{"id":99,"date":"2011-02-08T09:17:25","date_gmt":"2011-02-08T09:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/?p=99"},"modified":"2011-02-08T09:17:35","modified_gmt":"2011-02-08T09:17:35","slug":"cyberstorm-060-cybervision-64-cu-amiga-august-1995","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/?p=99","title":{"rendered":"CyberStorm 060 + Cybervision 64 (CU Amiga August 1995)"},"content":{"rendered":"
(Editor’s note: this was submitted as a single write-up, but was split into 2 by CU for use in the Magazine.\u00c2\u00a0 Product photography was by me)
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Phase 5 developments – a name that many people haven’t heard of before. German in origin, this company produces little things to bring your Amiga up to the cutting edge of personal workstations. I must admit to being not uninterested when the chance came to get my hands on their offerings; I may have jumped at the chance, but only a little bit.<\/p>\n

Gordon Harwoods have taken on their products in the UK. Hot from Germany they now have the CyberStorm accelerator and the CyberVision 64 graphics card. Just to let you know where you stand before we actually look at the stuff, be aware that the graphics card needs a Zorro III slot as found in the 3000 or 4000 (and some expansion cases for the 1200) and that the accelerator needs a CPU slot as found in the 3000 or 4000.<\/p>\n

CyberStorm 060<\/h2>\n

First off, the accelerator. The CyberStorm is a modular system as you can see from the photograph – everything plugs into a main control board offering the chance of easy upgrading as more becomes available. The design of the board really requires it to be fitted into a 4000, but the hardware will alledgedly work in a 3000 if the machine was re-cased. All that I can say for definite is that it will not work in a 3000 with revision 7 buster chip – however, successful use has been reported when using a revision 11 buster chip. Check with your dealer before buying! If that fails, Harwoods can check with Germany for you.<\/p>\n

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Cyberstorm 060 with memory and processor board<\/p><\/div>\n

The review model was fitted with a 50MHz 68060 chip, which is the latest (and possibly last) chip in the Motorola 68000 family. The technical specification of this chip is scary: 2.5 million transistors, dual superscalar execution (meaning that two integer instructions are carried out simultaneuosly), branch cacheing, instruction and data cacheing, deep pipelines and much more. If this means nothing to you, rest assured that these techniques are employed to make the thing take as few cycles to execute an instruction as is possible – in fact it is possible to get more than one instruction executed for every clock cycle which explains why the 66MHz version claims to offer over 100MIPS for certain instructions.
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\nFitting the card is fiddly, but not too bad. It really is necessary to strip the whole of your Amiga down, including removing the expansion card holder (which is not mentioned in the manual) to make sure that the board will stay seated when the further modules are plugged onto it in situ. There’s only two jumpers in the Amiga to change though, and having these in the wrong position doesn’t harm anything but you’ll know they’re wrong as your system will refuse to boot.<\/p>\n

Switching the Amiga on for the first time is a nervous moment as the card lets its presence be known by flashing the screen all the colours of the rainbow – a heart stopping moment if you don’t know that it is supposed to do that! The first sign that something is different is the speed in which your machine boots…<\/p>\n

The first thing to know about this card is that it’s fast. Lightning may be a more appropriate word, and soon anything and everything was being thrown at it in the way of benchmarking software to try and get a grip on the actual speed.<\/p>\n

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Phone me now!<\/p><\/div>\n

AIBB 6.5 refused to work. Not too good a start, but not really surprising as this probes the machine very deeply to try and find what’s inside it. Over to Sysinfo. 71 times faster than an A600? 39 MIPS? 28 million floating point operations per second – an 030 running at 25MHz will return around 2 MIPS and 0.7 MFLOPS. We’re talking speed here.<\/p>\n

Another old benchmarking program that opens a window and plots a graph of speed comparisons between the machine and the old 2000 had an interesting problem as it ran out of space and tried to write over the window bar.
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\nBandying terms like MIPS, FLOPS and basing an evaluation on benchmarks alone would be silly. For reasons that wont be gone into here, it is possible for a slow processor to outperform a faster processor on a MIPS rating. The real test of a machine is when you ask it to do something. What does the machine feel like? Well, after using Silicon Graphics Iris workstations (admittedly these are “low end” Silicon Graphics), an Amiga blows these out of the water both on raw power and perceived speed. It’s fair to say that this accelerator when coupled to the Cybervision will feel nicer than a Pentium based system in use, but I’m probably biased.<\/p>\n

