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Path: cs.tu-berlin.de!fauern!faulrs!hugis!castle.franken.de!forge.franken.de!Barnard
From: Barnard@forge.franken.de (Henning Schmiedehausen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.graphics,comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Picasso II Review
Message-ID: <g244t*FG0@forge.franken.de>
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 1993 12:39:28 GMT
FollowUp-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Organization: Barnard's Software Forge (ECG210)
X-Newsreader: Arn V1.01
Lines: 584
Xref: cs.tu-berlin.de comp.sys.amiga.graphics:15716 comp.sys.amiga.hardware:44392
Hi!
This is a review of the Picasso II board, which should have gone to
comp.sys.amiga.reviews. However as I'm involved with VillageTronic and not
an independent customer, Daniel decided not to accept the review. He
encouraged me to post this review to comp.sys.amiga.hardware / .graphics. I'd
like to thank him for correcting my spelling errors.
Ok, here it goes. Please remember. I cannot claim to be independent from
Village, though I do not really get percents from the Picasso sales or
something. I'm involved with them in another project. You might want to
consider this fact while reading this review, though I tried to be fair and
not biased while writing this review.
If you don't like this, please press you 'Skip' button *NOW*
---- snip ----
PRODUCT NAME
Picasso II graphics board
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
Picasso II is a graphics board to enhance the resolutions of all
Amigas which have Zorro slots. It gives your Amiga resolutions up to
1280x1024 pixels and has an on-board blitter which greatly speeds up drawing
operations.
AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION
Name: VillageTronic Marketing GmbH
Address: Braunstrasse 14, D-W-3000 Hannover 1
Telephone: +49 511 13841
FAX: +49 511 1612606
E-mail: crest@arkon.adsp.sub.org
In the USA:
Name: Expert Services U.S.A.
Address: 7559 Mall Road
Florence, Kentucky 41042
USA
Telephone: (606) 371-9690
Fax: (606) 282-5942
LIST PRICE
DM 598,00 (German)
SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
HARDWARE
You need a monitor which can synchronize at least 38.5 KHz.
Better would be a monitor which can go up to 57 KHz or 64
KHz.
You should have at least 2 MBytes of RAM to use all of the
features. (A 1152x900 picture in 256 colors needs one MByte
of contiguous RAM.)
No hard drive is needed.
All Amiga CPUs are supported (68000-68040). However a 68020
or better is recommended.
SOFTWARE
AmigaOS 2.04 or higher is required. The board works under
Rev. 3.0 / 39.106 of the AmigaOS.
MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
Amiga 3000 / 25 MHz, 210 MB hard drive.
Other boards installed:
A2060 ArcNet board
A2065 EtherNet board
Prototype serial / parallel interface board
2 MBytes of Chip RAM, 16 MBytes of Fast RAM.
Tested under
AmigaOS 2.04 (37.175)
AmigaOS 2.1 (37.175 / 38.35)
AmigaOS 3.0 (39.106 up to 39.116)
(I'm a Commodore commercial developer, so don't worry, it is all
legal.)
Targa TM1710NLD Monitor (17")
INSTALLATION
[NOTE: If you are not comfortable opening up your Amiga, then
you should have the work done by an authorized Amiga service
center. Opening your Amiga yourself may void your warranty,
and careless work may even damage the machine.]
The board came in a box together with a manual, a cable and three
disks. I plugged the board into the topmost slot of my A3000, but it will
work in any Zorro II slot. The cable is used to connect the video output of
the Amiga to the video input of the board. The hardware installation is
shown very clearly in the manual and was very easy.
The software installation is done via the Commodore Installer
program. Two localizations, German and English, are available. All of the
system software, the paint program PPaint Lite, the developer includes and
some demos can be installed.
I've seen only one small flaw: if you decide not to install a part
of the software (e.g., the Paint Program), then you have to do the whole
installing procedure again. So the best thing is to install all of the
software the first time.
At the end of the installation, you're asked about the monitor type
you're using. This is the only critical part of the installation due to its
nature, because you can seriously damage your monitor if you enter the wrong
type here. You can select between 38 KHz, 50 KHz, 57 KHz and 64 KHz
monitors. I used a 64 KHz monitor, so I had no problems. This risk of
damaging the monitor is also stated very clearly in the manual, so if you
look it up in your monitor manual, you shouldn't have any trouble.
