Now would definitely be a good time for PCI-Express Amiga hardware to arrive. AFAIK, the most recent card that can be put into an A1 (without an expensive PCI-to-PCIe riser) is a Radeon 9800.
Unfortunately they're AGP 8x only, which means that they use lower voltage signaling than the Amigaone AGP bus does (1.5V instead of 3.3V). Hence, putting one of these in your machine, would fry stuff.
Ok, so that would be usable for now. I assume that it plugs into the PCI 66MHz slot. Would it be possible to have both an AGP and a PCI-66 card plugged in and just switch between the two? That would enable experimentation without having to swap cards all the time.
I remember there being a discussion about the 66MHz PCI slot, but I don't think that there was ever a conclusion about whether it could have something plugged in at the same time as AGP.
I wouldn't know if you can plug in AGP and PCI-66 together. I would imagine it'd work find in a 66 slot. If not, plug it into a PCI-33 slot instead. As for switching between them, I don't know that too. I just swap cards installed, I've never had two together, habit from early on when that definitely would not have worked, but I don't know if that's changed or not.
Realize that the PCI vendor/device IDs need added to the list before they will be recognized, without that the computer doesn't know to try the Radeon driver on any card. That's my current problem with my A1, I need to swap in an older card in the list to install OS4, start over, edit the list to add my X1950, and then try that card again. Right now all I get is a message that no known graphics card was found to run an OS4 driver, but I do see that printed on the screen connected to the X1950. :) Ugh, if only I had time to fiddle with that stuff.
@billt I guess I should have gotten around to implementing the idea I had to allow you to specify board information from UBoot to be passed to PCIGraphics.card to permit it recognize a card it to doesn't support natively...
billt wrote: @Hans Realize that the PCI vendor/device IDs need added to the list before they will be recognized, without that the computer doesn't know to try the Radeon driver on any card. That's my current problem with my A1, I need to swap in an older card in the list to install OS4, start over, edit the list to add my X1950, and then try that card again. Right now all I get is a message that no known graphics card was found to run an OS4 driver, but I do see that printed on the screen connected to the X1950. :) Ugh, if only I had time to fiddle with that stuff.
Not having the vendor/device ID in the list could actually help someone working on a driver, or a new graphics system (which is on the card). That way they're not competing with the existing drivers for access to the card. A test scaffold could be built allowing the driver (or parts of it) to be tested without swapping hardware, and with the other graphics card still available to look at debug info and edit code.
Right now, no-one's written a VESA driver for OS4 (at least there isn't one released yet). If someone wrote such a driver, there wouldn't be an issue. IIRC, this is what Scitech's SNAP driver was supposed to do.
why vesa? ain't it old and crappy? and even if we had that, ain't 2d fast enough on radeons? my radeon 9250 is doing an ok job at 2d. and why should i stick in a board there that only has support for 2d?
this is only said with the desktop market in mind. as this is the only existing market.
Old radeon cards won't be around forever. Having VESA cards means that you can put any card in there and get a picture to start working from without worrying about if specific drivers are available. Plus is helps when developing new drivers without requiring that you have access to a card with specific drivers. It's not about performance, it's about basic support. VESA is the driver all other OS'es adds first to support the most wide amount of hardware from day one. I don't see why amigaOS has to be different about it.
Hmm, does all this mean that you can't use 'any card' in VESA modes on os4? If so then one wonders why there has to be such an artificial limitation.
Someone would have to write a x86 emulator for OS4 first.
Quote:
Is this because of UBOOT or OS4 itself? I was under the impression that UBOOT had an x86 emulator that used the BIOS on gfx cards to initialize them.
U-Boot includes a x86 emulator and you can use any gfx card with x86 BIOS in it, but that doesn't help once AmigaOS4 is started. AmigaOS4 could use the text mode U-Boot 1.1.x was using when it started AmigaOS4 For anything else like switching to VESA gfx modes you have to execute functions of the gfx card BIOS with a x86 emulator.
Right now, no-one's written a VESA driver for OS4 (at least there isn't one released yet). If someone wrote such a driver, there wouldn't be an issue. IIRC, this is what Scitech's SNAP driver was supposed to do.
No. SNAP was a gfx card driver system which supports a lot of (ancient) gfx cards, but for each new gfx card a driver had to be added to SNAP. Maybe it had a generic VESA framebuffer driver as well, but the main point of SNAP was that it has accelerated drivers for lots of gfx cards.
VESA is the driver all other OS'es adds first to support the most wide amount of hardware from day one. I don't see why amigaOS has to be different about it.
These other OSes run on x86 and can execute the VESA functions of the gfx card x86 BIOS. AmigaOS4 doesn't run on x86 and doesn't include a x86 emulator, therefore it can't use the gfx card BIOS.
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For anything else like switching to VESA gfx modes you have to execute functions of the gfx card BIOS with a x86 emulator.