Sonnet 7200 PCI programming

[jkdsteve]

Found another one from the old days:

AMP - AmiDog Movie Player, one of the best PPC mpg video players.

Works really well with Video and used to with Audio (CSPPC) but now all I get is stuttering with audio.device and whine/ring modulation with AHI.

Anyone try this?

[grelbfarlk]

AMP2, yes some of us have used that. Buli had a few good posts about playing DVDs nearly successfully with it, I think he copied the VOBs to the HDD. Typically you will want to use AHI, with Paula 8-bit DMA mode, but sometimes others work well.

Frogger is not quite as fast as AMP2 but supports more formats.

[jkdsteve]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

AMP2, yes some of us have used that. Buli had a few good posts about playing DVDs nearly successfully with it, I think he copied the VOBs to the HDD. Typically you will want to use AHI, with Paula 8-bit DMA mode, but sometimes others work well.

Frogger is not quite as fast as AMP2 but supports more formats.

Thanks.

I couldn't remember how to use Frogger...but I have it also, v1.67....no idea how that relates to FroggerNG but it is working now!

[grelbfarlk]

I use FrogGUI, works pretty well with FroggerNG 2.07, though there are a couple options that are not available.

[jkdsteve]

Originally Posted by BULI

Try watch video file direct from DVD/CD as simple file via button Play File (not Play DVD) in GUI_MUI_AMP. I recomend AMP2_BETA from here:



www.amidog.se/amiga/bin/WIP/AMP2-BETA-040716.lha


You will have synchronize, but you willn't choise subtitles, or difrent sound track.

Last version of AMP2 I have is 2.04 but it won't play audio correctly with AHI/PAULA on my machine, not sure why. Is this the same as AMP2 beta?

[grelbfarlk]

I'm using 040716 with the 1.03 GUI. For some reason it's throwing a GURU 8000 000B error with the newer GUI, haven't looked into that.
A lot of it will have to do with how it is encoded, what file type you are trying to play, etc. Just remember the curse of the Voodoo driver, it slows down a LOT at resolutions greater than 640 width. I can play a 720x480@24FPS successfully without sound skipping, though the quality is not great. That's playing in a window on Workbench. I usually check overlay, though I'm not sure whether it does anything (does the driver support it?).
640x480@30FPS usually plays just fine.
Usually you want the audio track to be MP2 rather than uncompressed.
System specs:
Ragnarok 950MHz
CSPPC 200/50
Voodoo 3@167MHz (don't remember if this is actually V3-3000 or not).
FM801
Spider
10MB NIC
Using AHI6 though AHI4 is faster. With Paula 8-bit DMA on Music and Unit 0.
Using Sonnetlib448 build from git.

It may be that the PPC is just not quite fast enough for whatever you're trying to play.

[jkdsteve]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

I'm using 040716 with the 1.03 GUI. For some reason it's throwing a GURU 8000 000B error with the newer GUI, haven't looked into that.
A lot of it will have to do with how it is encoded, what file type you are trying to play, etc. Just remember the curse of the Voodoo driver, it slows down a LOT at resolutions greater than 640 width. I can play a 720x480@24FPS successfully without sound skipping, though the quality is not great. That's playing in a window on Workbench. I usually check overlay, though I'm not sure whether it does anything (does the driver support it?).
640x480@30FPS usually plays just fine.
Usually you want the audio track to be MP2 rather than uncompressed.
System specs:
Ragnarok 950MHz
CSPPC 200/50
Voodoo 3@167MHz (don't remember if this is actually V3-3000 or not).
Using AHI6 though AHI4 is faster. With Paula 8-bit DMA on Music and Unit 0.
Using Sonnetlib448 build from git.

It may be that the PPC is just not quite fast enough for whatever you're trying to play.

You might be onto something with the encoding, the videos I'm trying to play with AMP2 are all MPEG LAYER I, Frogger and FroggerNG (I found my old copy!!!) play them just fine.

I'm just relieved not be be chasing Data Access Exceptions all day again!

Thx.

[grelbfarlk]

MPEG-1 should usually be fine unless the quality, bitrate, resolution or framerate are too high, this will vary a fair amount with with PPC you are using. Wrangler I think volunteered to get an Altivec and DSP accelerated MPEG-4 player going, but that might take weeks. At least 15 minutes™.

FFMPEG I got some builds out of but it wasn't nearly functional.

Frogger can still be grabbed from: https://web.archive.org/web/20161204...downloads.html
The list of WarpOS Compatible Software is probably in need of updating, but it is mostly correct where it is correct but incorrect where it is not current.
https://github.com/Sakura-IT/SonnetA...ary-version%29
Like WES doesn't really run well any more for me since the speedhack (partial cache flushing with DisL2Flush or was it DisSigBounce?) stopped working.
Amidog's MAME doesn't run well on Ragnarok any more.
WarpSNES was quite smooth on Sonnet and Rapture, seems a little hurky jerky now.
Amigenerator runs and looks the best for Genesis emulation but past old versions on Sonnet and Rapture the screen refresh seems out of whack. DGen is an alternate for this, doesn't look as nice but has some scalers which should work.
(But I run all the above on Retroarch MAME2003, Snes-9x and GXGen engines, anyway so.)

And of course Devilution- or Diablo I'm not sure whether it's completable, but it was running great.