INSTALLED SOFTWARE
The software consists of five parts:
- System software and support programs
- Picture and movie viewer
- Development system
- Paint program
- Drivers for graphics software
The system software has two parts:
- The village.library in sys:expansion. This is included via
BindDrivers and is the hardware-dependent driver. It has a
TOOLTYPE for selecting the monitor. If you get a new monitor, you
just change this tooltype.
- The Picasso monitor driver; it is started like all monitors from
Devs:Monitors and adds the PICASSO: screen modes to the Display
Database.
Support programs are
- ChangeScreen: A commodity to redirect Amiga screens to the Picasso
board. (More about this program a little later. It is one of the
main features of the Picasso concept.)
- PicassoSwitch: A commodity to switch between Picasso and Amiga
resolutions.
- StxyBlank: A screen blanker.
All these programs are localized; currently a German and an English
Localization are available, and others are in preparation.
There are four Programs and a GUI frontend for viewing pictures and
animations:
- ShowJPG, ShowIFF and ShowGIF for viewing JPG, IFF and GIF Pictures,
respectively.
- PlayMPEG for viewing MPEG movies.
- IntuiView as the GUI frontend. This reminded me of the 'xv'
program from X11.
The development kit contains includes for all major C compilers (SAS,
Manx, DICE, gcc and Maxon C++), source demos for line drawing using the
onboard blitter, and the source for the Styx blanker. Also Autodocs for the
support library (vilintuisup.library) and link-libraries for all compilers
are included.
The paint program is the quite popular 'PPaint' in a Lite version.
It is an 8-bit paint program which has most of the painting functions of
DPaint.
Currently available Drivers are for ADPro, ImageFX and Real3D.
Others are in development and will be available from VillageTronic.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
After installing the board and the software, you reboot the computer
and the next window you see will open on the Picasso board. I used the
1024x768 with 16 colors setting at first and had no problems with this
setting. The board proved to be everything claimed in the ads: fast and
easy to use. After three or four days, you will forget that you have one in
your computer.
One of the main reasons for this is the onboard blitter. The
graphics chips used on the Picasso board (which is of course a normal PC SVGA
graphics chip like on all comparable graphics boards) contains a 32-bit
blitter which is quite dumb compared to the normal Amiga Blitter (only one
source and one destination, no masking, etc.) but is very useful in all
operations which need to move large numbers of pixels (e.g., scrolling text,
moving a window, etc.).
The next thing is the video switch. As I stated above, you use a
small supplied cable to connect the video output of the Amiga computer to the
graphics board. On board is a video signal switcher (this is some kind of
digital relay) which connects the Amiga video signal to the monitor whenever
an Amiga screen is the topmost screen or the Picasso video signal to the
board when a Picasso screen is the topmost. So you need only one monitor to
display both Amiga and Picasso screens. Normally this switch is operated
whenever you press Amiga+M or Amiga+N to switch screens (you can switch
between Amiga and Picasso screens just like between normal Amiga Screens) or
you can operate it manually via the supplied commodity called PicassoSwitch.
You can also turn off this switch with a TOOLTYPE and use a two monitor
setup (e.g., for a CAD program).
The third thing which makes using the Picasso board so easy and
elegant is the way the screens are built into the system. Unlike other
boards, the display modes are added via the Display Database and show up in
the ScreenMode program and DisplayMode requesters. So, if you have a
program which supports a DisplayMode Requester, you're already done with
adapting the board to the program. You just select one of the Picasso
Screenmodes from this requester and your program will open its screen on the
Picasso board.
For programs which do not use a DisplayMode requester, a very useful
program called 'ChangeScreen' is supplied. This little tool allows you force
programs to open their screens on Picasso. Let's say you use an old program
which opens normally a NTSC:High Res Laced screen. Then a requester will
open up:
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Do you want to change the mode (NTSC:High Res Laced) of screen |
| 'MyScreen' of program MyProgram? |
| |
| Now Forever Never No |
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
If you click 'No', then the screen is opened as intended by the
program (NTSC:High Res Laced). If you click 'Never', then the screen also
opens like intended, but the name of the screen and the name of the program
are also stored in an internal database. If you click 'Now' or 'Forever',
then a DisplayMode requester will open up and lets you select the new
ScreenMode for this program. Normally you will redirect to a Picasso screen
like PICASSO:640x480, but you could also redirect to another Amiga Screen
(e.g., PAL:Low Res). The difference between 'Now' and 'Forever' is the same
as 'Never' and 'No'; if you select 'Forever', your setting is stored in an
internal database.
