/// Usenet Repost: Retina Vs. GVP Spectrum EGS 24-bit Video Boards
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By Kurt Haenen
(haenen@cs.kuleuven.ac.be)
Hi there Amigoids,
I've replaced my Retina 4MB board with an EGS 28/24 Spectrum with 1MB (It was
supposed to have 2MB, but there were some problems with the delivery) and I
want to share my opinion of both boards with you. First of all : I won't
compare any 24bit capabilities at the moment because it wouldn't be fair,
since I only had 1MB in the Spectrum, but lets talk about the rest.
The Spectrum sure has one thing my Retina didn't have : good documentation.
Well, that is at first sight. The docs clearly explain installing and using
the software that comes with the Spectrum, ie. the EGS system. So, I
installed the stuff and tried it ... At first it seemed to run fine, but then
... FREEZE ... So, I reset my machine, start enforcer and what do we get ?
Yup, enforcer hits.
Enforcer Hit! Bad Program!
18-Oct-93 01:02:40
BYTE-WRITE to 40059A3A data=00 PC: 07B79F52 ----BUS ERROR----
USP: 07BB239E SR: 0004 SW: 00A1 (U0)(-)(-) TCB: 07A04690
Data: 00000000 0000015B 00000166 00000000 10000000 000003FF 00059800 40059A3A
Addr: 40059A3A 07A09604 07BB23EA 07BB23EA 07B7F078 0793D44C 078007F8 --------
Stck: 07B71280 07BB23EA CE2C0132 07A09604 07A09604 021E015B 07B707E0 07976C02
Stck: 00000166 00000000 10000000 000003FF E1CF0046 036602BC 07BB74FC 07BB39FC
PC-8: 2C2B000C E08ECCBC 000000FF DC81DE34 6520063E 10876008 266F0004 10AB000F
PC *: 266F0004 246B0008 246A007C 47EA0114 598F2F48 001C3F41 001A2E8B 225345EF
Name: "Blanker Painter"
Enforcer Hit! Bad Program!
18-Oct-93 01:04:54
LONG-READ from 4000D748 PC: 00F82D28 ----BUS ERROR----
USP: 07B68A3A SR: 0000 SW: 1101 (U0)(-)(-) TCB: 07B642C8
Data: 00001320 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
Addr: 4000D744 07AEBE20 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 --------
Stck: 00000011 00000000 0000000B 0000EA60 00000000 00000000 07A0270C 07A0270C
Stck: 07930898 07B69114 078007F8 00000000 0793CBEA 000207A0 270C0000 00000000
PC-8: 670412D8 53802209 08010000 66442200 C27C0003 2F017278 B081651A 48E73F3E
PC *: 4CD87CFE 48D17CFE 7230D3C1 9081B081 64EE4CDF 7CFCE488 67105380 22004840
Name: "EGS-ScreenMode"
These are just some examples of the Enforcer hits I get. They all are BUS
ERRORS, but the address read from or written to changes. This is on an
A4000/040 with Zorro III on the Spectrum enabled. I won't consider disabling
this, cause it's the only reason to have a Spectrum instead of a Picasso. I
have a fat-buster revision 9, so this may be the problem, but it is not very
likely. Since the board doesn't do DMA, the buster-bug should not affect it.
The strange thing is that there IS memory at that place (the graphics memory
of the Spectrum). Has anyone else experienced this ? Oh yeah, running
enforcer gives me a system that doesn't freeze up anymore, but everytime a bus
error is generated, the system freeze for a moment. I send the enforcer
output to NIL: so it isn't the printing of the output that causes this, but
the bus error itself. I also run the program that came with the board that
turns of the cache for the address-space of the card.
Before you read on, I have to say that I have a 2 monitor system, so I do not
use the built-in display-switcher and I have told this to the install program.
One thing I liked about my Retina was the way screens were handled, ie.
exactly the same as standard Amiga screens. Cycling through screens on the
Retina would also include standard Amiga screens, but on the Spectrum they are
completely apart. To switch between Amiga and Spectrum screens you have to
use a hotkey, you can not simply press the screen-depth gadgets to get to an
Amiga screen if the current one is a Spectrum screen. And something really
anoying is that when your using the standard Amiga modes and use the
screen-depth gadget on such a screen, the monitor has to resync even if the
underlying screen uses the same display mode. Yet another software problem.
