Picasso96 and blitter

[Heiroglyph]

I'm doing some work in UAE and noticed something odd that I didn't expect.

When I disable the blitter emulation, Picasso96 doesn't update window widgets and some other misc. things like the icons in drop down menus.

Is the blitter still used when a Picasso mode is selected?
Is Picasso just copying the prerendered bitmap to its own screen?

I'm confused, I thought that all these would have been drawn in a system friendly way, bypassing the need for the blitter hardware.

It's entirely possible that I accidentally broke something, but I was specifically trying to just disable the blitter.

Anyone know what's happening?

[Crumb]

If you talk about Picasso96 you have 2 blitters: the amiga blitter and the graphic card blitter. Do not disable the graphic card blitter unless it's really necessary. Keep graphics in fastram if possible.

If you talk about UAE blitter emulation... just choose 32bit blits to speed things up.

[Heiroglyph]

This was a 32bit screen and I was disabling the UAE blitter emulation.

The OS was 3.9 if that matters in any way.

I still haven't figured it out, but I have moved on to other things for a little while.

[Thomas]

This is probably not the right forum to ask such questions. You should go to eab.abime.net and discuss with the WinUAE maintainer directly. He should know best.

[Crumb]

This was a 32bit screen and I was disabling the UAE blitter emulation.

The OS was 3.9 if that matters in any way.

I still haven't figured it out, but I have moved on to other things for a little while.

You don't need to disable UAE blitter emulation, just set it to perform 32bit blits. It is independent of using a 32bit screen or not.

Have you copied latest rtg.library to your hardfile? (It is usually bundled with WinUAE)

With Picasso96 Variable Setter (PVS) disable Amiga Blitter but not Gfx card Blitter.

[Heiroglyph]

It's not really a WinUAE question, it's more of a Picasso programming question.  I'm trying to leave Toni alone, I know he's not a fan of this type of thing.

Basically I'm asking does Picasso96 still try to use the Amiga blitter even though a native screen is not in use?

From what I'm seeing, it looks like in some cases (especially on Intuition) P96 is letting the chipset draw like non-RTG and then copying bitmaps onto the card rather than drawing everything directly through Picasso.

[Crumb]

It's not really a WinUAE question, it's more of a Picasso programming question.  I'm trying to leave Toni alone, I know he's not a fan of this type of thing.

Basically I'm asking does Picasso96 still try to use the Amiga blitter even though a native screen is not in use?

From what I'm seeing, it looks like in some cases (especially on Intuition) P96 is letting the chipset draw like non-RTG and then copying bitmaps onto the card rather than drawing everything directly through Picasso.

You should activate the flag to force p96 to use fastram for all bitmaps (with PVS for example)

UAE*Picasso96 driver doesn't use the graphic card directly like Amiga or Amithlon, it draws everything in the pc ram and later it copies the data to the viewable area so you will never get as much acceleration as a modern native P96/CGX system using a Radeon gfx card for example.

[Heiroglyph]

You should activate the flag to force p96 to use fastram for all bitmaps (with PVS for example)

Ah, thanks for jogging my memory.  I had decided that either P96 worked like that or that I had broken something.

That's a very interesting thing to try.

UAE*Picasso96 driver doesn't use the graphic card directly like Amiga or Amithlon, it draws everything in the pc ram and later it copies the data to the viewable area so you will never get as much acceleration as a modern native P96/CGX system using a Radeon gfx card for example.

Luckily those parts of Amithlon are still mostly available if you look at the kernel patches and the AmigaOSXL source code.  They are pretty straight forward, if not really optimal.

I was thinking of using the Haiku Game Kit or DirectFB on Linux so that it could take advantage of those projects development and their work on hardware acceleration.

I've become side tracked with my real Amigas lately, but that project is still very much on my mind.