Help with Art Effects 4 on an A4000D NTSC

[snowpile79]

Hello! I searched for any information on how to get support for Art Effects 4 (from Alinea or Haag & Partner) but I cant find any support info. Maybe someone here knows of a path to get support, has ran into this issue, or maybe Alinea browses these threads from time to time.

Anyways what happens is whenever I run Art Effects 4 after installing onto an HD I receive a workbench window: Out of Memory. First here is my setup then I will list what I tried.

I have an Amiga 4000 with KS 3.1.4, 040 25mhz, 272meg ram, MNT va2000 graphics card, Xsurf 100, rapid Road USB, Buddah Flash 20th Anniversary, CD-RW.

General info: I have 1.8meg chip free and 268megs of Free ram.
I DO have muLIBS running/installed and use their 68040.library as well. I also have Picasso96 installed for the MNTVA2000 but am not using the card when I try to start the application. Im using AGA at this time.
I did install the ART effects AGA patch that they recommend is installed in startup-sequence.

What I tried:
1) Slowly commenting out everything in my startup-sequence/user-startup. No effect
2) Booting off the Workbench 3.1.4 workbench floppy and running Art Effects off the HD results in SUCCESS! But this is a bad experience to have to boot off the floppy

So this means maybe its not compatible with MuLibs? I kind of need MuLibs for the 68040.library and other things. Im just guessing its MuLibs.

The only other special thing I can think of is I have Poseidon USB stack but I dont even load that before trying to start Art Effects.

Any ideas? Anyone running Art Effects 4 fine with the latest version of MuLibs and WB 3.1.4? Anyone know any way to get support from the Author's?

Thanks for any help.

[Matt_H]

This sounds like a problem with the ArtEffect swapfile/RAM settings. Have a look at the Hints section of the ArtEffect readme, particularly the second, third, and fourth items regarding VMEM and re-initializing the settings to default.

[snowpile79]

Originally Posted by Matt_H

This sounds like a problem with the ArtEffect swapfile/RAM settings. Have a look at the Hints section of the ArtEffect readme, particularly the second, third, and fourth items regarding VMEM and re-initializing the settings to default.

Ok thanks for the clue. I'll review the doc there again. I did notice the mentioning of those settings but they didnt put much weight on them but clearly they reference memory settings so a good place to start. The doc didnt seem to give any examples on the format of those settings. They mention "you can control virtual memory and swap with VMEM" but didnt really say how. Do you have an example of how to set these values? The manual that came with the box is in German which Im not fluent in and the readme didnt have the details on how to set those options. I'll re-read again too. Thanks

[Matt_H]

The program/documentation calls the settings VMEM, but it really concerns all of ArtEffect's RAM usage (real and virtual).

Go to the menu Settings -> Program Settings... -> VMem tab. The top block concerns real RAM usage. "min. use" is the amount ArtEffect will pre-allocate. "min. free" is the amount ArtEffect won't allocate, to keep RAM free for the rest of the system. The way the program calculates defaults for these is bizarre, so my working theory is that it came up with values that add up to be greater than your total RAM (or largest free block). Try changing the min. use to 16384 and min. free to 8192.

The lower block concerns virtual memory. Set the min size to 5 and the max size to, say, 32. Since you have so much actual RAM I doubt the virtual RAM function will be triggered, unless you're working with modern HD or print-quality images. In that case, you can increase the swapfile size if you need to, but don't get too crazy. 512 works on my AmigaOne/OS4 system, but larger sizes give errors.

[snowpile79]

Well this is solved now!

First thanks for the help/ideas. I did boot back off the WB 3.1.4 disk, go into Art effects and tweak those settings. Nothing helped and when I booted back of the hard disk it still said out of memory. SOooooo

I copied all my libraries from libs to an oldlibs folder. I copied all the libs from my workbench 3.1.4 floppy and did a memory flush (clear ram/clear out old libraries/fonts etc command) and... art effects works! So the pain starts.

I copy the libraries back that start with A, flush ram, test, works, then B, flush ram, test, works and on and on until I get to the W's... once I copy all the W libraries back boom out of memory... so I copy one by one... and... its the wizard.library file... which is required by Art effects??? Well I found there is a wizard.library in the Art Effects 4 directory and I guess the one in libs was corrupted or possibly old (but the installer should have warned or overwrote it? So I simply deleted the wizard.library that was in my libs directory and Art effects still finds and loads the library out of the Art Effects 4 folder just fine so I left it like that.

Now I have a problem when I have a new project if I drag the pointer across the project it leaves an artifact trail. I am loading their AGA patch on startup. Maybe I should just switch to the VA2000 RTG? I even set the art effects settings to load in its own non-public window vs public/workbench but still leaves an artifacts trail across my picture. If I resize the window the artifacts disappear until I drag the cursor across again so they are superficial/dont effect the project but are annoying.

[Matt_H]

Ah, wizard.library - among the clunkiest of the Amiga's UI toolkits. Glad you got it working. Strange indeed that the installer didn't replace the one you had in Libs:. Did you compare the version strings of the two copies? Note that deleting the Libs: version entirely might break other software that relies on it; instead, copy the version from ArtEffect into Libs:.

What is this AGA patch you're referring to? Definitely use an RTG screenmode for ArtEffect - it's meant to edit 24-bit images, so give it a screenmode to match!