• From: Goldcoast Australia
  • Registered: 2014-06-03
  • Posts: 177

Topic: rtg p96

So does anyone know how the amiga os was supposed to intergrate with putting in the picasso board.
Ie...was it supposed to move or redirect all intuition windows screens etc onto this card and they draw onto this with no problems and everything would behave itself?. Was this the idea? As im just thinking to myself, this would need to be 100% but the fact that it was an alpha driver eh what was not complete? Should it work the same on the replay like putting a picasso1v into an a3000, did they work properly?

  • MikeJ
  • Administrator
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  • Registered: 2011-05-05
  • Posts: 2,586

Re: rtg p96

It's all a bit of a mess really, the driver has been reverse engineered from the UAE one.
If it works on there, it should work on Replay.

The driver source is \sw\amiga_code\rtg

vde.i has the register map. It actually includes vbe which is the blitter, vde being the display engine + sprite.

If you want to remove the blitter from the equation, under BlitRectNoMaskComplete

return 0 for operation 12 (which is the only one which uses the blitter).

        CMP.B   #12,D6          ; only mode 12 is currently supported!
        BNE     .not_supported

There is also a define HasBlitter has the top which sets the capabilities into PSSO_BoardInfo_Flags

(I don't think the blitter it is the issue, but might be worth a go).
There is no interrupt at the end of the blitter, the driver waits for it to be complete.

There is a vblank interrupt, and it's the handling of this which may be more problematic?
/Mike

  • From: Goldcoast Australia
  • Registered: 2014-06-03
  • Posts: 177

Re: rtg p96

ah, ok, ill d/l that and have a look at it.

4 Reply by JimDrew (edited by JimDrew 2017-05-18 04:11:14)

  • Registered: 2013-08-16
  • Posts: 1,028

Re: rtg p96

The Picasso96 system does NOT replace Intuition or Graphics systems.  It does re-direct some functions, and it was designed to co-exist and nothing more.  You can't poke at an open Amiga screen's memory (opened on the video board) and have the changes appear on the screen.  You have jump through hoops to do that because most all of the Amiga graphics boards are Zorro II based and only have access to the video controller memory through a 64K bank switched memory architecture.  Only Zorro III boards have contiguous memory that is available, but you still can't poke at it easily.

The driver file does NOT handle any of the system stuff.  The sole purpose of the driver is to handle the interface to the hardware, which also means blitter functions (if they exist).  The Replay.card driver is complete as it needs to be.  Some blitter functions can be added to make things faster, but there is nothing missing in the driver to be 100% functional with Picasso96.