GRex PCI + Voodoo 3 3000 16 MB + LAN + Sound

[x56h34]

Let me clear up some facts. :-)

I think that Lord Spider is basically talking out of his ass. What he does  in his "tests" is this. He simply installs the latest Grex flashrom onto his rev. 0 BPPC card, and then plugs it in together with a Grex1200 busboard. He looks at the list of connected PCI cards (through the BPPC/Grex early boot PCI menu) and he sees all of them in the list, including Voodoo. He assumes that it works and he advertises it as "Grex compatible". This is of course incorrect and very misleading.

The point where you actually realize that your rev. 0 BPPC card will be incompatible with Grex1200 is when you try to "turn on" the Voodoo 3 driver, which of course will only work with a rev.2 card. CGX v4 simply can't see it and even if it does you would get errors if you try to set up screenmodes (e.g. heavy graphics corruption or a totally black screen).

I believe that Grex1200 can only be used with rev. 0 BPPC cards if you plan on using just a sound PCI and ethernet PCI card. RTG is not possible if you don't upgrade to rev. 2.

[x56h34]

@Effy:

Of course. Especially with items such as PPC cards. :-)

[x56h34]

@lordspider:

You are being misleading again. I know that if you use the original, outdated...old firmware, things work as the original intention was by DCE...however quite slow...and Voodoo 3 capability is not being utilized to its true potential.

Originally, DCE knew that a lot of Phase 5 produced BPPC cards (perhaps 95% of them out there) were revision 0, so they utilized the firmware to be in compliance with this fact, as they needed this compatibility in order to have a market at all.

As the competition grew, they needed some improvements to their busboard performance, so they made a new standard...revision 2 BPPC required!

The latest firmware which requires BPPC logic to be revision 2 will not work with a Voodoo 3 card, period. This is a known fact. It is a very important update to any BPPC card that is to be used with a BVision or Grex as it provides better power management and fixes a lot of issues which originally concerned BVision usage. BVision will happily work with revision 0 PPC cards, however even for it I would recommend a revision 2 PPC card, however this is not a must.

If you want to use the original old revision (was it 1.3?) of firmware, go ahead. Things will..."work"...but you will have a joke of a busboard, crawling compared to other solutions out there.

If you want the regular, speedy Grex compatibility, you need 2.2 flashrom and a revision 2 BPPC card. Your eBay description fails to mention this.

[x56h34]

@lordspider:

I'm sorry if this offends you but:

A. You are either a liar

or

B. The first one to experience this new phenomenon.

I would suggest doing a google search, or better yet doing a Yahoo! Groups search for the Grex mailing-list and see if there is one single person that in the past or present can confirm your results.

[x56h34]

@lordspider:

So far I've had about 6 BPPC cards in my posession that were revision 0. I've tried a few of them with Grex1200 and they didn't work. One had problems with Voodoo (glitchy graphics...really unusable) and the other would just give me a black screen. The remaining revision 0 cards I never tried as I assumed that they wouldn't work either.

Any revision 2 card that I tried worked fine with Grex (e.g. good Voodoo display).

I don't know...from experience and from other people's testimonials I am convinced that you really need a revision 2 card, but maybe I am wrong. It's not easy to test without obtaining a lot of ppc cards again. :-( I only have two left and I think that both are revision 0. Perhaps when I find some free time, I'll give it another try with the PPC card that I don't use, but my hopes are kind of low.

[x56h34]

@lordspider:

I remebmer that originally Phase 5 released BPPC cards which they internally referred to as v1.1. These were the first cards released...buggy with BVision usage and Phase 5 offered an upgrade for free to v1.2, in order to fix the problems.

Remember, both v1.1 and v1.2 are only internal Phase 5 names...these are both reported as revision 0 by boardtype.

How does one know that their card is v1.1 (revision 0)? It won't work with BVision without glitches, and in order to work in any way, you must supply power to the A1200 motherboard, through the floppy connector, and you still get bugs and glitches.

