Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Darrin on September 02, 2008, 08:09:14 PM
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I was checking my emails this morning and I had the usual "on sale" email from Tiger Direct attempting to get me to part with some cash. One item was a USB to VGA video adapter. In the same category was a USB video card:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3255944&CatId=1428
Assuming some sort of driver could be written, is such a device a viable alternative to expensive Zorro cards on the Amiga via the Deneb card?
I wouldn't mind enjoying "resolutions of up to 1280 x 1024 at 24 bit color" for $65. :-)
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USB video dongles of this kind are horribly slow on full-speed USB2 connections.
I can't imagine they'll be worth a flip on the Amiga, driver or no.
You know how people freak out about "oooh nooo it doesn't refresh fast enough!" regarding Amiga emulators on the PC? Yeah, this'll give them something genuine to complain about.
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B00tDisk wrote:
USB video dongles of this kind are horribly slow on full-speed USB2 connections.
I can't imagine they'll be worth a flip on the Amiga, driver or no.
You know how people freak out about "oooh nooo it doesn't refresh fast enough!" regarding Amiga emulators on the PC? Yeah, this'll give them something genuine to complain about.
LOL. You could be right.
I used Siamese on the Amiga using the normal serial port to retarget 8 bit to 24 bit screens to a PC using it's graphics card in resolutions up to 1024x768 using nothing more than a 68020 with 6MB RAM. It was certainly usable for Workbench and for Word Processing.
I use a Cybervision 64/3D, but it's really used to provide a pretty Workbench as most applications launch into native Amiga screen modes.
For that sort of use this might be OK and it is certainly affordable.
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B00tDisk wrote:
USB video dongles of this kind are horribly slow on full-speed USB2 connections.
I can't imagine they'll be worth a flip on the Amiga, driver or no.
You know how people freak out about "oooh nooo it doesn't refresh fast enough!" regarding Amiga emulators on the PC? Yeah, this'll give them something genuine to complain about.
We're not talking about USB 1.1 full-speed. We're talking about USB 2.0 Highspeed. The Deneb is able to achieve a data rate of more than 8 MB/sec. This is surely slower by a few factors than a real Zorro III card, but still could at least be twice as fast as a Zorro II gfx board.
However, given that these adapters are normally employed on fast PCs, they usually use some kind of lossless compression on the data before sending it over the bus. If this is the case and cannot be turned off, it would really slow down the gfx update considerably.
Anyway, only a few of these adapters have been announced with Linux drivers and reverse engineering on that kind of device could be a bit arkward.
Just today, I found a better one with bith digital DVI and VGA output for 70 EUR ( http://www.pearl.de/a-PX3103-1419.shtml ), but I still consider this too much for just experimenting with it (donation anyone? :) )
With "current" Amiga graphic boards having problems outputting native resolutions like 1280x1024 and higher, and no-one coping with DVI or HDMI output, an USB graphics adapter might be a solution. It wouldn't be very fast, but it would provide the resolutions (up to 1680x1050 in 24 bit).
Just my two cents.
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Thanks for that info Chris. I figured that if Siamese could work then there was some potential here.
I'll throw 20 Euros into the pot if you want to try. Do we have 3 more volunteers for a worthwhile project?
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By the title I thought you were gonna talk about USB2.0 DVBS/T tunner cards and / or video capture cards. Having decent video on the Amiga would be nice.
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To Chris:
If you ever manage to get a working picasso96 driver for any USB VGA dongles, i will surely buy more than one Deneb in the future!
The same will happen if you deliver a VHI driver for a mpeg/tv tuner/capture usb dongle device.
I am very short in cash these days, but i would have sponsored some $$ for that purpose.
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USB video dongles of this kind are horribly slow on full-speed USB2 connections.
As Chris stated already, the DENEB uses a real high speed USB2.0 host.
Just take a look into to E3B website, there are benchmarks for the DENEB publically available - speeds of above 6MB/s are clearly not full speed links.
Michael
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Jose wrote:
By the title I thought you were gonna talk about USB2.0 DVBS/T tunner cards and / or video capture cards. Having decent video on the Amiga would be nice.
There is a "new" USB Video class specification, but unfortunately, this standard is only meant for webcams. V4.1 has the class descriptors and detection for it built in, but that's currently all.
As for DVB-S/T, I'm not watching TV myself for about 10 years, so I'm not really too fond about it writing such a driver -- if anybody wants to do it, I'll happily provide Developer Specs. Also, you have to consider that a classic amiga is definately not fast enough for realtime MPEG2 stream decoding (not considering the fastest PPC amigas), so this class driver would only be reasonable for MorphOS Pegasos/MacMini machines.
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Darrin wrote:
Thanks for that info Chris. I figured that if Siamese could work then there was some potential here.
I'll throw 20 Euros into the pot if you want to try. Do we have 3 more volunteers for a worthwhile project?
Speaking about potential, I think for embedded machines without onboard gfx (aka EFIKA), an adapter that uses less than 2.5W (that's the maximum allowed for USB devices) would be better suited than a Radeon whatsoever. At least for my planned Touchscreen-Car-Computer project :-)
About that "bounty" -- even if I'd get the adapter, this would not come with an obligation to complete the project. As said above, the task would be rather complex.
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platon42 wrote:
We're not talking about USB 1.1 full-speed. We're talking about USB 2.0 Highspeed. The Deneb is able to achieve a data rate of more than 8 MB/sec. This is surely slower by a few factors than a real Zorro III card, but still could at least be twice as fast as a Zorro II gfx board.
However, given that these adapters are normally employed on fast PCs, they usually use some kind of lossless compression on the data before sending it over the bus. If this is the case and cannot be turned off, it would really slow down the gfx update considerably.
Anyway, only a few of these adapters have been announced with Linux drivers and reverse engineering on that kind of device could be a bit arkward.
