45Hz for a hand-made mode, P96Mode attempts now to increase the pixel clock to avoid interlacing the mode.
- P96Mode will now use the templates for Vesa modes also if the user attempts to create a custom mode whose size fits that of a known VESA mode. P96Mode previously used a heuristic to create such modes.
- Added support for another graphics card, this time the rather exotic GVP 110 EGS, the high-end graphics card from GVP based on the INMOS G364 chip. The card supports a hardware sprite and 8 bit chunky and 32 bit true-color modes. Unfortunately, the 15 bit and 16 bit modes and the 1-4 bit packed pixel modes are not compatible to anything P96 would be able to support. Note that its smaller and later cousin, the GVP EGS 24 aka GVP Spectrum is already supported since a long time.
- Due to a very ancient bug in WritePixel(), drawing on layered rastports could have failed on TrueColor off-hardware screens only. This broke the 3.1.4 screen mode preferences test screen partially because ellipse drawing was erraneously bypassed.
- Read/WriteRGBPixel() functions reading pixel values under a softsprite read the wrong pixel position because the width of the mouse save buffer was incorrect. This was another very ancient bug.
- When installing a Visiona or GVP EGS 110 card, the installer now requests the type of synchronization to configure the INMOS chip to.
- The monitor driver requests now a larger system stack.
- Overlapped masked blits from one bitplane to another were not handled correctly if the target position was below the start position.
- The planar blitter emulation for BltBitMap() was reimplemented and gained some speed. This may help the Native P96 utility a bit to improve performance even on non-RTG installations. In some rare cases, the previous implementation may have crashed the system, probably due to a bad minterms parameter. The new implementation should be more robust.
- The BlitPattern emulation for planar target bitmaps was reimplemented as well. In case a mask is involved, e.g. for drawing filled polygons, the implementation also gained some speed.
- The rastport AreaPattern fill logic failed to grab correct pens for high and true-color modes in some cases. This is another ancient bug that has been fixed.
- The PiccoloSD64 crashed in case it failed to detect any valid video RAM because it forgot to remove its interrupt server before exiting. Thanks to Toni Wilen for reporting this defect.
- The same bug was also fixed in the Retina, GVP Spectrum, Piccolo, Retina BLT Z3, Altais and PicassoII card.
- The CVisionPPC handler now only adds the interrupt handler to the system if the interrupt is enabled. This may help to avoid compatibility problems.

[Leon Besson]

Thomas. Great stuff as always

Does the CVision fix also apply to the Bvision on 603 cards?

[Thomas Richter]

That is all the same hardware, so yes. However, this only makes a difference with INTERRUPT=No.

Remember, however, if you have trouble, please report at the icomp forum because there Jens can verify whether you have a paid copy, and then I can send out betas to you. This does not work from here.

[Leon Besson]

Will do. thanks again for the hard work. And yes I have paid my dues for this

Hopefully this will fix my SCSI issues as well I was getting

[Leon Besson]

Well. Downloaded it from my “purchase history”. Added the INTERRUPT=NO on the CVision icon. And nope, still hanging the system when accessing a SD card on a SCSI card reader/writer.
Only does this after installing, setting up screen modes and the using Screenmode to use the BVision.
Will look to get on the iComp forums to see what to do next.

[hexaae]

Nice update 3.3.2!

[DisasterIncarna]

just got a Chameleon MK2 to replace my MK1, decided to grab the current P96 on the purchase as well, only ever used the aminet version till now, 2 good purchases, the only surprise was me forgetting the UK had brexit and import tax is a thing i have to deal with again was a hefty fee, but worth it regardless.

[jurassicman]

Hi, is the latest rtg.library version 43.399 ?

>version LIBS:Picasso96/rtg.library
rtg.library 43.399

[Thomas Richter]

Yup, that's the 3.3.2 version.

[jurassicman]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Yup, that's the 3.3.2 version.

Cool, thanks!

[macce2]

On July, I purchased P96 from iComp.
Couldn't find any new link for download on iComp's website.
So, should this new update be free for old buyers of P96 ..?!

[spudje]

Yes, you login and go to your past orders and redownload from the same link(s).