Picasso Bug ??

I've got some really weird behavior from the OS4 RTG system.

I don't know if I am the only user who has more than one
gfx card but here goes...

Current System Config:

A4000D in tower case
Standard Commodore Zorro III bus board
CyberPPC 50mhz 060 / 233mhz 604e
CybervisionPPC
UltraWide SCSI on PPC card

Zorro Boards:
Cybervision 64
Highway USB/ Norway ethernet (not active, OS4 not supported)


The Picasso RTG system seems to function fine with only
one GFX card in use, screens cycle correctly with the cycle
gadget when multipull screens are open.

Now; the ( not fun ) starts when both GFX cards are in use.

For example; I have Workbench screen on the CVPPC card and
Ibrowse on its own screen on the CV64 card.

If I use the screen cycle gadget to visit the Worbench screen,
the CV64 screen closes and stops video output,the same happens in reverse direction.
That's only a minor problem, this is Weird...

Now; if both screens are active, and I pull down any of
the screens it reveals a copy of the other screen behind
(wierd) and massive system slowdown.

Now if I click on the underlying screen, all screens go blank or the outputs get swapped about (super wierd).

Now imagine what it's like with more than one open screen
on each GFX card, the system becomes totally unusable.


Now I have to resort back to OS3.9 to do anything usefull.
I use CyberGfx 4.2 with OS3.9 and have no problems
at all with 3 GFX cards + AGA.

With CGX it takes a few milli seconds to cycle thro screens
( as fast as I can Click my mouse ), with Picasso it seems
to take about 2.5 secconds.


Anybody got any Ideas....


Wol...

Well, it gets even worse!!!

Some screens open up on BOTH GFX cards at the same time,
but only one is responsive ( often with corruption ).

If this problem cannot be fixed, then OS4 is totally
useless for me


Wol..

@Wol

The problem is I don't know anyone who has a classic and uses multiple gfx cards, it works if you have two gfx cards on an AmigaOne... Can you give a bit more details? E.g. what monitor drivers do you have, where they are from, etc.? Also, what do you mean by screen cycle gadget? Does the same problem (e.g. monitor turning black) happen if you use LAmiga+M to cycle through the screens?

The fact that when you drag down a screen and it reveals the screen behind is however quite normal. AmigaOS never had real multi-monitor support, meaning that it maintains a single screen list, not a separate screen list for each graphics card. So if you drag a screen down, the one behind it in the screen list becomes visible, regardless of which video device the screen resides on. Intuition does not know, nor does it keep track of where physically each screen resides (e.g. what graphics card, that is completely transparent to intuition). So when you drag a screen down on one gfx card and you see the screen on the other gfx card behind it, what you're seeing is a limitation of the original AmigaOS design. The whole AmigaOS graphic system needs to be thrown out and replaced by something more modern, which would allow multi-monitor support as nice as what MacOS has, and that is planned.

Regarding screen switching, that is fast as long as your bitmaps fit into videomem. As long as the videomem runs full, the graphic system has to start moving graphics in/out of videomem. That causes slowdowns. Since OS4 uses a lot more graphics than 3.x, it means your videomem will fill up more quickly. However you can activate a much simpler GUI theme without all the fancy stuff, and you'll find that things will get quite a lot faster on a classic.

@COBRA

Quote:

Not when the other screen is displayed on the other video card it isn't. This never happens with CyberGfx.

Quote:

Well I can assure you; when using CyberGfx with OS3.**
this problem never happens. All screens stay where they
are supposed to and if you drag a screen down it ONLY
reveals the screens on that particular video card, they
never get confused. (It NEVER copies between GFX cards).

I was expecting the Picasso RTG system to be as capable
as CyberGfx RTG system, but it seems Picasso has major
design flaws and will never be able to handle more than
one GFX card. Heh; what's going to happen if I put 3 GFX
cards in ?

Quote:

Well for some stupid reason Picasso seems to move bitmaps between video cards.
And somtimes when opening a new screen, it displays it on BOTH video cards at the same time...Insane..


Wol..

@Wol

Quote:
Well, I used Cybergraphics both on a CyberVisionPPC graphics card, and a PicassoIV graphics card under 3.9 and it did not have screen dragging capability, like OS4, e.g. I could not drag a screen down to reveal the other screen behind it. MorphOS also uses Cybergraphics, and until the very recently released MorphOS 2.0 it did not support screen dragging.

Quote:

That is incorrect. You did not listen to what I wrote before. The screens are handled in a list by Intuition. Not Picasso96. Under AmigaOS, intuition handles the screens, and when you drag a screen down to reveal another one behind, that is handled by intuition.library. It is a limitation of intuition.library that it only keeps a single screen list, not separate screen lists for each graphics card. When you drag a screen down, intuition will look at which screen is behind it in the list of screens, and it will copy the contents of that screen to the area which is revealed by the dragging. It does so, without knowing physically on what graphics card that screen resides on. Picasso96 does know of course which graphic board each screen belongs to, and intuition could even get this information from P96, but it doesn't.

Basically, intuition is completely ignorant to having multiple displays simultaneously. Simply because it was not designed to handle that. That is why, for instance when you have 2 monitors side by side, you cannot move the mouse over from the left screen to the right one, or you cannot move a window over half way between the two screens. These are all design limitations of the original AmigaOS, which will of course be addressed in future versions. Some of them can be overcome by adding patches here and there, which is what both CybgerGfx and Picasso96 were doing, but a proper solution would be a major redesign.