There is an option to allow you to have a connection between the Amiga side
and the Spectrum side, so that moving the mouse off a screen on one monitor
will make it appear on the other one, but still it keeps blanking the Amiga
screen when I move the mouse off it, so it isn't very useful. Also the mouse
keeps appearing at the wrong place when moving from the Amiga screen to the
Spectrum screen. You move the mouse off the left edge of the Amiga screen, so
you would exspect it to appear at the right edge of the Spectrum, but NO, it
appears at the left edge :{(
The EGS system supplied catches your eye for a few moments. Windows move with
their entire contents visible, you can put pictures in the background of the
screen, have a 24bit drawing in a window on top of that and simply drag the
window and its contents in real-time. This surely means the board is quite
fast and the supplied screen-blankers (especially scooter) only adds to this
impression, *BUT* if you have more than 1 screen on the Spectrum, the screen
cycling (with A-m or the screen-depth gadget) is *SLOW* ! The Retina was a
lot faster at doing this and it think this board could do it a lot faster too,
so my guess is that it's another glitch in the software. To continue about
the EGS stuff: it really sucks. As I said, at first it looks great, but
then: the clock always crashes, the display disappears (I mean the EGS screen
is closed) regularly, simply because there seems to be a small shortage of
memory (I have 8MB fast-ram and still it isn't happy) and no serious
application (I mean existing software) works under EGS. I haven't found an
ADPro driver on my disks, so I couldn't use ADPro to display stuff and the EGS
viewer can't read anything else than IFFs. Once again I wanted my Retina
back. It may have been a slower board, but the software was reliable and
useful. It didn't crash on me for over 6 months. The Spectrum software
doesn't crash either (if we forget about the EGS stuff and only consider the
screenmodes), but there are a lot of things that aren't right:
- To begin with: the enforcer hits. This may be a hardware problem though.
- When using CED 3.5 and opening a duplicate view (Amiga-d), the cursor is
drawn twice (in XOR I guess) in the newly opened view, so that is becomes
invisible. The second cursor scrolls up and down together with the text
and only disappears when you scroll enough to get it out of sight. This
problem never appeared on the Retina or the Amiga native display, so it
must be a bug in the Spectrum software.
- As stated above, screen-shuffling is *SLOW*. The Retina was at least 10
times faster at this than the Spectrum. Since the Spectrum has a Zorro
III bus and the Retina only Zorro II, this should not be the case, so I
guess it's again a software problem. REMARK: Could some Picasso owners
tell me how fast the Picasso is in screen-shuffling. I flip through the
screens a lot and I would like this to be snappy. Also for the Picasso
users: Is it true that you can drag down screens on the Picasso to see
the underlying screen ? I heard this rumour ...
- Powersnap doesn't work anymore. I do not know what exactly seems to be
the problem, so this could be a Powersnap bug, but it did not appear on
the Retina. Maybe it's because the screens are in fastram now.
- There are no programmers docs except for the EGS stuff. This really
sucks. I am not going to write something for EGS. Actually I hate EGS.
All the nice commodities I have are useless on an EGS screen. Oh well, my
feelings about EGS are probably not shared by others, so I won't bother
you with them, but I really think they could have done a better job than
this: who the hell needs all those EGS gadgets and menus when you've got
Amiga gadgets and menus *AND* MUI (which in my opinion are better).
No promotion utility was provided with the Spectrum, but since I'm the author
of Promotor, that wasn't a big problem.