Just today, I found a better one with both digital DVI and VGA output for 70 EUR ( http://www.pearl.de/a-PX3103-1419.shtml ), but I still consider this too much for just experimenting with it (donation anyone? :) )
With "current" Amiga graphic boards having problems outputting native resolutions like 1280x1024 and higher, and no-one coping with DVI or HDMI output, an USB graphics adapter might be a solution. It wouldn't be very fast, but it would provide the resolutions (up to 1680x1050 in 24 bit).
Just my two cents.
Interesting idea. You are saying that it might be able to run twice as fast as a PicassoII card (which is ZorroII)? I did not realize that my Retina Z3 & PicassoIV cards are supposed to be more than twice as fast as my GVP Spectrum, or PicassoII cards. Shows I am not using them enough to notice the difference, I will have to do something about that. Perhaps the difference in performance is not that great, but the potential of the two different Zorro busses is?
If, and only if, you truly believe that there is a better than 50% chance of success at getting one to work on the Deneb, I will donate up to $20 US dollars through Paypal toward the purchase of a likely USB to HDMI/DVI display adapter. If I were not broke I would buy the adapter of your choice (within reason) for you to testand write drivers for and just ask that you return it to me when you are done, but I am retired and poor now.
I try to support as many Amiga developers as I can, in some small way.
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platon42 wrote:
Darrin wrote:
Thanks for that info Chris. I figured that if Siamese could work then there was some potential here.
I'll throw 20 Euros into the pot if you want to try. Do we have 3 more volunteers for a worthwhile project?
Speaking about potential, I think for embedded machines without onboard gfx (aka EFIKA), an adapter that uses less than 2.5W (that's the maximum allowed for USB devices) would be better suited than a Radeon whatsoever. At least for my planned Touchscreen-Car-Computer project :-)
About that "bounty" -- even if I'd get the adapter, this would not come with an obligation to complete the project. As said above, the task would be rather complex.
I must have been typing my reply at the same time you composed the above.
I would be interested to read more about your Touchscreen-Car-Computer project. I have one of my own, but it is just an Intel Mac Mini attached to a 7" Lilliput touchscreen and dual booting Vista and OSX. It also has a GPS antennae so I can use it for voice command turn-by-turn directions.
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platon42 wrote:
Speaking about potential, I think for embedded machines without onboard gfx (aka EFIKA), an adapter that uses less than 2.5W (that's the maximum allowed for USB devices) would be better suited than a Radeon whatsoever. At least for my planned Touchscreen-Car-Computer project :-)
Sounds interesting. I never had a chance to set up my Efika with MorphOS 2 while I was home as I was too busy with my kids and the Deneb card (24 days off work flew by!) so extra graphics card options are always welcome.
About that "bounty" -- even if I'd get the adapter, this would not come with an obligation to complete the project. As said above, the task would be rather complex.
I absolutely understand and I'm still willing to chip in. Unless my Cybervision breaks down then I personally don't have a need for such a device, but I think it would be great for the community. Besides, you've saved me way more than 20 Euros by providing me a $20 Ethernet option instead of a more expensive Zorro card so it's the least I can do. ;-)
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I would chip in with €20, and I understand that it´s not a sure thing.
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About that "bounty" -- even if I'd get the adapter, this would not come with an obligation to complete the project. As said above, the task would be rather complex.
I understand/agree. I'm willing to donate 20 euros as well. Just let us know if you want to give it a try.
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Seems like there are several variations (http://www.usbgear.com/USBG-DVI2.html)
Very very cool.
Seems like the tally is
arnljot €20
Darrin €20
HyAmi €20
amigadave $20
So seems to me that the total is €60 + $20. Getting there ;) Now we just need Platon42 to accept :)
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by arnljot on 2008/9/3 5:50:16
Seems like the tally is
arnljot €20
Darrin €20
HyAmi €20
amigadave $20
So seems to me that the total is €60 + $20. Getting there ;) Now we just need Platon42 to accept :)
So that's €60 + €13.86 = €73.86
I'll up my contribution to €25 and cover the remainder plus P&P (S&H).
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Chris, if you are interested in developing a class for USB->VGA adapter then gimme a PM.
Several of my closest friends work as hardware designers for DisplayLink (http://www.displaylink.com) I am pretty sure I could get you a developer kit including driver source for linux.
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@chris:
im usually not watching tv either (now and then only, in my girlfriends place), but regularly misuse my amigas for kinda multimedia projects where realtime tv and video surveillance is used for input. so i might throw some money into developement of according drivers. i think there are dvbt-cards decoding mpg streams in hardware but i dont know if they are usb. right now im using elbox voodoo/tv-card combination that lacks dvbt support up till now so an alternative would be nice.
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Most DVB-T PCI cards and (all?) DVB-T USB dongles require MPEG2 software decode. Not really something the Amiga could do well eh?
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im just back from an electronic shop, there are a lot pci tv_cards that are advertised as equipped with hardware mpeg2 decoder for a better performance. i didnt not really found something like that among usb dongles but i cant say i really looked close. i already asked elbox fot dvbt support and they said they might do something but im sure it will take if its gonna be achieved at all
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wawrzon wrote:
there are a lot pci tv_cards that are advertised as equipped with hardware mpeg2 decoder for a better performance
I wouldn't say there was "a lot" of DVB-T PCI TV cards in the first place let alone "a lot" with hardware MPEG decoders.
The majority of DVB cards nowadays use software decoders. (Although quite a few have hardware ENCODERS)
Hauppauge (Pronounced Hop-pog) are the biggest seller of TV cards and in 2005 (when I left the TV hardware industry) all but one of their cards used software decoders.
It's just economics. The cards are much cheaper without one and the PC's today are more than capable of software SDTV decode.
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We need some sort of classic option. Software Hut seem to have sold their last "new" Cybervision 64/3D cards and the only Cybervision card I could find on eBay was listed at $266.
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And this is how Amiga environment should ask the developers to do anything. Not just demands, and demand "I want". This is what is called "community effort" :D.
I can pay 100$ for developing a drivers for Spider :-P... anyone more? Maybe for $1000 Elbox will write something?... I'm dreaming.