The floating point unit on a 68060 is similar to the one on a 68040 in that it doesn’t have all the instructions that a 68882 coprocessor has in hardware. These need to be emulated by adding an extra library to the Amiga operating system to cope with these troubles. What happens when the 68060 comes across an instruction for its FPU that is not supported is that a CPU “trap” is generated, software is called and the instruction is executed. This takes time. I would think that this would be exceptionally time consuming on a 68060 as a trap may have to cause the dual integer pipelines and caches to be flushed. It’s rather like trying to drive your lamborghini on diesel. However, the CyberStorm comes with software to try and patch some programs to run faster by avoiding this problem. The most noticable speedup came when rendering a scene with Scenery Animator – rendering time dropped from 27 seconds to 17 seconds just by running the patch. Compare this to 150 seconds on a 4000\/030 with a 25MHz 68882 coprocessor.<\/p>\n

Pagestream 3g is pretty much a power application; it needs a lot of grunt to get it moving at a reasonable speed. However, refreshing a 1024×768 screen takes under half a second using the 68060. I couldn’t get a more accurate timing as my reactions couldn’t cope! Without the ‘storm, the 030 takes 6 seconds for the same task.
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\nVista pro 3 takes 66 seconds to render a nice scene of the grand canyon; the 030\/882 combo takes 666 seconds. This was at the highest quality that Vista would render to, too, although the size of image wasn’t large. However, a speedup of a factor of 10 is nothing to be sniffed at whatever the situation!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mosaic is getting more and more use on the Amiga as it is the tool which is used to access the World Wide Web (a collection of sites carrying information on the Internet). GIFs need to be decoded which takes time; this time is expensive as your computer will also be connected to the phone whilst you’re waiting for the decoding to happen. The 030 takes 16 seconds to decode a page. 2 seconds sees the same task finished on the 060. I want one!<\/p>\n

ADPro is another power tool that gets its fair share of commercial use. One of the most computing intensive functions that I use within it is the “Twirl” function, which distorts an image as if it had been pinched and then twisted. The reference 030\/882 combination takes a mammoth 162 seconds to twirl an 800×600 24 bit image whereas the 060 takes under nine!\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally on the test front, Lightwave 3.5 is undoubtably the most commercially used Amiga application. The same scene that was used in the 3D spectacular article a few months back was re-rendered in the highest possible quality mode. The 060 took 33 minutes compared to 4 hours 14 minutes on the 030\/882 running at 25MHz. I must confess to being slightly disappointed at this, but on reflection I reckon it still wasn’t bad. I get the feeling that the lightwave render module isn’t as efficient as it should be and I hope for faster from Lightwave 4. This isn’t a problem of the accelerator though. Compared to 3D Studio on a Pentium, it could be considered as slow but one reason for this is that a Pentium normally has 256Kb of secondary level cache which really affects the performance of rendering. The images produced by 3D Studio aren’t quite the same as Lightwave’s either.<\/p>\n

The expansion possibilities ought to be mentioned. There’s two free slots on the CyberStorm. Already available is a SCSI interface, along with a SCSI interface that incorporates Ethernet and high speed serial ports. Phase 5 are investigating production of a secondary cache: maybe this would help with rendering? Upgrading to a 66MHz chip is a case of plugging one in and changing an oscillator. On the review version, this oscillator was soldered but it may be pluggable on later versions.
\n<\/p>\n

Cybervision 64<\/h2>\n

Moving on now, the other half of the combination deserves some space too. The CyberVision 64 is interesting in two respects. First off, it’s a 24 bit graphics card running on a Zorro III bus with 64 bit memory access on the card but secondly in that it tries to introduce a standard for Amiga retargetable graphics and 24 bit applications.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The board comes with either 2 or 4 MB of RAM and is based upon the S3 Trio 64 graphics chip as found in some PC graphics cards. A brief look at the board shows that it’s been well manufactured and that there’s plenty of connections for future upgrades. No modules have been announced for this yet, but multimedia expansions should be forthcoming soon.<\/p>\n

With the board safely installed in a Zorro III slot, all that is needed is to install the single disk of driver software. The software really does point towards a possible future of Amiga graphics in that it defines a standard for high resolution and high colour screens working on graphics cards that are not native to the Amiga hardware.<\/p>\n

This software, called CyberGraphics, is very similar in design to the Picasso’s software (which is widely acknowledged as the best stab at integrating a VGA chip into an Amiga). It is now available for the majority of graphics cards on the market, including the Picasso, Piccolo, EGS Spectrum and PiccoloSD64. It consists of a set of libraries and a monitor file; the libraries work with all graphics cards and only the monitor file is board specific. It’s a small, efficient package. The distribution for other cards is soon to change – watch this space for more!<\/p>\n

