{"id":67,"date":"2011-02-04T19:08:46","date_gmt":"2011-02-04T19:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/?p=67"},"modified":"2011-02-09T11:51:18","modified_gmt":"2011-02-09T11:51:18","slug":"piccolo-sd64-cu-amiga-1995","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/?p=67","title":{"rendered":"Piccolo SD64 (CU Amiga March 1995)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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(Editor’s note: This was written in January 1995, so is a little dated)
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Back in 1986, 4096 colours on a home computer was considered groundbreaking. Now, unfortunately, it isn’t: it’s 16 odd million or bust. This prompted Commodore to upgrade their standards and provide 24 bit colour palettes along with a pseudo 24 bit graphics mode with lots of colours on screen for their newer AGA machines such as the 1200, 4000 and CD32. For older Amiga owners, there was no AGA upgrade available, apart from the 24 bit graphics cards that were appearing.<\/p>\n

Now, there’s a veritable multitude of options for upgrading the graphics display of your Amiga. Unfortunately, with only a few exceptions, these all take the form of a card for “big box” Amigas such as the 2000, 3000 or 4000. Bursting onto the market recently, we have the new Piccolo SD64 from Ingenieurburo Helfrich (known as the makers from now on). Blittersoft have provided one, so it’s time to get it under the spotlight.<\/p>\n

Chips wi scraps, please?<\/h2>\n

Based on a fast graphics processor with either 2 or 4 MB of memory on a 64 bit data bus talking to your Amiga with Zorro II or III, this piece of kit sounds promising. The blurb on the cover is pretty tasty too, if you like this sort of thing.<\/p>\n

Popping the bonnet up to see what lurks underneath, you see a well manufactured board containing a depressingly small amount of chips for your money. One of these is the Cirrus Logic 5434 graphics processor chip – the current flavour of the month with PC owners as it is used on the fast Kelvin64 PC graphics card, which incidentally costs around the \u00c2\u00a3200 mark. This chip is a bit nippy and will chuck out pixels at a rate up to 110 million per second! (That’s a lot)<\/p>\n

Clustered next to this beast is the main memory (2MB on the review version) and sockets for upgrading to 4MB at a later date. A further socket for another chip exists and two “feature” connectors are one here too. Various uninteresting lumps sit around with the task of making the thing talk happily to your Amiga.<\/p>\n

At the back of the card, there are four connectors. One is an input and allows you to connect the standard output from your Amiga to the card to be passed through to the monitor when the card is not in use. The second is a standard 15 pin VGA connector to which a monitor is attached The third and fourth are a video output jack and S-VHS output jack. Unfortunately, these do not work without an optional upgrade but this could mean that the card could be used for video work. I emphasise the could there; nothing has been announced for definite.<\/p>\n

More on that input to the card: when the Amiga is generating the current display, the card switches off its output and routes the Amiga’s output through the card therefore eliminating the need to swap cables around. However, if you have two monitors, you can use them simultaneously.
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“But will it work on my black and white telly?”<\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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A nice place to work.<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.
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\nPicopainter is a very, very nice paint package. Based around a familiar looking toolbox, it is simple to use and fast. The palette has to rank as one of the nicest I have ever seen; move a slider and the possible colours available by moving the other two sliders updates (hopefully a glance at the screenshot may explain what I’m trying to put across here). Also on the colour side of things is a colour mixer. Here, a colour can be put at each corner of a square to produce smooth flows – nice. Some basic image processing tools are provided too. Convolution operations allow a variety of effects of differing use, as do the colour processing tools. Picopainter is fast, intuitive and pretty stable.<\/p>\n

Dia is simply a viewer program capable of loading a variety of file formats. With a full AREXX port and a complete manual, it does pretty much everything you could ever want a viewer to do, though no doubt someone will prove me wrong.<\/p>\n

EGS has the capacity to be a great thing – it provides a standard way of giving users a full colour desktop without having to write for each graphics card. Programming information is available to those who want it.<\/p>\n

One thing that has not been mentioned yet are the manuals. These are possibly the most complete manuals that I have seen for a graphics card. Every aspect of every piece of included software is minutely detailed which is refreshing to see. It appears that the hardware manual is out of date, though. It seems to refer to the Piccolo SD64’s predecessor and not the SD64 itself when dealing with technical specifications. In use, it is much the same though.<\/p>\n

Of vital importance is the speed of the card, too. The card’s raw hardware is fast. Very fast. Using the Intuispeed benchmarking program proves that the card outperforms a 3000’s graphics system by quite a way when in 1024×768 with 256 colours on basic operations such as line drawing, dot drawing, box filling and the like. However, on windowing operations it just about manages to keep up. This suggests that the software is not as optimised as it should be, which turns out to be the case. The current drivers are not making full use of the new features that the chipset allows over the older Piccolo; as you read this work is underway to remedy this. Quotes of “three times faster” are being mentioned but until this appears take it with a pinch of salt. Rest assured that as and when the updated drivers are available, we’ll give you the low down.
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The Bad News<\/h2>\n

All is not quite rosy with the SD64, though. One major bug rears its head all too often – after opening an EGS full colour screen (for PicoPainter or a viewer program) and then closing it, memory is not fully released. OK, so only 20KB aren’t freed – nothing in a 10MB system. However, this 20KB fragments memory badly. From having a largest free block of 6.5MB of memory, this drops to 3.2MB – literally halved. Whether this is just for my particular configuration I can’t say, but it is something to watch out for as many image processing functions require a large chunk of memory.<\/p>\n

Despite that bug, the card is still stunning. The speed is great, especially on native EGS screens. 24 bit windows can be thrown around with impressive speed. Text scrolling on the workbench is superb – useful for those who use CLI\/SHELL a lot. Other workbench operations are fast, but not as quick as they should be – yet. Workbench emulation is stable and well implemented. The manuals are excellent. To conclude, a great buy for anyone in the market for high colour and high resolutions. They’re not getting this one back either: I’ve bought it…<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Ratings (in 1995 context) for Piccolo SD64<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
Requirements<\/td>\n2MB RAM, Kickstart 2.04, 6MB hard drive space<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Recommended<\/td>\n6MB+ RAM, 68030 or better, multisync monitor with 48KHz scan rate or higher<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Performance<\/td>\n86<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Fast, with more to come promised. Z2\/3 autosense, too.\u00c2\u00a0 Let down by memory bug.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Value for money<\/td>\n93%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Workbench emulation, 24 bit painting, EGS, 2MB of memory and a decent chipset for under \u00c2\u00a3300!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Reliability<\/td>\n10\/10<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Still working perfectly in my Amiga 3000 in January 2011, 16 years later…<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ease of use<\/td>\n92%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Easy to install, set up and use thanks to the manuals<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Overall<\/td>\n90%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
A star performer: fast and stable with goodies included too!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

64 bit graphic chips, 24 bit colour and a 32 bit bus. For the first time on an Amiga. Clear?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-amiga","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}