[Timtheloon]

Originally Posted by Hedeon

Loads of pictures but none indicating what crash you are having.

Good point, it normally just freezes or the computer restarts with the spider installed. But sometimes the computer does gives an error message

I’ll try again later after work to get this info

One thing I have discovered with the Beta lib and the USB card installed showconfig can’t complete it only writes the top two lines and then stops and the shell window will not close but the computer doesn’t crash I can open another shell window

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by Timtheloon

Good point, it normally just freezes or the computer restarts with the spider installed. But sometimes the computer does gives an error message

Seems the error is somewhere on the 68K of things. The Spider is a DMA card. Maybe that's the issue. Btw VoodooMemOS shouldn't be necessary. DMA memory is necessary and should be added by the pci.library if you place any value of 15 or lower into VoodooMem(? not sure about the name on that one). I think the docs even state that with the spider you need to put 12 there.

[grelbfarlk]

That sounds like what happens with the slightly not correctly, good card order.
I usually have Voodoomem set to 13, I don't think I've run into a situation where I needed more VRAM for a game.
You can also play with Spiderbuf in envarc:Mediator/
My envarc:mediator/SpiderBuf=8 (Number picked out of the air)
SpiderBuf:

This controls how much RAM is allocated for USB card DMA buffers
The value is a number which will be used as a multiple of 40KB
The default value is 1 (i.e. use 40KB for DMA buffers)
The highest possible value is 51 (i.e. just over 2MB of DMA buffers)

From: https://mediators.github.io/#environment-variables

Is it a real Elbox Spider? A variety of boards NEC boards have been converted to Spiders some are far more reliable than others. The unreliable ones I have will be extremely picky about what other boards they work with, or they will never do USB Highspeed or just make the system crashy like yours is. But if you aren't even starting the driver, that leaves it down to hardware issues, card order, power, noise, poor card seating, solar flares.

[Timtheloon]

It is a spider clone but has you said I ain’t loading the drivers however this could be it and it just didn’t affect the apocalypse.

I tried your order of cards but still the same however I have finally got an order of cards this included rearranging some of the Zorro cards, which is loading the games but wipeout sometimes stutters but only every so often.

Here is a picture of card layout



I have set my system so I can start either the latest 17.13 library (#450) or the 17.14 BETA library

It still require me to have yes for VoodooMemOS. If not both libraries will give an error first pic 17.13 second 17.14





The next two picture is the error I was getting with the other card orientations if it didn’t out right crash.





@Hedeon I do find with this that Quake II runs fine with 17.13 but if I try to load it with 17.14 it just crashes with a grey screen (this was with the spider removed)

Now I’ve noticed when reading through the thread that it mentions about the Picasso96 resolutions not being setup correctly now I have just setup mine has I always have done but is there a specific way these resolutions should be setup

Forgot to add VoodooMem is set to 13, I tried 12 but still states Could not Allocate VGA Memory

[Timtheloon]

that "Unreliable" Mediator guide is a good guide Its good to fall back to

I just noticed this at the bottom of that guide, it may not mean the same thing but the error number is close to the one I receive... Should i start stripping my system and give it a good clean

4.2.1 Guru meditations from ramlib (80000004)

This seems to be a widely experienced symptom, and may trace back to multiple underlying causes. Potential remedies worth investigating:

Remove and reseat the Mediator and bridgeboard
Clean all the contacts on the bridgeboard, Mediator and PCI cards
Install dtack and place it in S:Startup-sequence before anything touches the Mediator (i.e. at least before any DEVS:Monitors files are loaded)
Note that dtack may cause issues with Warp3D. If anyone would like to explain why dtack is able to help, we would love to place a thorough explanation here!

[grelbfarlk]

CMSJ's issue that wrote that for, turned out he had a broken Mediator bridge that eventually got sent back to Elbox for repair (after he had sold it all off to somebody else).

He did not have the purity of heart to get to the point of installing a PPC board.
For Sonnetlib users, that is often a sign of hardware issues. Especially when it crashes like that as soon as the pci.library is touched or during boot.
It used to be stack problems but Hedeon fixed that a long time ago.

Not sure what's going on, I tried the Sonnet with builds 448, 417, 403, back to 380 and that failed with trying initialize the board. Swapped in a Rapture and I'm getting No system VGA memory detected (pcidma) with the same versions. Still knifing around.

[Hedeon]

The beta library fails to setup the PPC card as it somewhere down the line fails to detect it. Do you have a beta library that outputs debug info?

[Timtheloon]

Originally Posted by Hedeon

The beta library fails to setup the PPC card as it somewhere down the line fails to detect it. Do you have a beta library that outputs debug info?

I used the library you posted on post 4394.

I've never setup the debug what do I need todo?

[trixster]

debug=1 in ENV:sonnet

[Timtheloon]

take it you mean this

Debug (0-3): Set the level of debug messages. 0 = no messages (default).

[Timtheloon]

Originally Posted by trixster

debug=1 in ENV:sonnet

just seen trixsters reply

does this output to a file? if so where

[torsti76]

Originally Posted by Timtheloon

just seen trixsters reply

does this output to a file? if so where

Output defaults to the serial port at 9600 baud. You can use a nullmodem cable to another machine or sashimi to capture it.