Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Picasso II graphics board Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.graphics Date: 1 Feb 1994 14:37:11 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 463 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2ilpen$je6@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, graphics, 24-bit, Zorro II, commercial PRODUCT NAME Picasso II graphics board BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a multiple format graphics board that integrates into the Monitors system found in AmigaDOS 2.04 and beyond, providing screen modes ranging from 24-bit deep 320x200 to 1600x1200. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Village Tronic/Expert Services Address: 7559 Mall Road Florence, KY 40142 USA Telephone: (606) 371-9690 Fax: (606) 282-594 LIST PRICE There was some confusion about the price, caused by special "show prices" for the boards. I've heard either $500 or $550 for the 1 meg board, and $550 or $600 for the 2 meg board. I wound up paying $485 for a 1 meg board at my local dealers, and $50 for the extra meg of RAM at a local nerds' supermarket. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Zorro II slot required. I don't know how well this works on the expansion boxes available for the low-end Amigas, but would be interested in finding out. Two meg of Fast RAM required, and more would be useful. SVGA or multisync monitor required, and the board is is happier with a high-speed multisync. SOFTWARE AmigaDOS 2.04 required, 3.0 makes more features available. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING A3000/25, 16 meg Fast RAM and 2 meg Chip RAM. AmigaDOS 3.1. NEC MultiSync 4FG monitor. I bought the board specifically for use with Amiga Mosaic 1.1. VERSION INFORMATION The Picasso support software used was: village.library 2.53 vilintuisup.library 2.7 PICASSO firmware v1.43 (22.09.93) These are the versions of the software that the North American distributor recommended until January 29, 1994. PICASSO firmware v1.44 is available, but it's recommended that 1.43 be used instead. Later versions of this software are available in Europe, and as of January 29, 1994, one is available in North America. Users are not uniformly happy with the upgrade. It corrects all or most of the bugs mentioned in this review, but introduces some rather annoying new ones. Whether you prefer the upgrade or the reviewed version will depend on what applications you use. WHY I BOUGHT A PICASSO Those of you who know me - or at least know my views on graphics - are probably wondering what I'm doing reviewing a graphics board. After all, I always claimed that more colors weren't very important, and for resolution favored width (and lots of it) over either depth or height. Well, there's one application that is sufficiently important and useful that I think it deserves the environment it expects. Amiga Mosaic is an Amiga port of NCSA's Mosaic. It's a World Wide Web browser, with support for gopher, ftp, and news as well as the http protocol used by the web. One problem with this program is the large number of documents on the web that assume a 256-color display for embedded images. Indeed, many of those images are no more than links to photographic quality jpeg images. Surfing the web on a high resolution, interlaced 16 color display meant looking at many poorly rendered pages. The thought of being able to display those photographic images properly, as well as view the web pages the way the author intended, was too much. I went out and bought the card. INSTALLATION Installation of the hardware and software is dealt with in the HARDWARE and SOFTWARE sections below, respectively. HARDWARE The hardware is the basis for the entire product; if it's poor, nothing else really matters. This is a very solid piece of hardware. The card installation was straightforward, though it was a tight fit in my aging A3000. The provided cable for connecting an SVGA video socket to the Picasso fit nicely in the A3000 deinterlacer port. The card plugged in and worked the first time, with no problems. Installing a second meg of memory was straightforward, though the tight fit caused a few worried moments while unplugging it. With either one or two meg of memory, the provided viewers, as well as MultiView and the ADPro driver, all produce truly stunning images on the NEC 4FG monitor. Mouse scrolling is smooth and fast, whether the sprites are the good old Amiga low resolution sprites, or sprites that use the same resolutions as the screen. Screen scrolling up and down is also fast and smooth, though you can't move the mouse pointer above the top of the screen it's on, and 256 color screens don't scroll. These are apparently a software limitation fixed in the next release. Screen flipping between screens with the same mode is as quick as for Amiga screens. For screens more than 4 bits deep, which use chunky pixels, redrawing the screen is something you can watch happen. Screen flipping with a mode change has a noticeable delay, and in some cases an audible click. If you're changing between standard Amiga modes and Picasso modes, the click always happens. If you're changing between Picasso modes, it seems to be random. If you're used to Amiga screen-switching, this might be annoying, even though it is brief. If you've been using other