CompuServe Messages

"I think I have a busted Buster problem. I found that I could not get my 2MB Spectrum board to display an 800x600x24 screen from my A3000/25 (12MB fast RAM) onto my A1950 monitor! I also had problems with an 800x600x8WB clone – it took over two minutes to redraw a screen with a few windows!" Hmmm, flickering screens should not be related to the Buster chip… Buster would cause the screen to break up or have chunks missing from it, but not flicker. Check to make sure that you selected the correct monitor for EGS to generate displays for. Go into DisplayAdjust and look in the lower-left box that lists monitors and make sure it lists the monitor you are using. 800x600x24 is rock-solid on a 1950 and 1960 monitor, so these and anything better than them should be rock-solid. "I opened up my A3000 and switched the jumper to force it to Zorro II mode. The good news is that I am now able to bring up an 800x600x24 board, the bad news is that the screen flickers significantly! " Again, this may be related to a monitor setting…? "Another bit of bad news is that the EGS_Workbench at 8 bits deep is FAR TOO SLOW for me, to be useful to me (although the 800x600x3 is very nice, and I will be "test driving" the 1024×768 mode, which should be nice!)." This is probably related to the Zorro-II mode; Zorro-III is much faster. "I seem to have a translucent pointer also (any idea why that seems to be happening?)." The VGA graphics chip has a transparent hardware sprite (cursor)… After you get used to it, it looks really neat! "Using left-Amiga m to shuffle thru both EGS AND native Amiga screens is a nice programming touch. It's a shame that the screen flipping gadgets will only work to flip EITHER native Amiga screens or EGS screens, but not both." Adding Amiga-M was easy enough (it's a hotkey in the input stream), but hacking gadgets is a bit more system-unfriendly… "I used to use my three button's middle button to flip thru all my screens – it would be nice if this feature were available <hint><hint>." I'll mention it to them. This will probably come out as a PD addition rather than part of the EGS system as a whole. "BTW, are there any files/docs available for users to write EGS compliant code??????" Yes there are. However, they are LARGE. I'll work on getting them up here on CompuServe… "I never realized how much I'd miss PowerSnap, but obviously it won't work on a non-native screen (perhaps another utility program you might consider for EGS). It should work fine on the Workbench driver, but you are right, it does not support native EGS screens. However, the console handler (L:ECON-HANDLER) does support ConClip, so any text that appears in a console (or the EGS-Shell) can be copied to the Clipboard and pasted somewhere else…! "I'd really like to know if any of my problems are related to my busted Buster problems (what exactly are the signs and symptoms of EGS' DMA problems with a busted A3000????). Is it my monitor, my CPU, my humidity, my barometric pressure???" Garbage screens, missing chunks of visual data (i.e. the window draws, but the imagery for the system gadgets — close, resize, zoom, etc. — is missing. Also, crashes when resizing a window, or opening a new window are also good indicators. "Is there any way to speed up that workbench clone so that I can have the 256 colors I thought I'd have???" Zorro-III mode is much faster at updating an 8-bit screen. Although the EGS-SPECTRUM is faster than standard ChipRAM, you'll probably find 256-color Workbench screens pretty slow due to the system rendering routines. Native EGS 8-bit screens are really snappy though… "Will the 800x600x24 screen still flicker as much if I find and replace my older Buster with revision 11 (that's the latest one, right?)" Your flickering is probably not related to the Buster chip, but some other problem — most likely monitor file…