Piccolo SD64 (CU Amiga March 1995)
“But will it work on my black and white telly?”
Before you reach for your credit card, check that your monitor will do this lump of resin, plastic and silicon justice. The card will output to single scan Amiga monitors (such as the Philips 8833) but this is a criminal waste of opportunities: it’s like buying a Ferrari and putting bicycle wheels on it. The manual recommends using a monitor supporting horizontal scan rates of up to 48KHz to get the most from your card. If you have a monitor such as this, you’ll be able to get resolutions of up to 1120 x 832 pixels on the screen without flicker or interlace. For techies, the chip will output 1024×768 screens with a refresh rate of 70Hz – this is pretty darn good.
For this review, the card was fitted inside an Amiga 3000 with Kickstart 3.1, 10MB of memory and connected to an NEC 4FG monitor.
Installation of the hardware was easy; plug in and play. One very slight problem surfaced – for use with NEC monitors, you have to take your soldering iron out and solder across two links on a board. After just buying the board, this is not a job for the faint hearted (or clumsy). Personally, I wish that the manual had this information in a prominent place instead of hidden away, but I guess only a small proportion of buyers will have NEC monitors. It made me sweat, though.
As with all graphics cards, the software forms the backbone of how well the thing actually performs. The SD64 comes with three pieces of software: the EGS system; TVPaint Junior and PicoPainter. EGS is short for Enhanced Graphics System and is an attempt to lay down a standard platform for 24 bit applications. There is a version available for other graphics cards, such as the GVP Spectrum. The SD64 comes with version 7, which appears pretty stable. More on that later. TVPaint has become the de-facto standard for 24 bit paint packages; junior is basically a cut down version. Picopainter is a proprietary package written by Ingeneieie, erm, the makers which is pretty good.
Installation of the package is easy, using Commodore’s standard installer. A monitor file is placed in your “Devs/Monitors” drawer, allowing access to the new screenmodes. A further piece of software to initialise the EGS system is put in WBStartup so as to be run automatically on every boot up.
A nice place to work.
Many people will be interested in the workbench emulation side of things. Once up and running, the list of screen modes available to the system will have the “PICOa:” range of entries added to it. These range from 320×200 to 1280×1024, all in up to 256 colours (even on Kickstarts prior to 3.0 by a bit of fiddling). The card also restricts available screenmodes to those which can be handled by your monitor. A snapshot of workbench running in this resolution is provided, and as you can tell it’s incredible. For day to day use, the high 70Hz refresh rate 1024×768 mode will be good enough for most people.
Another tool provided is PicoRetarget, a screen retargeting tool which lives in WBStartup. This little program looks for any screens opening and gives you the option of forcing the screen into a different resolution. As an example, Pagestream 2 does not give you an option of what screenmode to run in, but using this tool means that you can run in a 1120×832 screen with no troubles – stunning. This works with most packages with a few exceptions like ProDraw 3. DirectoryOpus had a couple of hiccoughs, too: the package starts fine but does strange things to the screen after running the configuration program. Even using the program’s in-built screen mode requester caused this problem. However, trying Newmode (a PD utility) instead of PicoRetarget fixes this problem.
Workbench emulation seems very stable – essential for any graphics card. The only thing the card doesn’t do is allow you to drag screens, but this is no great loss as multiple screens can still be stacked up and swapped between.
Support for some specific packages has been included too. Real 3D gains a library allowing rendering to an EGS screen, as does Imagemaster. A saver is thrown in for ADPro too which works well providing a high colour EGS screen is open before running ADPro – if it isn’t, the chances are that ADPro will snaffle too much memory and not allow a high colour screen to open.
Onto the other side of EGS: a standard environment for 24 bit work. The reason for the development of EGS was to provide a standard platform for 24 bit packages. Programs written for this system will work with the SD64, the older Piccolo, the GVP Spectrum series and any other 24 bit cards supporting EGS without need for modification. So far, there has been little software written to take advantage of this.
EGS completely replaces the workbench yet everything is reassuringly familiar. If you’ve ever used an X Window system, you’ll appreciate the niceties that have been combined with the Amiga way of doing things.
The software provided is little more than basic essentials to configure your EGS system and see it working. The really interesting parts are the bits written specifically for the Piccolo by the manufacturers: PicoPainter and Dia.