multi-screen systems, it probably won't be. In comparison to the multi-screen window managers for an X workstation, you get to watch the Picasso screen go briefly blank and then your new screen appears, as opposed to watching an X screen slowly redraw all the windows you had open. Most of the new screen modes work just fine, including the 1600x1200 mode, though two modes (1120x832 and 1152x900) refused to sync on my monitor. Again, I'm not sure if that's because the hardware is trying to use a mode my monitor can't use, because the software isn't working properly, or because those modes are to close to the limits of my monitor's capabilities. By choosing one mode for my main working screens (1024x768, in depths ranging from 2 to 8), I avoid all of these problems, and get a more usable work environment than I previously had. Since the Picasso II seemed a rather expensive investment for one program and viewing pretty pictures, this was a relief. Again, those who have discussed graphics with me before will recall that I'm willing to trade speed for wider, but not for deeper. In going from super high resolution interlaced to 1024x768 I lost bits but got a tighter image. I managed to recover the lost display area by going to a smaller font. As for speed, here are the results of using the IntuiSpeed test that came with the board, for both the super high resolution interlaced screen I used to use, and various depths of 1024x768. Super-High Res Laced | 1024 x 768 | 1024 x 768 | 1024 x 768 4 colors | 4 colors | 16 colors | 256 colors -------------------+-----------+------------+------------+------------ Draw Points | 75186 | 61154 | 55530 | 59639 Draw Lines | 6124 | 3046 | 1593 | 1395 Draw Boxes | 2051 | 2575 | 1468 | 1000 Draw Circles | 630 | 427 | 378 | 455 Scroll vertical | 193 | 690 | 368 | 183 Scroll horizontal | 196 | 192 | 97 | 94 Draw Text | 4388 | 6101 | 4085 | 2835 Draw Frames | 2716 | 2570 | 1569 | 671 Window open/close | 46 | 41 | 27 | 17 Window size change | 101 | 91 | 85 | 75 Window Move | 467 | 409 | 313 | 229 -------------------+-----------+------------+------------+------------ The test measures the number of various operations that are done in a fixed amount of time. While super high resolution interlaced is faster for simple drawing, the Picasso using 1024x768 mode with the same number of colors is faster for text (notably for the important operation of vertical scrolling) and in the error range for window operations. Notice that the 256 color mode is faster for drawing points and circles than the 16 color mode, almost certainly thanks to the chunky pixel memory organization used for that mode. For those interested, my primary work screen is 1024x768 with four colors. Mosaic gets a 256 color screen, as I use it for displaying GIF images. While I seldom use my Workbench screen, other users of my Amiga seldom use anything else, so it's set to a depth appropriate for them. My 5-year-old child enjoys his 16-color icons. SOFTWARE Without the software, the hardware is just a board. While the software isn't rock solid, it's already usable, and apparently fixable. I'm going to cover the various programs provided in order of increasing importance. Software installation uses Commodore's Installer program, and I had no problems with it. Running it multiple times works fine. I haven't tried the "uninstall" package; I don't plan on doing so soon. The least important program is PicassoPhoto. The documentation doesn't mention it, but it apparently lets you save Picasso screens as IFF images. The package includes TVPaint Jr. and MainActor and their documentation. MainActor didn't impress me as an animation player nor viewer. I have so little interest in TVPaint that I haven't bothered installing it yet. Next is PicassoSwitch. This is a commodity that allows you to switch between Picasso and Amiga graphics output. Since you can set the graphics drivers to do this automatically there isn't much need for PicassoSwitch. Except for some long delays after odd modes, the driver handles this perfectly. The only time I've dealt with PicassoSwitch was in checking to see if the two modes that didn't work on my monitor might have been a failure of the mode sensing software. It does what it's supposed to do. StyxBlank is a screen blanker commodity that uses the Picasso screen mode. It's the now-relatively-old moving, color-changing line. The blanker is simple, with few features, but it does the job. Your old blanker may work just fine, even with Picasso mode promotion, if the program uses system calls for graphics, and checks the size of the screen it opens. For the modular blankers, this could require configuring every module separately. I use ShadowMaster, which has this problem. On the other hand, every module now runs in a Picasso screen, ranging from 320x240 up to 1600x1200. The various viewers rank next, and we'd be getting into some really useful software with those. However, IntuiView needs to be discussed first. It implements a good idea - it's a configurable file viewer and manipulator. It's also a common idea; most of the directory utilities available already provide these kinds of facilities, as does Amiga Mosaic. Thus, I haven't used IntuiView at all. The software includes viewers for IFF, GIF and JPEG images. The first thing you notice about the viewers is their speed. Not