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The reasons as well that most of them dont put hardware decoders on them is because they will not work in any version of windows media centre. For them to work they have to pass through the raw stream.
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amigadave wrote:
I would be interested to read more about your Touchscreen-Car-Computer project. I have one of my own, but it is just an Intel Mac Mini attached to a 7" Lilliput touchscreen and dual booting Vista and OSX. It also has a GPS antennae so I can use it for voice command turn-by-turn directions.
It's still in very early state. I've got an EFIKA in a cardboard box "case" with Radeon and a PicoPSU 60W, a 8" TFT touchscreen at 640x480. It's running MorphOS 2.x and the touchscreen can be used as a mouse replacement. The touch screen and the EFIKA are powered via Y-cable from the 12V connector in the car (a nifty Toyota Aygo).
I also received my OBD2 (on board diagnosis) interface construction kit (PCB+components) yesterday that I still need to solder. It will return serial data of the ISO 9141-2 diagnosis port at the weird baudrate of 10400 baud. I still need to dig the protocol, but it will allow reading realtime information such as speed and acceleration. Unfortunately, it seems as if the EFIKA MPC5200B serial driver still needs to be written. Shouldn't be too difficult.
Ah, I need to write a nice, good looking, touch screen compatible GUI for Media Playback (only audio planned) and for diagnosis. I also have a GPS module that can be connected via USB that I might want to make use of, but open and free map material is scarce.
I need more time to finish all of that, but I hope I will some time...
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wawrzon wrote:
im just back from an electronic shop, there are a lot pci tv_cards that are advertised as equipped with hardware mpeg2 decoder for a better performance. i didnt not really found something like that among usb dongles but i cant say i really looked close.
Sending uncompressed video across an USB link easily exhausts or exceeds the raw bandwidth of 480MBit/sec. A 50Hz true color stream would be at a sustained rate of 260MBit/sec. While this is not a problem for a PCI interface, over USB this is too much.
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Darrin wrote:
by arnljot on 2008/9/3 5:50:16
Seems like the tally is
arnljot €20
Darrin €20
HyAmi €20
amigadave $20
So seems to me that the total is €60 + $20. Getting there ;) Now we just need Platon42 to accept :)
So that's €60 + €13.86 = €73.86
I'll up my contribution to €25 and cover the remainder plus P&P (S&H).
Wow. I wouldn't have thought of people comming up with this. If somebody could collect the bucks (I have no PayPal account anymore), buy that thing and send it to me, that would be great. Thanks!
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Hi Platon
I'm always willing to chip in for a project you're working on, because you seem to actually complete your projects, and they work when you do!
I'm good for $40 USD, so just let me know where to send it. Also, if I or someone else collected it for you, could we then send you a cashier's check which you could cash for Euros?
Finally, slightly OT here, but what are USB options for the forthcoming GBA1000? Would a Deneb plug into it?
Thanks again for all you do!
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platon42 wrote:
Wow. I wouldn't have thought of people comming up with this. If somebody could collect the bucks (I have no PayPal account anymore), buy that thing and send it to me, that would be great. Thanks!
It's because we trust you and your abilities. :-)
I'm in the USA, so I'm not a good candidate to do the purchase and sending, but if we have an honest member here in Europe who is willing to do it and who has a Pay Pal account then I'll send him my share of the money if he passes me his details.
How about the guy who runs Versilla? He does Pay Pal, lives in Germany and is 100% trustworthy? Does he post here?
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platon42 wrote:
A 50Hz true color stream would be at a sustained rate of 260MBit/sec.
A RAW decoded digital TV stream would be 601 video (16-bit 4:4:4 Y'CbCr) at PAL SD resolution/refresh would be 720x288x16x50 = 158MBit which would be about manageable with USB2.0 HS
Soon as you go to Desktop size and modern refresh rates then uncompressed RAW goes out of the window for almost any link 1024x768x24x75 = 1.3GBit/s
But I am pretty sure these USB gfx cards do not just get streamed raw RGB data. I would imagine they are very similar in architecture to PCI gfx cards with their own framebuffer RAM and hardware acceleration such as a blitter and line drawing etc. To cope with the much lower bandwidth vs 32-bit 33MHz PCI I would imagine the host tries to buffer and compress the data prior to transfer.
Just gotta hope the compression they perform on the host isn't too CPU hungry for a high end Amiga :-(
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Darrin wrote:
I'm in the USA, so I'm not a good candidate to do the purchase and sending, but if we have an honest member here in Europe who is willing to do it and who has a Pay Pal account then I'll send him my share of the money if he passes me his details.
How about the guy who runs Versilla? He does Pay Pal, lives in Germany and is 100% trustworthy? Does he post here?
Versilla? Do you mean Vesalia.de? Anyway, I'm in Europe too (the Netherlands), but I'd prefer someone from Germany as well. I'll keep an eye on this thread to find out where I can drop off my money.
Just my 2000 cents :-D
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Platon42, I can wire the full amount to you first. Then the pledgers can send me their part of the amount to my paypal.
So I suggest:
1) I(or other) wires full amount up front to Chris
2) Chris confirms receipt of the funds in this thread
3) Pledgers pay their pledged part of the amount to my paypal or whoever else put up the money up front
Statement: When I wire the money to Chris I consider it payment for the following service: That Chris will aquire and look at supporing a USB graphichs card for the Poseidon USB Stack and Deneb USB Card for the Amiga. However, Chris is under no obligation to actually deliver this, this can be due to technical constraints or constraints to his time to spend on this.
Or to quote Chris himself:
Platon42 wrote:
About that "bounty" -- even if I'd get the adapter, this would not come with an obligation to complete the project. As said above, the task would be rather complex.
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platon42 wrote:
wawrzon wrote:
im just back from an electronic shop, there are a lot pci tv_cards that are advertised as equipped with hardware mpeg2 decoder for a better performance. i didnt not really found something like that among usb dongles but i cant say i really looked close.