The Cybervision software is excellent. For workbench emulation it is stability itself and refuses to crash! Screen dragging (a feature which often disappears from graphics cards) is back again and the CyberGraphics software really excels in showing its cleverness in this department. With the CyberVision 64 and PiccoloSD64 in the test machine (both running CyberGraphics) it is possible to drag a screen that is being generated by one card down and reveal a screen behind it that is being generated by the other card! The level of integration and transparency in the system is astounding.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>CyberGraphics defines a standard for 24 bit workbench applications, as EGS tries to. However, the CyberGraphics system integrates completely within the Amiga’s intuition system allowing for a 24 bit workbench screen to be opened. A screenshot shows this. There’s two 24 bit pictures on the screen, directories and a console window. The incredible thing is that the speed of the system is still amazing!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The CyberVision 64 comes with a utility called NewMode which forces any screen of a utility to another user defined screenmode. This is easy to use and works very well; much better than PicoRetarget as supplied with the PiccoloSD64.<\/p>\n

The other software provided with the card promises to be Photogenics Lite: this software has not yet been completed but it should allow for the 24 bit modes to be used as the primary photogenics screenmode. 24 bit painting and effects should be possible and if not too much is removed from Photogenics this should be a valuable addition to the CyberVision.<\/p>\n

Benchmark-wise, this card beats the PiccoloSD64 in all respects of speed. Sometimes the difference is marginal but sometimes it’s absolutely massive even when the SD64 is running the CyberGraphics system instead of the EGS system that it comes with.<\/p>\n

When both the CyberStorm and CyberVision are in the same machine, there’s a scarily fast beast instead of an Amiga on your desk. As an example, a test of drawing rectangles changed from a value of 12944 to 71476. In contrast, the PiccoloSD64 managed 9076 under the CyberGraphics software, 10058 under the original EGS software and refused to work point blank with the CyberStorm 060.<\/p>\n

On the technical side of things, the card will chuck out pixels at an impressive rate: up to 1600×1200 pixels. The 2MB version will support 24 bit colour depths in up to 800×600 pixels – if you want more colours in higher resolutions you’ll need the 4MB. As with all graphics cards, a nice monitor is a necessity. For the CyberVision, you’ll need something capable of 31KHz horizontal frequency as a minimum but a 65KHz frequency would be much better.<\/p>\n

There’s little to say about the graphics card other than it is scarily fast and that performance is very much better on a fast processor but will still knock the spots off AGA even without the CPU. The Cyberstorm really did incredible things to the playback of animations, too. On a 4000\/030 running Scala MM300 a HAM8 lo-res animation used to glitch occassionally. With the CyberStorm, HAM8 hi-res interlace animations are possible – something Commodore said shouldn’t happen! This was a very nice demonstration of what the Amiga can do as it was a broadcast resolution animation (full overscan) running at 25 frames a second. I have no doubt at all that it would push fields through at 50 frames a second if necessary.
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Wrapping up<\/h2>\n

In conclusion, both of these bits of kit really are top products. It may seem that I have been slightly muted about the graphics card. The reason for this is that I couldn’t find anything bad to say about it! This card is setting the standard that all other graphics cards need to look up to – it really is that good. The CyberGraphics software is truly superb and with its support for other graphics cards deserves to become the standard of retargettable graphics on the Amiga. A star performer on both counts.<\/p>\n

The Cyberstorm 060 is the fastest Amiga accelerator available that will run all applications. For the render hungry, there are transputers and other malarky planned but their use may well be limited to the applications that are written with it in mind. This accelerator will work with everything as it is directly compatable with the original chip used in the Amigas since their release. Of course, some games which do silly things with interrupts and modify their own code will fail (as they would on an 020) but I very much doubt that people will be spending a grand for games.<\/p>\n

Value for money is a difficult thing: whether you can justify \u00c2\u00a31000 for an accelerator is a very difficult question especially when you compare what you could get on a different platform for those readies. In the Amiga market, it’s not that bad though and the investment should be protected as there is already provisions for upgrading. The graphics card at \u00c2\u00a3300 compares directly with a high end PC card and is pretty good value for money.<\/p>\n

Both these products specify the state of the art for their respective areas so both deserve the Screen Star accolade. Truly excellent. I really don’t want to send them back…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summer 1995 saw the launch of Phase 5’s CyberStorm and CyberVision. Were they any good? Read on, brave reader…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99","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\/99","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=99"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=99"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=99"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.binarydevotion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=99"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}