only do they do the conversion quickly, but also they open the display and you get instant feedback about what's going on. Compared to something like MultiView with appropriate datatypes, they're a marvel. Their disadvantages become obvious quickly - they try to choose the smallest resolution on which your image fits. In at least one case, that means they chose a resolution that my monitor couldn't display. The IFF and GIF viewers will let you specify a resolution, but won't let you scroll the image if it doesn't fit in that resolution. The JPEG viewer lets you pick the color depth, but not the resolution, and only lets you scroll if you use the undocumented scroll switch. The net result is that I wasn't using any off them as external viewers in Mosaic, until I stumbled over the scroll switch for ViewJPEG. I recently turned that on, and will probably leave it on. The program you'll probably use the most is ChangeScreen. It's a commodity that watches for other programs to attempt to open screens, and lets you change the screen mode they've asked for. ChangeScreen helps programs that don't give the user a chance to chose a screen mode from the 2.04 monitors list. Programs that let you select a screen mode will offer the Picasso modes as a choice, and everything should work fine. If the program that's having its screen promoted is smart enough to check the size of the screen it opened, this can work quite nicely. Even if the program doesn't do that check, many of them can benefit from being opened on a Picasso mode screen. A few don't work very well. It takes some experimenting for each program that you're going to do this for to find out whether it will work, and the best resolution to use. When in use, ChangeScreen allows you to promote screens of a specific type to some other type automatically, or to choose a mode for a program opening a specific screen name. Being a little paranoid, I've never tried the first option. The second works quite nicely, barring bugs in programs that cause their screen name to change. In normal use, ChangeScreen brings up a requester every time a program that's not in its database tries to open a screen mode that's not automatically promoted, and you have to deal with that. This is what causes problems with blankers, as noted above. Normally, you tag the program as "always promote", or "never promote", and forget it. You also have the option of promoting (or not) for just that invocation. Once a program is in the database, you can change its screen mode, including back to "leave it alone." The ChangeScreen window also allows you to select programs from a requester and select a mode, but this doesn't appear to work. The requester puts the programs path in the database, so it fails to match when the program runs. ChangeScreen can also force old programs to use Topaz 8 instead of the default system font, and can be set to patch only the programs that use the AmigaDOS 1.x OpenScreen call. In practice, ChangeScreen works fairly well. The only program it's caused a problem with has been my screen blanker, because I had to set it up for each module. While this took some time to fix, it was worth it. Some of the old standards - StarBlanker, Swarm - look fantastic on a 1600x1200 display! Now we come to the heart of the package: the Picasso Monitor. This program, and its support libraries, are what hook the Picasso card into the system so that its modes show up on the system screen modes list. It also maps the systems graphics calls into their Picasso equivalents, so that programs that use the new mode have a chance of working properly. There aren't very many options you can set here. You need to say what bandwidth your monitor is; the installation script sets that for you. You can arrange things so that the software uses the Amiga's blitter instead of the CPU, which is useful if you have a slow CPU. You can control whether all the bit planes in a screen scroll at once (recommended, if nothing breaks). Finally, you can control whether you get a sprite in standard Amiga resolutions, or in the Picasso resolutions. This last feature caused some troubles, because the documentation doesn't mention that if you haven't created a custom mouse pointer, the default shows up as a Picasso resolution sprite even if you've disabled that. This is not only confusing, but also a bit ugly. They recommend using standard Amiga sprites if you're going to use high resolution, as the high resolution sprites are tiny, and hard to see. I heartily concur! You can get the default pointer as an Amiga resolution by invoking the pointer Preferences program, and Saving it as is. This software works. It's not 100 percent yet; there are problems with sprites getting lost, or stuck in the menu bar. There are problems with program rendering small things that wind up on the wrong screen. It interferes with things that monitor the input stream, like AutoPoint, Snap, and WShell's DHOpt. Also, the system just feels less stable than it used to. It seems as I find it frozen after being left alone for long periods of time, and that it crashes more often than it used to. I don't have any concrete evidence, just a feeling. On the other hand, the vendor claims there is a new version coming out soon that should many of the listed bugs, plus the problems mentioned in the section on hardware. That