Picasso II Issues

[JHKrueger]

Hello everyone,

I just got bought a Picasso II graphics card on eBay and it seems to be defective. When I plug the card into one of my Zorro 2 slots in an Amiga 2000 the machine won't boot anymore. I just get a black (sometimes red) screen on the amiga output and nothing on the Picasso output. When I remove the card everything is back to normal. Any suggestions what may be broken? The card is equipped with 2 MBs of memory and I already tried to remove one mb without any changes. So far I could not see any damage on the card (even the famous 12V resistor ist still in place). My amiga has nothing else installed right now, i.e. I removed all other Z2 cards. The mainboard is revision 6.2 and I'm using a brand new 3.2 Kickrom.

Cheers,
Jens

[JHKrueger]

Just in case someone else is reading this, here is the answer: I got a second Picasso II and was able to figure out the problem by swapping things out between the two cards. It turns out the two PAL chips on my first Picasso II are faulty, replacing them with the chips from the other card brought the Picasso back to live (now I only need to find someone who can re-flash an old PAL to get both cards to work).

Jens

[jbenam]

Hi Jens,
Since you're from Germany, I am sure you can find a willing fellow Amiga user on a1k.org who can flash you a PAL - as far as I know, the ones used on the Picasso II+ project on A1k.org should be the same.

More info here: http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=40955

[JHKrueger]

Great idea, I'll definitely check that out.

[alexh]

I am sure that MastaTabs aka Tobias Seiler former VillageTronic engineer and active amiga user can help you.

[JHKrueger]

Getting in touch with with him sounds really great. How do I reach MastaTabs? Is he active on this board?

[alexh]

No. He's active over at A1k.org

[JHKrueger]

ok, I'll try to make some noise on A1k.org until he responds :-)

[jbenam]

MastaTabs is VERY busy usually. It's probably better if you ask another user first - at least if you want to get that PAL any time soon

[JHKrueger]

I just asked my question in a1k, I'll see who answers and when. It's not that urgent, with the working Picasso II card I realized that I need a good accelerator card first anyhow. An RTG card with a stock 68000 CPU in an Amiga 2000 is unbearably slow.

[alexh]

Why not plump for a PiSTorm 2K? Super Fast HDMI RTG (soon with native passthrough), AHI, Wifi networking, lightening Fast USB storage (70MiB/s), 128MiB FastRAM and it's about only about €120.

Ok so there is a waiting time at the moment but they are nice especially in A2000 CPU + Video slot configuration.

With Emu68 you'll have the fastest A2000 ever.

[JHKrueger]

Actually, I do have an Amiga 2000 setup with a PiStorm as well and indeed it's really fast but I also want to get some old-hardware-only setup to work properly.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by JHKrueger

Actually, I do have an Amiga 2000 setup with a PiStorm as well and indeed it's really fast

Keep an eye open for the A2000 Video Slot -> PiSTorm MIPI port adapters that will be coming soon.

[JHKrueger]

Since you seem to know the PiStorm better than I do maybe you've heard about an issue I have with the PiStorm on my Amiga 2000 systems:

I noticed that over time I accumulate display errors in background images in the workbench. I run the latest OS 3.2 and that comes with a white background image with red/black "Amiga OS 3.2" text. When I play around with the Amiga for a few minutes I see red and black dots and sometimes stripes in the background images. I testet the chip.ram of the Amiga itself and that appears to be just fine (with a normal 68000 CPU) but with the PiStorm Amiga Test Kit just crashes so I. Any ideas?
Cheers, Jens

[alexh]

Which video mode are you using? Native? RTG?

RTG video memory is on the RPi. Are you using Emu68 or Musashi? Emu68 is bare-metal programming of the RPi so corruption in of RTG in Emu68 could be DDR refresh issues? RTG driver issues? Musashi+RTG I'm really not sure. Never seen any issues (like you are describing)

Native video (e.g. PAL/NTSC screen modes) corruption could possibly be due to the chip-ram speed issues? Lots of changes to do with this over the last few weeks. Are you on the latest PiSTorm WIP firmware?

Best place to talk about this is the PiSTorm Discord server

https://discord.gg/fhmmxbpK

[JHKrueger]

I'm using native video. I'll check if I'm now on the latest firmware (I was a week ago) and I'll move my question to the discord server. Thank you