How does one know that their card is v1.2 (revision 0)? It works with BVision fine. You could supply power to the A1200 motherboard through the floppy connector, but only if your overall usage seems unstable (system crashes after a while).

How does one know that their card is the revision 2 (latest)? I guess if boardtype reports it as revision 2. Other than that, these work fine with BVision, and no power to the A1200 motherboard floppy connector is required (unless you really want to make sure, but even without it I've had a very excellent, stable usage), and are Grex compatible.

Now...it could be that v1.2 which Phase 5 calls internally (still reported as revision 0 by boardtype) is actually the missing link in our little dilema here, which may sometime work with Grex, or may even perfectly work with it.

It could be that DCE simply wanted to avoid overall confusion and they stated that revision 2 is needed.

It's a guess. Nothing more. :-)

[x56h34]

@Effy:

Hehe, well it's a hobby. It's fun to mess around with Amiga hardware so you learn the tricky parts as you go. I guess I learned it through testing, reading, beign around when  cards were comming out, etc. The previous post was speculation in some parts. I can't guarantee that I am right. It's just a big extremely well educated guess. :-)

It's not so hard to pick up the clues about Amiga hardware. Just use google groups, get a cup of coffee, and read away. You can read interesting articles written by commodore staff/amiga hardware & software companies themselves, during the late 80s and all the way upto present time.

[x56h34]

Another thing to consider (more educated speculation :-)) is that there are so many different versions of BPPC cards out there.

Some have 040 and 603e.
Some have 060 and 603e.
Some have 040 and 603e and SCSI.
Some have 060 and 603e and SCSI.

603e power requirement varies depending on the type, e.g. a 160Mhz requires less power than a 240Mhz.

040 requires more power than an 060.

SCSI on-board eats up even more power, especially if used together with an 040 and a 240Mhz 603e chip.

Maybe this is why the logic update to revision 2 by DCE is the only guaranteed way of using Grex? Could it be that it's all down to the power management? Maybe DCE figured that a certain power need is in order, so that Grex could work stable, so they recommend revision 2, but on the other hand cards that don't eat up much power due to a certain combination of on-board features (low power usage) can get away with it, and work with Grex? :-)

[x56h34]

I guess the new rule for rev. 0 BlizzardPPC usage with Grex1200 busboard is..."try it and see if it works". :-)

[x56h34]

I'm tempted to give it another try.
Right now my Grex1200 is stored away in a closet, and the A1200T/PPC is connected to a Mediator 1200 busboard.
I'm kind of lazy to do it right away just to see if it would work, as it would involve flashing the PPC card to Grex compatible firmware and a lot of extra work in preparing the OS3.9 system partition, etc., etc.

I'll most likely try it out over a boring long weekend or something. :-)

[x56h34]

@thread:

I've tried installing Grex1200 again this weekend in my Elbox Power Tower 1200, and it wouldn't work with my BlizzardPPC rev. 0.

I've flashed the card with the latest Grex compatible firmware (2.2).

In the BlizzardPPC early-boot-menu, by clicking on the PCI button, I could see all the PCI cards connected to the Grex busboard. Voodoo 3, Terratec 128i, and Realtek 8029.

This means that Grex detects everything OK, however if I try to connect a VGA monitor to the Voodoo output, I get only a black screen. Right away this seems strange, as Voodoo 3 (just like BVision) should be able to display the BlizzardPPC boot menu on your monitor. Mine doesn't, and I even made sure that Enable 31khz display is set.

After installing OS3.9 with both boing bags, and the latest version of blizkick, I installed the grex drivers and I've updated CGX to v4 through the 42.7 update file.

By clicking on the CGXMode file in SYS:Prefs, it doesn't load up. SnoopDos shows that CGXMode tried to load some tooltypes from the Voodoo3 monitor file, but when I actually look at the tooltypes of Voodoo3, there are none. :-?