You can also select 'copy continously': this is for programs which
access the bitmap directly with the CPU. If you don't check this button,
then you wouldn't see anything on the screen. This is only necessary for
very few programs; most application software works without this button. Here
you can also select how often each second you want the contents of the bitmap
copied on the screen (once per second up to ten times per second).
As I said above, the settings 'Forever' and 'Never' store information
in an internal database. This means that for most programs, you click this
requester and the following display requester exactly one time; after that,
ChangeScreen looks at the internal Database and promotes the Screen to a
Picasso Mode. Of course you can modify this Database, add or delete entries
in the Commodity User Interface. There you can also select 'Default
Promotions'; e.g., you select that all PAL:High Res Laced Screen are promoted
to PICASSO:640x480.
ChangeScreen is IMHO the most flexible way to force most programs to
open their screen on the Picasso. All system friendly programmed software
will work on the board. (I have a compatibility list below.)
DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS
I currently use the board in the 64 KHz setting and with 1024x768 and
256 colors for Workbench. I'm a heavy Workbench user: almost all of the
programs that I use all day long open their windows on Workbench. You can
feel the Blitter especially in all scroll operations.
Subjectively, I feel no speed decrease in going from my old 720x480
four-color setting to this new 1024x768 256-color mode (though there is an
objective slowdown). In the 2 to 16 color modes, the speed of workbench
operations is IMHO faster than the built-in Amiga Graphics. There is a speed
benchmark program supplied, and have I compiled a comparison between Amiga
and Picasso graphics, which is below.
The Intuition Emulator is very stable. I could not blame any of the
crashes I had on the board software. I use also some software which is not
too legal (e.g., a clock in the Workbench title bar) but it works without
problems.
In the 64 KHz settings, the video signal timing is very tight; if you
use the 1024x768 or the 1280x1024 setting, you have no problems with the
picture. If you use the 1120x832 (NeXT) or 1152x900 (SUN), then at least my
monitor had trouble with the timing: about 16 pixels on the left and the
right edge are 'rolled in'. If you use a better monitor like an Eizo 560 or
the Targa TV-24, you have no problems with this. So I would recommend to get
a monitor which can go up to 75 or 82 KHz frequency. If you use the 57 KHz
settings, you have no problems with this. I spoke with Village and they said
me, that this problem is known and will be fixed in the next software
release.
What I really like, is the 'virtual screen' option. Just like a
normal Amiga Screen, you can open a 'virtual screen' which is bigger than
the resolution and can be dragged and moved around. I use a 1152x900 screen
with the 1024x768 resolution.
Unlike a normal Amiga Screen, you cannot drag a Picasso Screen down.
However as I stated above, you can flip through the screens with Amiga+M and
Amiga+N. If you drag down an Amiga Screen and behind it is a Picasso screen,
this screen is not shown. (You would need copper lists for Picasso screens,
which is of course not possible. Amiga Graphics are much more flexible in
this point than any SVGA graphics.
BENCHMARKS
One of the most interesting questions for all graphics boards is:
'How fast is it, compared to the Amiga Graphics?'
There is a benchmark program supplied, it is called 'David's Has und
Igel' (German for 'David's Rabbit & Hedgehog' :) I used it to compile the
following table. It consists of eleven speed tests. Each one is run in a
640x200 window on the selected screen resolution. All NTSC-resolutions are
640x400, all Picasso resolutions are 640x480.