The Spectrum of course has some advantages: faster scrolling than the Retina
and (silence) ... Well, that's about it. The software of the Retina was
simply a lot better than the stuff for the Spectrum. I have also used the
EGS-DisplayAdjust program to get the most out of my monitor and yet again I
was not impressed. The Spectrum can not achieve the same resolution/refresh
rate my Retina could. This seems quite odd, especially since all the talk in
comp.sys.amiga.graphics indicated that the max. pixel speed of the Retina
should be lower than that of the Spectrum. I should state however that
according to the manual that came with my Retina, the Retina has a 90MHz pixel
speed, not 75 as mentioned in all the comp.sys.amiga.graphics articles. But
because of the limitations of my monitor I don't think the pixel speed
limitation is the problem. The real problem is the sprite. My Retina did
800x600x8 bit at 86Hz on my monitor, the Spectrum can only go upto 83Hz, if I
push it higher, the sprite pointer gets screwed up if it's at the top of the
screen. The Retinas image also filled up my display nicely. When using the
Spectrum, even when I turn my monitors knobs so that the display is as large
as possible, there still are black borders to the left and right of the
screen. I can remove those borders, but that means dropping the refresh rate
and I don't wonna do that: I was just getting used to the rock-steady 86Hz.
Another problem with the Spectrum is the mouse-pointer: the Retina had a nice
4-coloured (1 transparent) sprite for this, but the Spectrum seems to use some
weird kind of sprite, with a kind of half-transparent color. I do not like
this ! Of course this is a question of taste. Another anoying thing is the
image the sprite uses: I work on an A4000 and so I normally use a hires
sprite, but this seems to screw up the color information of the sprite used on
the Spectrum. Again a software problem. REMARK: Again, could some Picasso
II users tell me whether or not the Picasso II sprite is also
half-transparent. Both cards use the Cirrus Logic chip-set, so my guess would
be that the Picasso also has this type of sprite, but I would really like to
know for sure.
Ok, I'm gonna wrap it up here ... Conclusions: I want my Retina back. The
scrolling was slower, but the software was a lot better and it was *STABLE*.
Once again it has been proven to me that even the nicest board is shit without
decent software. Well, I guess that's about it. I'll be giving the Spectrum
back to the store and will probably get a Picasso II (which seems to have much
better software) and a bit of money back. Of course, due to the same chipset,
I guess the Picasso II will also have some of the problems (sprite and display
size) I mentioned here, but at least you get a decent workbench emulation and
drivers for ADPro and of course it's a lot cheaper than the Spectrum. At the
moment I don't think the Zorro III facility of the Spectrum is of much use:
under normal WB operation, fast data transfer is only needed when scrolling
something. And since both boards have a blitter to speed up this operation a
bit (if not the entire area needs to be refreshed), I don't think you'll
notice the additional speed of Zorro III a lot. And then of course there is
the fact that generally German firms have better software updates than US
companies. I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but I really think this is
true. GVP for example has an excellent record of supplying the user with neat
manuals, but I haven't heard about any software upgrade for any of their
products (ok, maybe it's cause I'm in Europe). MacroSystem for example has a
very bad record concerning manuals (my Retina came with some photocopied
stuff), but their software is continually updated and enhanced. Ok, that's my
opinion, let the flamin' start :{)
One last remark: I think it's really outrageous that the graphics boards for
the Amiga cost so much money. An EISA board with a Cirrus Logic chipset on it
(the same one as in the Spectrum, Picasso and Piccolo) costs about $150 US,
while the Spectrum costs about $400 US. For that kind of money a 80x86 user
gets a really fast Localbus S3 board which can do 1280x1024 in 24bit at 72Hz
non-laced. With the bankrupcy (how does one write that) of C= being only a
small step away (How are the CD32 sales in your country ? How's the SEGA
promotion campaign on your TV-station ? Have you seen a single C= commercial
on TV ? And just how many CD32 games have you seen ? Didn't C= say that
there were going to be 17 games out by the time the CD32 was going to be
released ?), maybe we should consider porting the Amiga look and feel to some
other platform.
Hoping to get a better board soon,
Kurt Haenen
Kurt Haenen, Student Civil Engineer, Department of Computer Science, KU
Leuven. (Where you come from Civil Engineer may have a completely different
meaning.)
Snailmail: Homsemstraat 53, B-3891 Borlo, Belgium
Email: haenen@cs.kuleuven.ac.be stud16@cc4.kuleuven.ac.be
fhgaa99@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be
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