Quote:

You will have to give me more specific information from that. So far you haven't even told us what graphics cards you're using, what drivers you use with them, where you got those drivers from, etc, etc. There is no way to figure out a problem without having such information available.

@Wol

have you disabled screen dragging?

IIRC i have tested under AmigaOS4 both CVPPC and CV64 together.

@COBRA


Ok, here we go again.......


If you look at my first post you will see I am using
a CybervisionPPC Video card and a CyberVision64 video card.

I know the CVPPC does not support screen dragging.

I know the CV64 does support screen dragging.

I normally never use screen dragging; what's the point
with 4 monitors, it was only used for testing purposes.



Yes I UNDERSTOOD your post regarding Intuition, I am trying
to explain the behavior of the two RTG sytems.

Now; Intuition cannot track where screens are, so the CyberGfx system
must be keeping a list of which screens belong to which
video cards because the screens are STICKY to their cards.


I will now explain the OS3.9 CGX behaviour.....

After system boot,the Workbench screen lives on CVPPC card.
Now I open an application on the CV64 card.
I now have 2 active video outputs. (correct behaviour)

Now because the CV64 does support dragging I can drag
down the screen to reveal nothing (correct behaviour)
I can move my focus to either screen using the screen cycle gadget
at top right of said screens with both video outputs staying active.

Now I decide to open another application on additonal screen on
the CVPPC card, so now I have 2 open screens on the CVPPC and 1
open screen on the CV64.

Again I can use the screen cycle gadget to visit all 3 screens,
while cycling between screens; the 2 screens on
the CVPPC stay on the CVPPC and the screen on the CV64
stays on the CV64, additionally if I drag the screen down
on the CV64 it reviels nothing. (correct behaviour)

Now I will open another screen on the CV64, so I now have a total
of 4 screens open; 2 on the CVPPC and 2 on the CV64.

I can again visit any screen with the screen cycle gadets,
the 2 screens on the CVPPC stay on the CVPPC and the 2
screens on the CV64 stay on the CV64. (correct behaviour)

Additionally because the CV64 does support screen dragging
I can drag a screen down to reveal the seccond screen on
the CV64 but no others! (correct behaviour)

The behavior of the AGA output is also identical to the CV64. (correct behaviour)

------------------------------------------------------------



I will now explain the OS4 Picasso behaviour.....

After system boot, the Workbench screen lives on the CVPPC card.
Now I open an application on the CV64 card.
I now have 2 active video outputs. (correct behaviour)

If I use the screen cycle gadget to visit the other screen
it kills the video output from the screen I have just left.
(incorrect behaviour)

Because OS4 has fake screen dragging, I can drag the CVPPC
screen down to reveal a copy of the CV64 screen (Incorrect
behaviour) also massive system slowdown.

I can also drag the CV64 screen down to reveal a copy of
the CVPPC screen (incorrect behavior) more system slowdown.
(so I now have 2 copies of each screen! (wierd behaviour)

If I click to front any of the underlying screens the
display from the other card is terminated and the screen
is brought to the front, so now the screen has swapped
video cards.(incorrect behaviour).

Additionally sometimes the display on the other card is not
terminated and I get 2 copies of the same screen!

Now imagine what it's like with more than 1 open screen on
each video card, it's total chaos especially if the screens
are different resolutions and AGA is in use at the same time......


In normal use of my Amiga I require 2 or 3 active video
outputs, as I do a bit of video production and multimedia
stuff with Scala and have network cams for scurity.


Sorry Iv'e got to cut this short, got to collect the wife
from work now, talk later...........

PS: not typo checked my spelling is S**t

Wol..

@COBRA

Hi Wol!

Sorry about not replying sooner. I think I found what you have to do to solve the problem of screens going blank. You should set DISPLAYCHAIN=NO in the tooltypes of ALL your monitor drivers which are in Devs:Monitors/. Please try it, and report back if that solves the problem with screens going blank when you switch to another screen on another gfx card.

Regarding the screen dragging. I remember now that the CV64 had some special capability no other gfxcard had, which allowed for screen dragging. And that is exactly why, when you drag a screen on a CV64, you will only see screens only on that card behind. In case of OS4 however, screen dragging is implemented differently, on system level, so that it works on all graphics cards. However as I explained, intuition does not check which graphics card a particular screen resides on, that is why when you drag a screen on one gfx card, you can see a screen behind it which is on another gfx card. However one of the important features of OS4 screen dragging is that you can actually drag things across between screens. For instance, when you have a DirOpus running on one screen, you can drag that screen down to reveal the Workbench screen behind, and drag icons from the workbench screen across to the DirOpus screen, and DirOpus will list those directories. Or if you have an ASL requester on one screen, again you can drag things into it from the workbench, etc. So if you had Workbench on one gfx card on one monitor, and DirOpus on another gfx card on another monitor, you could not drag across, if screendrag only showed the screens on the same graphics card. So, while I see how this is confusing, if it did not work this way, it would actually limit the usefullness of the system. However I would agree that at least there should be an option to disable this, and if there was proper multi-monitor support in OS4, so that for instance you could drag things across directly from left to right (if you have two monitors side by side), then even an option for this would not be needed.

Btw I forwarded this to the OS4 dev team so hopefully there'll be an improvement in an update in multi-monitor suppor, I think it's an important capability and any improvements in this area would be good.

Edit: In the meantime I found out, that intuition in 4.1 already checks during screen dragging, if a screen is on the same board or not, and will only draw it if it's on the same board. Too bad 4.1 for Classic is not out.

@ Rouge


I bump this for your interest......or not



Wol..