|NTSC-2|NTSC-4|NTSC-8|NTSC-16
-------------------+------+------+------+-------
draw points |72393 |70326 |68022 |53630
draw lines |24734 |11005 | 5821 | 3345
fill areas | 8476 | 3605 | 1939 | 1114
scroll vertical | 916 | 349 | 169 | 86
scroll horizontal | 844 | 327 | 172 | 100
draw circles | 658 | 607 | 572 | 342
graphics/Text() |11116 | 8122 | 5626 | 3258
draw frames | 9910 | 4753 | 2635 | 1496
open/close Windows | 154 | 105 | 67 | 40
resize Windows | 344 | 207 | 198 | 131
drag Windows | 1238 | 785 | 432 | 350
|PIC-2 |PIC-4 |PIC-8 |PIC-16|PIC-32|PIC-64|PIC128|PIC256
-------------------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------
draw points |70213 |64880 |60431 |56773 |68841 |69022 |67729 |66482
draw lines | 3474 | 1803 | 1269 | 976 | 527 | 508 | 503 | 497
fill areas | 3052 | 1605 | 1045 | 756 | 1605 | 1346 | 1154 | 1026
scroll vertical | 1485 | 676 | 553 | 418 | 400 | 313 | 280 | 259
scroll horizontal | 391 | 197 | 127 | 103 | 151 | 126 | 110 | 101
draw circles | 524 | 443 | 394 | 345 | 493 | 493 | 482 | 464
graphics/Text() | 6643 | 5156 | 4117 | 3486 | 1749 | 1559 | 1384 | 1280
draw frames | 2757 | 2036 | 1509 | 1262 | 702 | 620 | 546 | 503
open/close Windows | 78 | 58 | 45 | 38 | 32 | 29 | 25 | 24
resize Windows | 191 | 180 | 116 | 113 | 118 | 119 | 106 | 79
drag Windows | 703 | 494 | 441 | 305 | 319 | 340 | 321 | 222
(Please remember: These speeds were calculated with my Amiga 3000. Most of
the operations on the Picasso board are done with the CPU. So a 68040 will
be a significant speedup)
Some of the figures may seem strange to you (Picasso speeds up in 32+
colors) but remember: up to 16 colors, the graphics board can organize the
video memory in planes, and with more colors it uses chunky pixel on the
video board. So the operations between 32 and 256 colors are almost equally
fast (line drawing, pixel setting, etc.) because internally the board goes on
chunky. Up to 16 colors, the board uses plane modes, there you can see the
speed decrease with every added plane.
Also keep in mind that the most important operations on the
Workbench are the Window operations, line drawing, vertical scrolling and
Text Output.
DISPLAY MODES
The following modes are available with the Picasso-Board
Bound with ScreenMode:
|max. col| 38 KHz | 50 KHz | 57 KHz | 64 KHz
-----------------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------
PICASSO:640x480 | 256 | 71 Hz | 73 Hz | 73 Hz | 73 Hz
PICASSO:800x600 | 256 | 60 Hz | 72 Hz | 82 Hz | 82 Hz
PICASSO:1024x768 | 256 | 87 Hz i| 62 Hz | 70 Hz | 78 Hz
PICASSO:1120x832 | 256 | ----- | ----- | 65 Hz | 73 Hz
PICASSO:1152x900 | 256 | ----- | ----- | 60 Hz | 68 Hz
PICASSO:1280x1024| 16 | ----- | 87 Hz i| 87 Hz i| 87 Hz i
Available via the Support Library:
640x480 | 32k/64k| 71 Hz | 71 Hz | 71 Hz | 71 Hz
800x600 | 32k/64k| 60 Hz | 60 Hz | 60 Hz | 60 Hz
640x480 | 16,7M | 64 Hz | 64 Hz | 64 Hz | 64 Hz
TECHNICAL DATA
Output signals: Analog red, green, blue, max 1 V
HSync, VSync: TTL
15 pin High Density VGA plug (female)
Input signals: Analog red, green, blue, max 1 V
HSync, VSync: TTL
15 pin High Density VGA plug (female)
Video Memory: 1 MByte
Bus Interface: Zorro II
Color Palette: Workbench / Screens: max. 256 from 262,144 colors
Chunky Pixel Modes: 256 from 262,144 colors
HiColor: 32,768 colors
HiColor2: 65,536 colors
TrueColors: 16,777,216 colors
Needed address-
space: Either a 2 MBytes chunk of expansion memory and a
64 K Segment for the chip registers or (if you need
your expansion memory space for FAST RAM) two 64 K
I/O segments.
COMPATIBILITY
I had the chance to test the Picasso with quite a lot of programs,
because I was at the CeBit fair for VillageTronic as one of their salesdroids
and we had many programs at the computers there.
No problems:
- ADPro
- AmiBack
- AmiTools
- AmigaElm Usenet Mailer
- Arn Usenet Newsreader
- CygnusED
- FinalCopy
- GadToolsBox
- GnuEmacs
- ImageFX
- KingFisher
- MaxonCAD
- MaxonWord (beta version)
- PageStream 2.2
- SAS C package (cpr and se)
- WordPerfect 4.1
(As you can see from this selection; I'm a programmer, not a casual
user. As a rule of thumb, you can say that most programs which are OS2.0
compliant will work on Picasso. Programs that offer a ScreenMode requester
will work even without ChangeScreen adjustment.)
