CompuServe Messages

Tony, I for one have no experience with Picasso's. I do know that they are solid boards, and compatibility is -on the whole- good. But that doesn't mean there are no better choices. For me the situation was like this: I wanted a gfx board, but I am not content with 256 colors. The situation back then was clear: Spectrum, Piccolo and Picasso. Everyone of those boards could do 24 bit graphics. But, when I dug into it, reading tons of reviews on all of them, I discovered that this 24bit ability had its limits. The only mode in which the flickering of the screen was humanly acceptable was in 640×480. And that's not much. I then started thinking about a GVP 110/24. This is a gfx board that can do pixelspeeds of 110 MHz. Unfortunately, this one was discontinued by GVP and very, very expensive. So I went back to the other three. I walked around the Cologne Amiga show and was almost ready to buy a Picasso II just like you. But I decided to check out the competition once more and there it was: the Piccolo SD64. I saw it demoed, read the specs (with 4 megs of RAM, it can do an interlaced 1024×768 in 24bit – sure, this is interlaced, but interlaced at 100 Hz is barely noticeable) which included 800×600 in 24bit at 70 Hz. non-interlaced and a max. pixelclock of 110 MHz. I immediately ordered one for the price of DM 888,- (this was the 4 meg version – do the exchange in $ yourself… 🙂 When it finally arrived at my house via UPS (they couldn't be had at the show yet…) I installed it into my A2000 (with 040-33) and tried it. The board worked right away. However, being so new and all, the EGS software in its new version 7.0 wasn't quite up to speed yet. I couldn't get 24 bit displays to work correctly. This was solved within a week however when I sent the EGS author an email. He knew what was wrong and would send me a new hardware driver. It arrived quite soon (as part of a complete EGS update – version 7.1 "Phoenix") and now all is well. About the compatibility – it's great! No more patches and stuff needed to crank up the number of colors on the WB to 256, like it was under 2.x! In fact, I wouldn't know what the difference to a Picasso board is regarding compatibility. Both use the display database to be as compatible as possible for all correctly written software. And Mand2000 looks very professional on a 1280×1024 screen in 256 colors at 60 Hz. non-interlaced! AutoPilot is happy on its own 640×400 screen. You see, you can tweak and alter all screenmodes to tailor (sp?) your needs. I created two screens for redirecting old programs – they have the exact dimensions of the original Amiga screens. As mine is PAL, I now have a screen called PAL:640×256 and one called PAL:640×512. Most programs that don't use the display database can be made to run on these by forcing them with a program called PicoRetarget. I wouldn't want to go back to the old Amiga modes. Sometimes I have to (games) so I have a flicker fixer and looped this through the monitorswitch on the SD64. When a program decides to run on the old chips, the monitorswitch passes the Amiga signal through to the monitor. An SD64 is zorro II / III autoswitching, has 2 or 4 megs of display ram, uses a Cirrus Logic 64bit videochip with blitter and… it's fast. On your A3000 it would be even faster using the zorro III bus. I think IBH (manufacturers) can ship this to the States, they use UPS as their carrier anyway. With a GFX board, NTSC or PAL is irrelevant. >F<riso Just yell if you need more info. Friso P. Gosliga | Auto CIS: 100341,464 – Internet: Friso.Gosliga@kub.nl | Pilot