Sending uncompressed video across an USB link easily exhausts or exceeds the raw bandwidth of 480MBit/sec. A 50Hz true color stream would be at a sustained rate of 260MBit/sec. While this is not a problem for a PCI interface, over USB this is too much.
As one of the at least two contributors from the land of NTSC to help with the purchase of the USB video adapter, I must ask a stupid question. Will your work to write a driver include both PAL and NTSC devices. I assume it will as it is a class of driver you will be working on, but I don't know how those things work, hence the question.
Will the driver work with just one specific adapter? If yes, and it is a PAL adapter that we purchase for you, how will you provide a NTSC frequency driver?
Forgive me if these questions are stupid. (it won't be the first or last time I have written stupid things here) :lol:
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arnljot wrote:
Platon42, I can wire the full amount to you first. Then the pledgers can send me their part of the amount to my paypal.
So I suggest:
1) I(or other) wires full amount up front to Chris
2) Chris confirms receipt of the funds in this thread
3) Pledgers pay their pledged part of the amount to my paypal or whoever else put up the money up front
Statement: When I wire the money to Chris I consider it payment for the following service: That Chris will aquire and look at supporing a USB graphichs card for the Poseidon USB Stack and Deneb USB Card for the Amiga. However, Chris is under no obligation to actually deliver this, this can be due to technical constraints or constraints to his time to spend on this.
That sounds perfect! I'll send you my share by PayPal assuming Chris agrees and you're ready to send the funds.
Cheers.
Darrin
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i can try to get hold of hardware in question and send it to chris. btw i do not need no refunds in this case. but what i wonder is what kind of gfx card are we getting here, does it have some 3d capabilities such as could be used by w3d or so?
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@wawrzon
I don't think w3d will be in the mix, a pure 2D card only I think. Classic amigas have little or no 3D support ouside software w3d drivers or permedia. I'm not even sure if there is warp3d drivers for voodoo? Also, wawrzon, are you located in Germany?
@amigadave
Very good questions. I think that it's not PAL or NTSC as it's PC. And that PAL or NTSC only comes into play when we're talking TV screens. But better that Chris looks into this and answers it, or perhaps alexh
@darrin
Yes, but like you say; this has to be okay with Chris. Also wawrzon has offered to arrange for him to get hardware - so chris has to opt for the solution which suits him best, not necessarily what suits us :)
@thread
Lets keep the specs to a first version limited: Can we have workbench on a LCD over USB. Then if that's feasible and implemented, let's only then see if there is any room for improvement/enhancement.
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Does chris have any experience writing P96 drivers?
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yes im located in berlin, germany. i can easily purchuase from pearl.de but will first check at local electronics store.
i too expect it will be pure 2d but wanted to check for 3d support since i assume this could be used to offload the main cpu and bus transfer (restricted by zorro and usb2) even for 2d graphics and get some reasonably fast graphics anyway.
voodoo3 has warp3d support through mediator drivers by the way (yes i know, it is a hack). i do not have this working through @ the mom. and: yes os3.x has very little 3d support but some rudimentary librarys exis that could be updated and from what i understood the people on amiforce.de are working on some kind of opengl support inside amiblitz but i could be wrong. (there was a talk of opengl includes anyway)
what concerns os4, i understand that minigl is being updated, but that doesnt concerns the classic users that much since 3.9 is better choice for a "deneb-system".
well, im off to shop first.
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ah, and how about this:
http://www.diwa-shop.de/idealo.jsp?artId=0-61-DA-70820
would it be too much for a classic (say even with a ppc)?
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@bloodline
I guess Platon42 needs a P96 driver if he wants to test this, and has thought of this when he mentioned the product which he'd looked at. Although, I think he can write such a driver, Chris himself is the one most qualified to answer that question. So you should direct your question to him, and not the thread :)
@wawrzon
The link is dead. Can you accept paypal from us who have pledged support?
@Platon42
I guess/hope too that the Z3 DMA speed should be sufficient, as the driver would use the draw functions in the USB card and only copy rasters as needed from the system memory. But alexh's friends should confirm how these cards work. The full screen raster of what's projected to the user is composed and built by a graphics card, and hopefully this is how those USB thingy-madingies work... :-P
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Can I just point out that I use CybergraphX 4. ;-) :lol:
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@platon42
I think about making sane backend port for my scanner (Plustek S24). I have looked on Your site but there isn't any developer kit for poseidon. Includes and examples are included in MOS SDK but there is no autodocs for Your usb stack. Where can i download it ?
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the link is not dead, but in case u cannot access it for some reason this is what ive meant:
Digitus Videokarte USB2.0 Video Grabber DA-70820
to clarify:i do not expect a 060 based amiga to be able to decompress and display full blown 768or720x576 avi or mpg2 video in realtime by itself. i thought of some kind of tandem like a pci_tv_card and f.i. voodoo3 with its overlay function on mediator. using such a configuration i can easily put video_input in bacground of an amiga animation just like a simple color_keying genlock would do on aga. the question is: if said usb_gfx_dongle woud support something like that or if there are any other devieces capable of.
well back from shop at the moment, but they denied the existence of such hw. so if chris accepts i will order the piece. as i said i do not need any refunds. there are a lot of developments still left to support. :)
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ok, the piece has been ordered. i hope it arrives soon. i'll keep u posted.
@platon42: is this ur current adress i in my deneb manual? otherwise pm me where to send it, please.
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wawrzon wrote:
ok, the piece has been ordered. i hope it arrives soon. i'll keep u posted.
@platon42: is this ur current adress i in my deneb manual? otherwise pm me where to send it, please.
PM me with your PayPal email address when you're ready and I'll send you my share.
Thanks for making the effort (and thanks to Chris for looking into this).
Darrin
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alexh wrote:
A RAW decoded digital TV stream would be 601 video (16-bit 4:4:4 Y'CbCr) at PAL SD resolution/refresh would be 720x288x16x50 = 158MBit which would be about manageable with USB2.0 HS
Hate to disagree, but DVB and DVD are all 4:2:0, so it's rather:
Y: 720x576x25x8 = 82,944,000 bps
'Cb: 360x288x25x8 = 20,736,000 bps
Cr: dito = 20,736,000 bps
sum = 124,416,000 bps
as long as you keep it Y'CbCr, RGB 4:4:4 is ~250 Mbps.
Count me in for another 10€. I live in Germany and could very well handle the transaction and sending to Chris. I don't think I'll ever buy a Deneb (don't do that much with Amy really), but like to donate to something productive. I think the best would be to let Chris select the specific adapter first - it might get pretty hard to get low level developer specs for most parts...
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I've discovered the server software for all DisplayLink products is proprietory. They are not going to release the code in any form other than binaries for windows :-(
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@thread
Slow down a bit:)
Chris aka plato42 has not yet accepted to do this, also he has just indicated one device, not said 'this one'.
@alex
Could your friends indicate how they operate, and how much work is on the device, and how much in software. Also, could some linux sweet talk work, or that it's amiga so no threat?:)
Could they at least indicate witch chips are used so manuals could be sourced?
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arnljot wrote:
Could your friends indicate how they operate. how much work is on the device and how much in software.
I got a tidbit of info. From the small conversation we had, theirs appears to be about 80% software and 20% hardware.
arnljot wrote:
Also, could some linux sweet talk work, or that it's amiga so no threat? :)
They said no. But I have just heard from one of them that they have already ported their work to MacOSX
arnljot wrote:
Could they at least indicate which chips are used so manuals could be sourced?
Erm, they use THEIR chips. They do not sell products direct (AFAIK) they sell a HW & SW solution which companies integrate into their products (http://us.kensington.com/html/13875.html). They do not distribute anything but high-level datasheets.
http://techgage.com/article/displaylink_-_multi-display_setups_with_usb/1
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well, the way i read it chris has accepted to look into the case as soon as somone supports him with hardware he pointed to. it is naturally up to his good will.
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amigadave wrote:
As one of the at least two contributors from the land of NTSC to help with the purchase of the USB video adapter, I must ask a stupid question. Will your work to write a driver include both PAL and NTSC devices.
Will the driver work with just one specific adapter?
First, we're talking here about a driver for USB graphics adapters. This thread is not about writing a driver for a USB *digitizer* dongle that would digitize and stream an external video source to the host computer. In a previous post I made clear that this would not make sense for 68k Amigas, and probably also not really for PPC Amigas. The MPEG1/2 or MPEG4 stream send by these adapters is far to CPU intense to decode to the graphics card in realtime (e.g. to watch TV).
The output format is probably freely configurable within the limits of the DAC. I don't know if PAL or NTSC can be driven by the chipset. The main use is for high-resolution TFTs though.
And regarding your question with the specificy: Yes, the driver would only work with one adapter, with the same kind of chipset.
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wawrzon wrote:
i can try to get hold of hardware in question and send it to chris. btw i do not need no refunds in this case. but what i wonder is what kind of gfx card are we getting here, does it have some 3d capabilities such as could be used by w3d or so?
No 3D support planned.
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bloodline wrote:
Does chris have any experience writing P96 drivers?
No, I don't, and I wouldn't write a P96 driver rather than a cybergraphix driver because I have access to the development material (and sources) there and the developer of CGX is part of the MorphOS team that I can frequently ask, if I'm stuck somewhere.
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wawrzon wrote:
ah, and how about this:
http://www.diwa-shop.de/idealo.jsp?artId=0-61-DA-70820
would it be too much for a classic (say even with a ppc)?
Probably.. If I'll ever write the UVC webcam class driver and you find a grabber that also uses the USB Video Class standard, we will find it out.
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arnljot wrote:
@bloodline
I guess Platon42 needs a P96 driver if he wants to test this, and has thought of this when he mentioned the product which he'd looked at. Although, I think he can write such a driver, Chris himself is the one most qualified to answer that question. So you should direct your question to him, and not the thread :)
@Platon42
I guess/hope too that the Z3 DMA speed should be sufficient, as the driver would use the draw functions in the USB card and only copy rasters as needed from the system memory. But alexh's friends should confirm how these cards work. The full screen raster of what's projected to the user is composed and built by a graphics card, and hopefully this is how those USB thingy-madingies work... :-P
I indeed think that I would be able to write such a driver. But I'd make it CGX, not P96.
While I am sure the device has its own frame buffer, I'm not sure about the blitter capabilities of the device. In the worst case, all changes to the framebuffer have to be made locally and then transferred back to the USB adapter. But I really guess that there is at least some support there.
I'm not sure if this the worst case, but I expect the adapter to "simply" expose the chipsets register set and some kind of memory bus over USB control and bulk transfers. Maybe even ISO transfers, but that's no problem for the Deneb at least.
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wawrzon wrote:
ok, the piece has been ordered. i hope it arrives soon. i'll keep u posted.
@platon42: is this ur current adress i in my deneb manual? otherwise pm me where to send it, please.
Which piece exactly did you order? Hopefully not the video grabber... :-(
My current address is not in the manual, please PM me, in case it is needed.
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Which piece exactly did you order? Hopefully not the video grabber...
no, exactly what you wanted to have i hope:
http://www.pearl.de/a-PX3103-1419.shtml
i will pm you as soon it arrives at my door.
the videograbber comes next. lol.
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@platon42:
and as for the DA-70820 videograbber i cannot find any info if it is compatible with uvc. probably the easiest way to determine this was to buy it and try it out since it isnt that expensive. i think, i will look into it on my peecee. apart of that i think it might be really interesting to have uvc driver so if you plan on this, i would be happy to be of any assistance i am able of (sorry, not a coder).
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"Sending uncompressed video across an USB link easily exhausts or exceeds the raw bandwidth of 480MBit/sec. A 50Hz true color stream would be at a sustained rate of 260MBit/sec. While this is not a problem for a PCI interface, over USB this is too much."
Isn't a VGA usb card sending almost raw data too ? Maybe there are cards with some form of lighter compression that can be decoded with the CPU. It's probably cumbersome to send raw video to USB bus even on a PC
(?).
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How can I help :-?
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redrumloa wrote:
How can I help :-?
You could give us Angelina Jolie's cellphone number and the IP address to connect to her wireless shower-cam.
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You could give us Angelina Jolie's cellphone number and the IP address to connect to her wireless shower-cam.
For a start. :roflmao:
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Jose wrote:
Isn't a VGA usb card sending almost raw data too ?
If they work like I think they work, then some composition and all the refresh is done by USB devices themselves reducing the amount of bus bandwidth. Once the gfx data is transferred to it's RAM unlike RAW video it does not need 100% screen updates every 1/25th of a second if the image does not change.
For VGA usb cards I fear that the host has to compress this data on the fly. Perhaps too much for all but the most powerful Amiga. But we'll see.
VNC works on the Amiga (just) and that uses an 11Mbit ethernet connection.
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the video adapter has just arrived. im going to forward it to chris as soon as its possible.
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wawrzon wrote:
the video adapter has just arrived. im going to forward it to chris as soon as its possible.
The eagle has landed. wawa personally came along at my office and handed the box over. But it is uses same DisplayLink technology (quick test on my office's laptop) that alexh told we won't get our holds on. I will try a short analyser run on it anyway.
But about false advertising: The adapter sold at Pearl only goes up to 1280x1024 and not to 1600x1200 as they say on the website. wawa should report that.
It uses the LibUSB, which is LGPL & GPL, so at least here we could demand the source code for. I doubt, it will be any use though.
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wawrzon wrote:
the video adapter has just arrived. im going to forward it to chris as soon as its possible.
PM me when you're ready for my share of the funds.
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Just got a DeLock 61644 (http://www.delock.com/produkte/gruppen/USB+Adapter/USB_20_to_DVI_VGA_HDMI_adapter_61644.html) USB-DVI adapter for evaluation with our notebooks (all are docking and TFT equipped, but DVI-capable machines are out of the budget). We'll be testing it in the next couple of days, afterwards I can offer it for extended testing, maybe it's of use.
This adapter was specifically recommended by our hardware provider - let's see what it can accomplish.
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Darrin wrote:
wawrzon wrote:
the video adapter has just arrived. im going to forward it to chris as soon as its possible.
PM me when you're ready for my share of the funds.
me too
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Well... what can I say, probably *all* USB Display Adapters use the same kind of chipset: The DisplayLink DL-120 or DL-160 (latter has the higher resolutions). I opened the box and the thing consists of only three chips. The very fat ASIC BGA DL-120, a DVI encoder chip and 16MB of DDR memory. 16 MB, seems a lot for an adapter that can only display 1280x1024 in 24 bit. But then again, it surely has at least two frame buffers (double buffering) to avoid tearing effects and probably a rather large decompression buffer for the compressed data. The device only has one bulk output with 512 bytes per packet and on interrupt in endpoint. The rest is done via control transfers.
This means, there is no way the to read back pixels from the framebuffer on the adapter, only a "write to memory" feature. This means the Amiga has to have a copy of the current framebuffer in memory. One could save the memory for the delta buffer, if the MMU would be used to calculate accesses (like the Savage Shapeshifter driver).
Except for the decompression, I expect the device to be rather simple hardwarewise -- maybe the registers of the DVI encoder chip are directly accessible over control transfers. If that's the case, luckily the docs of the chip are available on the net.
I'll keep you informed how it turns out. But I really need some more sleep...
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Zac67 wrote:
Just got a DeLock 61644 (http://www.delock.com/produkte/gruppen/USB+Adapter/USB_20_to_DVI_VGA_HDMI_adapter_61644.html) USB-DVI adapter for evaluation with our notebooks (all are docking and TFT equipped, but DVI-capable machines are out of the budget).
The DeLock looks *exactly* like the one wawa provided. If can determine the DL-chipset by opening it. I would like to know if it is the DL-160, because according to the specs, it should support 1600x1280, which mine doesn't :-(
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hi all! just back from munich this morning and see there has been quite some traffic on the thread. chris get enough sleep, please. it is not all that urgent.
But about false advertising: The adapter sold at Pearl only goes up to 1280x1024 and not to 1600x1200 as they say on the website. wawa should report that.
is it definite? if so i could fill a complaint, but pearl isnt that dependable anyway.
@all: im repeating this for th last time: thanks folks, but i do not need a refund on this. im happy to support.
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wawrzon wrote:
But about false advertising: The adapter sold at Pearl only goes up to 1280x1024 and not to 1600x1200 as they say on the website. wawa should report that.
is it definite? if so i could fill a complaint, but pearl isnt that dependable anyway.
Yes, that's definitely a fact. I opened the box and is says DL-120 there. Only the DL-160 is able to provide the 1600x1200 resolution (and also I cannot set the resolution on my screen at work).
PS: Sleep is overrated :crazy:
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ok. so we will probably have to find some dongle with dl-160 later but i hope what u have now is enough to prove a point either way.
PS: i love to sleep, and i have to catch up now after i spent the night ina train
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platon42 wrote:
maybe the registers of the DVI encoder chip are directly accessible over control transfers. If that's the case, luckily the docs of the chip are available on the net.
The docs of the DVI chip?
platon42 wrote:
It uses the LibUSB, which is LGPL & GPL, so at least here we could demand the source code for. I doubt, it will be any use though.
That is not a bad idea. In our office some managers are dreading a phone call asking about this subject. GPL software has been used in some products and legally no-engineer knows where we stand when it comes to releasing part/all of our source code.
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The DeLock really uses the same chip, but it's a DL-160 - so the high resolutions should work as advertised/mentioned in the 'manual'. But I bet it's the very same board design (=reference design from chip manufacturer).
(http://www.psyma.com/temp/USB_DVI_f.jpg)
(http://www.psyma.com/temp/USB_DVI_r.jpg)
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wawrzon wrote:
@all: im repeating this for th last time: thanks folks, but i do not need a refund on this. im happy to support.
So where do you want me to send the money? :-?
That's very kind of you.
In that case, I have another 25 Euros here which I'm willing to pledge to any other useful USB device that Chris would like to examine in the future for developing possible Posseidon drivers.
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@darrin: thats an attitude i appreciate
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Zac67 wrote:
The DeLock really uses the same chip, but it's a DL-160 - so the high resolutions should work as advertised/mentioned in the 'manual'. But I bet it's the very same board design (=reference design from chip manufacturer).
Except for the DL-160, my adapter has the same components, even the same amount of memory (16 MB).
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@platon42:
hi chris. i quote here the answer iv received from pearl on my complaint. seems to me bllsht since 1600x1200 is a 4:3 resolution but wanted to hear what u say.
@all: sorry for a german quote but this is just support issue i wanted to notify chris about.
Ihre Anfrage an den PEARL-Kundenservice
Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
vielen Dank für Ihre Anfrage und das uns entgegengebrachte Vertrauen.
Auflösungen von 1680x1050 oder 1600x1200 können nur auf 22 Zoll
Bildschirmen mit 16:10 bzw. 16:9 Breitbildformat ausgewählt werden.
Dass Sie nur bis maximal 1280x1024 Pixel einstellen können liegt
vermutlich daran, dass Sie einen 17 oder 19 Zoll Monitor besitzen.
Bitte korrigieren Sie uns falls dies nicht zutreffen sollte.
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wawrzon wrote:
@platon42:
hi chris. i quote here the answer iv received from pearl on my complaint. seems to me bllsht since 1600x1200 is a 4:3 resolution but wanted to hear what u say.
Yeah, that is bull indeed (I had a monitor connected with a natural resolution of 1600x1050). They should open the box and see for theirselves that it only has the DL-120 inside and not the DL-160 that is needed for the higher resolutions. Also, when searching for the product number "Y-2240" you will find that this device has also been rebranded as "Unitek USB 2.0 External graphic card" with the description "Enjoy resolutions of up to 1200x 1040 at 32 bit color".
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i actually have some annoying experience with them, so i think they have kinda regular policy to play dumb as long its possible. didnt find the other "Unitek USB 2.0 External graphic card" on teir hp though. we can send the piece back in if you wish, however it is probably unnecessary in this case.
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platon42 wrote:
Except for the decompression, I expect the device to be rather simple hardwarewise -- maybe the registers of the DVI encoder chip are directly accessible over control transfers. If that's the case, luckily the docs of the chip are available on the net.
I'll keep you informed how it turns out. But I really need some more sleep...
The thing seems to use some XOR encryption/scrambling with a period of 4095 (LFSR?). Luckily, I found out that it can also operate in an unencrypted "debug" mode, which makes it much easier to analyse the protocol :-) A university friend of mine is helping me as he has a similar aim by writing a driver for linux for it :-)
BTW: x86 assembler sucks big time.
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Nice to see progress here, even if everything is open still.
I started with x86 assembler many years ago, but detested it so much I couldn't stay on - it's like riding an open oxcart after knowing the 'Rolls Royce' 68k version...
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great news, thanks for keeping up with this, chris!
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platon42 wrote:
BTW: x86 assembler sucks big time.
You looking at the Intel MacOS drivers?
DisplayLinkGA
DisplayLinkDriver
I thought with them being beta they might have accidentally left in source level debugging but no such luck!
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alexh wrote:
platon42 wrote:
BTW: x86 assembler sucks big time.
You looking at the Intel MacOS drivers?
DisplayLinkGA
DisplayLinkDriver
I thought with them being beta they might have accidentally left in source level debugging but no such luck!
I only got a PPC Mac, and they unfortunately don't provide drivers for PPC Macs. Hence, I've been looking in the wintel drivers. The actual "driver" logic is in the DisplayLinkManager.exe, which in my version does contain a lot of kprintf() debug statements, that led in the right direction already. There are a few debug symbols too, but not in the important parts.
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The MacOSX intel beta drivers would probably be a better place to start? They have no hardware acceleration etc.
Use TransMac to open the .dmg stuffit file and 7Zip to open the .pak file
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alexh wrote:
The MacOSX intel beta drivers would probably be a better place to start? They have no hardware acceleration etc.
Use TransMac to open the .dmg stuffit file and 7Zip to open the .pak file
The cruel & crucial point is still that I have to read that brainf*cking x86 code. Anyway. I'm at a stage now that I have identified and understood the display memory (16MB) accessing functions and can display a nice gradient. I also have found the registers that are used for the frame buffer start addresses, so I can actually switch between two memory locations now.
I have yet to find out the calculation for the video registers (I'm using a pre-recorded setup right now) and the delta-compression scheme, among other things of course.
But things are progressing well...
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platon42 wrote:
The cruel & crucial point is still that I have to read that brainf*cking x86 code. Anyway. I'm at a stage now that I have identified and understood the display memory (16MB) accessing functions and can display a nice gradient. I also have found the registers that are used for the frame buffer start addresses, so I can actually switch between two memory locations now.
I have yet to find out the calculation for the video registers (I'm using a pre-recorded setup right now) and the delta-compression scheme, among other things of course.
But things are progressing well...
Well done Chris. I'm glad to see you're still working on this as I thought it was a dead end. I guess you like a good challenge. :-D
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>The Deneb is able to achieve a data rate of more than 8 >MB/sec. This is surely slower by a few factors than a >real Zorro III card, but still could at least be twice as >fast as a Zorro II gfx board.
Thats a great speed that most amiga systems dont reach.
I get results of 2 voodoo3 systems they transfer only 8 MB/sec to GFX card.
I think the A1200 bus is 16 bit, but clock is 2*faster as Z2 that do only 4 MB/sec.
Z3 cards do 13 mb/sec i have Piccolo3 merlin.cybervisionPPC do 17 MB
I currently have done a SDL with hardware 3d support, game that support it you can download here.
http://artishq.wordpress.com/
sdljump.
On my cybervision PPC i work ok, but it work too slow on Voodoo cards.maybe somebody know more what can do to avoide the texture limit of 256*256 of voodoo Cards
3D hardware operation statistics
--------------------------------
Rasterization compatibility check failed due to the
following reasons:
2532: texture too large for perspective texture mapping
Rasterization statistics
Number of points drawn using 3D hardware: 0
Number of lines drawn using 3D hardware: 0
Number of triangles drawn using 3D hardware: 0
Number of quads drawn using 3D hardware: 393
But to make out of a amiga a good hardware that is no shame, USB2 cards are excelent when they have a directx10 chip.
Same as Cuda
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html
If there are some USB2 cards that support pixelshader and are full programable i plan to enhance the codegenerator that it can generate ATI Pixelsahader code from amiblitz syntax (only ATI seem release docs to build driver or write pixelshader)
It is not more work as i do 2001, when i add codegenerator support for 68k fpu.
also there is no need to support full datatypes as byte word.only long and float is enough.
on winuae can pixelshader programs currently written,so it can use on winuae too.
this gfx cards have RAM from 512 MB upto 1 GB Ram and have more more ram also compare with amiga ng Systems.
So a classic amiga can get a real rocket with less money, no CPU can get the power a cheap radeon 42000 GFX chip can get, because the memory Interface of GFX Card is much faster than on PC hardware.
>However, given that these adapters are normally employed >on fast PCs, they usually use some kind of lossless >compression on the data before sending it over the bus.
because s3tc support on hardware is a lossy compression, this adapters or cards use the pixelshaders to decompress data.
maybe there is a USB to PCIe adapter somewhere out, and a cheap directx 10card can add ???
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In case no-one noticed, new Linux GPL'ed drivers are available:
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libdlo
I haven't checked the code yet, but seems this might be very helpful when writing an amiga driver...
Mark
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In case no-one noticed, new Linux GPL'ed drivers are available:
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libdlo
I haven't checked the code yet, but seems this might be very helpful when writing an amiga driver...
Mark
The lib is not that helpful yet, though DisplayLink have announced that they will extend it to also support "a" compression, whatever that means. There is more information about internal workings on our butterbrot site:
http://floe.butterbrot.org/displaylink/doku.php
If I'm going to pick up on it, it's going to be after the AROS Port of Poseidon. The Linux and X window guys are currently poking around the lib (but they are not really happy), so I'd wait some time to see what they find out...
PS: There's also a mailing list for the DisplayLink stuff, if you want to join it, contact FloE under the address echtler at fs dot tum dot de.
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Has there been any forward motion on USB video for the Deneb?
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Platon
This is a cool project glad to see the progress. Is there any way for this kind of driver for Subway usb?
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Is there any way for this kind of driver for Subway usb?
Unlikely to be usable even if there were. I suspect there is not enough bandwidth on the clockport?
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Has there been any forward motion on USB video for the Deneb?
No, don't think so.
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No, don't think so.
Well, damn. Hey, while I have your attention, are you still updating Poseidon for AOS3? I have a couple of things I would like to submit to you: USB audio device being recognized as USB Audio?????????? (or something like that,) and the NDIS port on a SonyEricsson phone.
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Well, damn. Hey, while I have your attention, are you still updating Poseidon for AOS3?
Not if I don't need to.
I have a couple of things I would like to submit to you: USB audio device being recognized as USB Audio?????????? (or something like that,) and the NDIS port on a SonyEricsson phone.
A lot of USB devices come with broken names (if that's what you see). Poseidon replaces illegal characters (UCS-16 space beyond ISO-Latin1 and below 32) with '?' letters.
No support for (R)NDIS planned. Looked at some years ago and considered it not worthy.
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After reading the entire thread I put together the quotes I found most useful..
Well... what can I say, probably *all* USB Display Adapters use the same kind of chipset: The DisplayLink DL-120 or DL-160 (latter has the higher resolutions). I opened the box and the thing consists of only three chips. The very fat ASIC BGA DL-120, a DVI encoder chip and 16MB of DDR memory. 16 MB, seems a lot for an adapter that can only display 1280x1024 in 24 bit. But then again, it surely has at least two frame buffers (double buffering) to avoid tearing effects and probably a rather large decompression buffer for the compressed data. The device only has one bulk output with 512 bytes per packet and on interrupt in endpoint. The rest is done via control transfers.
This means, there is no way the to read back pixels from the framebuffer on the adapter, only a "write to memory" feature. This means the Amiga has to have a copy of the current framebuffer in memory. One could save the memory for the delta buffer, if the MMU would be used to calculate accesses (like the Savage Shapeshifter driver).
Except for the decompression, I expect the device to be rather simple hardwarewise -- maybe the registers of the DVI encoder chip are directly accessible over control transfers. If that's the case, luckily the docs of the chip are available on the net.
The cruel & crucial point is still that I have to read that brainf*cking x86 code. Anyway. I'm at a stage now that I have identified and understood the display memory (16MB) accessing functions and can display a nice gradient. I also have found the registers that are used for the frame buffer start addresses, so I can actually switch between two memory locations now.
I have yet to find out the calculation for the video registers (I'm using a pre-recorded setup right now) and the delta-compression scheme, among other things of course.
new Linux GPL'ed drivers are available:
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libdlo
The lib is not that helpful yet, though DisplayLink have announced that they will extend it to also support "a" compression, whatever that means. There is more information about internal workings on our butterbrot site:
http://floe.butterbrot.org/displaylink/doku.php
If I'm going to pick up on it, it's going to be after the AROS Port of Poseidon. The Linux and X window guys are currently poking around the lib (but they are not really happy), so I'd wait some time to see what they find out...
PS: There's also a mailing list for the DisplayLink stuff, if you want to join it, contact FloE under the address echtler at fs dot tum dot de.
What's the current status on the USB commanded display adapter for Amiga project?
I found the project intriguing ! ;)