Incompatible:
- CPUBlit - will mangle your screen operations, is not really
necessary anymore
- DPaint AGA - due to illegal programming practices. Electronic
Arts has a board from VillageTronic, they're
thinking about a 'DPaint Picasso' version.
Games:
Well, most games will (unfortunately) take over your
computer. This however does not mean, that they will not
run with the Picasso board, only they will not run *on* the
Picasso. If you don't activate the software, then the board
will just display the normal Amiga signal and act as if it
is not there.
DOCUMENTATION
A manual is included (currently in German, but an English manual is
already in the translation process), and there is a 'CHANGES' section on one
of the supplied disks. The printed manual is 171 pages in DIN A5 format.
The quality of the documentation is *very* good. There are sections
for the absolute beginner, installation, a chapter where the author describes
why only certain scan rates and resolutions are possible, Program
documentation, three chapters about the programming support libraries, a
tutorial to the Paint program, a glossary, technical information and the
story about rabbit & hedgehog (that's where the name of the benchmark program
comes from).
The documentation is definitely written for beginners, but also has
its chapters for experts (programming the board).
LIKES AND DISLIKES
I like the way the board adds the Screen Modes via the display
database, which gives you a great flexibility with most of the application
software. The possibility of virtual screens gives you the chance to use
bigger resolutions even if you have only an 38 KHz or 50 KHz monitor. (That
is, you can use a 1152x900 virtual display and roll it over a 800x600
resolution display, just like on the normal Amiga graphics.)
Also, the ChangeScreen concept is very nice, because you can redirect
most of older programs to use Picasso screens.
The video switch which avoids two monitors or mechanical switching
devices and the good documentation round up the picture of a solid, very
stable and fast graphics board.
I didn't like the fact that the board has only one Megabyte of
memory; not so much because I'd like to see 800x600 in true color or 1024x768
in 32 K colors, but I'd like to have larger virtual screens. 1024x1024 or
2048x1024 would be very nice to have.
I'd also like to see a more flexible way to set display resolutions.
At the moment, you have only six different resolutions for ScreenMode. What
I'd really like to see are the normal Amiga Modes (e.g. 320x200) but with
much higher display rates (e.g. 85 or 90 Hz)
The last thing that I didn't like is the fact that all of the viewer
programs (ViewIFF, ViewGIF and ViewJPG) use different command line options
instead of a similar command syntax. You can tell that all programs were
written by different authors. Though you don't see this normally (these
differences are hidden by the IntuiView frontend), it is annoying if you use
the viewers directly.
VENDOR SUPPORT
Actually, I've had quite good luck with this board. I met the
VillageTronic people at the DevCon in Orlando, where they showed me the
first beta version of the board. From this second on, I decided to sign up
with them somehow, and I am currently involved with Village in another
project. However, I was one of the Salesdroids of VillageTronic at the CeBit
fair in Hannover and I got my board (which is number #112 and one of the
first boards that didn't go to software developers) as a reward for a week
of hard labour. :) You might want to consider this while reading this
review, though I've tried to be fair and not biased while writing this
review.
So I had quite good contact to the company but if you have problems
with it or have questions or suggestions, you can always contact Village via
Fax or EMail. They'll try to answer your questions as well as possible.
CONCLUSIONS
I think of this board as a very good product. It gives the Amiga the
resolutions, that it really needs to keep up with PC or Mac. I got more than
one gasp from PC users when they saw the display. 'And this is really an
Amiga? I always thought that the picture should flicker' was an often heard
quote. The speed of the board is very acceptable, you don't feel any
slowdown while working, even in the 256 color modes.
I'd give it four stars out of five due to the fact that the board
can be improved (and will).
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright 1993 Henning Schmiedehausen. All rights reserved.
This review is freely distributable as long as it remains unchanged
and this copyright notice is kept.
---- snap ----
--
\\ _ Henning Schmiedehausen - barnard@forge.franken.de _ //
\X/ --- Home of Barnard's Software Forge - ECG210 --- \X/
Amiga - Learning to fly | Picasso II: 1152x900, 256 colors - I love it!
Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, yeah, Write in C.
Only wimps use BASIC.
Write in C.