I haven't fooled around with Grex in about a year and my memory is not 100% fresh on how to exactly install all the drivers, so I was wondering if there's something that I missed? AFAIR, CGXMode should simply load up and detect my Voodoo 3 card, however I'm not sure if there's a step that I may have missed. LordSpider, any tips?

Also, when I run the latest pciscan file from shell, I can also see all the pci cards connected to the Grex busboard just fine.

[x56h34]

lordspider wrote:
How did you connected the PCI cards? I don't know if it may be important, but my G-Rex had LAN in first slot (closest to the BPPC), Terratec in 3 slot and Voodoo in 5 slot.

Voodoo 3 in first, Ethernet in second, and Sound in third slot.

I also tried using only Voodoo 3 connected in first, and only Voodoo 3 connected in second slot with the same results.

I don't think it should matter where you plug in each card.

The Early Startup Menu and the BPPC menu are displayed through the Voodoo card without problems, even with I set "No 31KHz screen".

I think this could be a clue if your rev. 0 card works or not. Since I didn't see anything on my monitor (black screen) probably this means that my rev. 0 card is not Grex tolerant.

I've first installed CGX 3 from this archive:

http://grex.amigaworld.de/download.php?id=31

After it was working fine, I've upgraded it to the CGX 4 version using the second archive:

http://grex.amigaworld.de/download.php?id=32

and the CGX 4 CD-ROM.

As far as I can remeber installing CGX 4 without installing CGX 3 lead to displaying the boot logo forever.

I did the same thing, except since nothing worked for V3, I upgraded to V4 and again, nothing worked.

My Voodoo3.info has following tooltypes:

BITMAPCACHE=YES
BOOTLOGO=YES
DRAGGING=NO
PASSTHROUGH=YES

This I don't have. I'll give it a try.

And the CGX variables are set as follows:

56KHZAUDIO = 1
ALERTEMU = 1
CPUP2C = 0
FORCECHUNKY = 0
HIDE15BIT = 1
HIRESCRSR = 1
KEEPAMIGAVIDEO = 0
NOMOUSERATIO = 0
NOPASSTHROUGH = 1
PLANES2FAST = 1
SAVEMEM = 1
SUPERGELS = 1
SUPERLAYERS = 1
USESEMAPHORES = 1
WBPATSPEEDUP = 1

I have these more or less set like yours.

Thanks for the tips. I'll try again when I find time. :-)

[x56h34]

@AmiGR:

Interesting...

My Grex is the new version (2 DMA slots).
It seems that I only tried Voodoo 3 in slot 1 and slot 2 (the DMA slots), so I guess it's possible that that's why it didn't work / show any video when in early-boot-menu.

I guess I need to try again and see what happens when I use Voodoo in slots 3, 4, or 5.

BTW, my BPPC is an 060/240Mhz/SCSI version (not an overclocked 603e) and the card is a revision 0, according to boardtype.

[x56h34]

@lordspider:

Thanks for the advice.
It's probably best for me to try using just Voodoo 3 in the 5th slot (without anything else connected to Grex), until I iron out the bugs.

I'll report back in here after I finish my second test. :-)
I am anxious to try it again as I've obtained new info, so I'll probably mess around with it tonight, after I return home from work. ;-)

[x56h34]

@thread:

No go. This BPPC rev. 0 definitely doesn't work with Grex. I've tried using Voodoo 3 in every PCI slot, and the results were always the same. CGXMODE doesn't run, and there's no video output through Voodoo 3 when in early boot menu, or when in BPPC boot menu.

I've even made sure that the motherboard gets extra power through the floppy power connector, as well as the PPC card itself (+5V through the fan connector). P8 and P9 connectors are inserted directly to the Grex.

:-(

Back to mediator for me. :-) I'm not going to fool around with this anymore, as flashing the PPC card with different firmware back and forth ain't healty. I was curious to see if rev. 0 would really work, however it seems that it won't (at least not my card).