could go a long way towards making this feeling go away as well. DOCUMENTATION Without the documentation, the software is just code. This is where the Picasso II package has the most problems. The documentation is a 100-page spiral-bound pamphlet. It could have come from your local copy shop. Besides the omissions already mentioned, it contained a large number of typographical errors, and was apparently printed on a 300 dpi laser printer. It gets low marks for overall quality. It provides detailed instructions for installing the card. If you're comfortable working inside an Amiga, you don't need this. If you're not, you should have someone else install the card for you. The effort spent on this section should have gone elsewhere. It also included a long and somewhat muddy explanation of how various monitor frequencies interact, and culminating in a specious explanation for why they don't provide 24 bit color on 1280x1024 screens. While this may be interesting, it isn't relevant, and this section be moved into the technical section. The software documentation covers most - but not all - of the included programs. Most notably, CheckPicasso and PicassoPhoto are missing, and the IntuiSpeed documentation tells you little more than the name and display tell you. Since these three programs do not have English localization, this is particularly painful. What does exist is somewhat muddy and badly organized. Lack of an index makes this particularly painful. On the plus side, they include a troubleshooting guide that seems to cover the obvious and some not-so-obvious problems, and complete programming information. They also include a glossary of technical terms. LIKES AND DISLIKES The board provides a much more usable work environment than ECS Amiga graphics; provides beautiful renderings of deep images; and takes Amiga Mosaic to a new level of usability. This board shows that working in a modern graphics environment is no longer just a luxury. On the hardware side, the noticeable delays in switching screen modes, even from one Picasso mode to another, and the two unusable modes are annoying. These may caused by the monitor and not the Picasso. On the software side, I dislike the problems it creates in other software, and the low quality of the documentation. The interference with input commodities is annoying, as is the instability of the software. Likewise, the provided viewers are suitable only for very specific purposes. Fixing the stability problem has to be first on the list of suggestions. Tools for creating screen modes - especially if I could disable some of the current standard modes - would be excellent additions. Having the ChangeScreen facility use a multiselect file requester would help. Reworking the viewers to make them more intelligent, and providing scrolling where needed, would be useful improvements. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS The similar products are the GVP Spectrum and the Piccolo board. The Picasso seems to have the best Workbench emulation, which was high on my list. It also has an edge in price, which never hurts. Its major disadvantage is missing a Zorro III mode, which makes it slower. Since Jochim Worringen's review of the Piccolo card seems to indicate that a faster CPU is more important than bus width in this regard, this is not that critical: the fastest Piccolo/Picasso configuration was a 33 MHz 68030, being 30% faster with 256 colors than the same card in 8 colors in Zorro III mode. BUGS I've mentioned most of them: lost sprites and things rendering on the wrong screen. In addition, text cursors sometimes get misplaced, and wind up being erased to the wrong color. The vendor believes most of these to be AmigaDOS 3.x related and expects to solve those bugs with their next release of the Picasso software, due out soon. In addition, that release will solve the limitations on screen scrolling, and should include more English text for the programs that need it. Before I installed the second meg of RAM, the graphics problems were even worse. Normally, this involved artifacts from an already-open Picasso screen appearing on a newly opened screen. In one case, using the console clear screen sequence to clear it up caused a checkerboard to cover the console window. You can usually clear these by flipping screens away from and back to the dirty screen. All these problems vanished with the two-megabyte upgrade. VENDOR SUPPORT I contacted the US vendor on a Saturday, to find get the chip types for the second meg of RAM (another omission from the manual). I also discussed the bugs mentioned in the first paragraph of the BUGS section. They were polite, provided the information I needed, or quickly admitted when they didn't have it, suggesting I call back during the week. WARRANTY One year from the manufacturer. Local support depends on your dealer. CONCLUSIONS This board does what I bought it for. With two meg of RAM, the hardware seems to function quickly and reliably. The software still needs work, but that is apparently happening in a timely fashion. In this case, those of us in North America are on the slow end of the pipeline. While I'm not 100% satisfied with the board to date, I don't regret the purchase. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1993, Mike Meyer. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews