Warp3d Voodoo vs. Radeon ClassicOS

[trixster]

Congrats on getting both the mediator and the sonnet working, Motormouth! They're good aren't they!

Is the sonnet working stably for you, any issues or teething problems? The massive thread on eab is worth checking out if you havent already done so.

Regarding Radeon vs Voodoo: for a classic system I can't think of many reasons to choose the Radeon over the Voodoo. The Radeon's ram might be useful on the 68k side of the house but it's zorro ram and will be much slower than ram on your accelerator; it is not used at all by the sonnet. Warp3D on the Voodoo is much more useful if you're at all interested in playing games - BlitzQuake, Quake2, Quake3, Hexen2, Wipeout 2097 etc all make use of Warp3D.

Make sure you populate the sonnet with as much ram as you can - 192mb is what you're aiming for to give the best gaming experience.

[trixster]

I havent seen anything new on backwards engineering the sonnet.

The sonnet team have progressed onto getting other PPC PMC cards running with PMC->PCI adapters. These are quite a lot faster than the sonnet but require power modifications to get running stably.

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/SonnetAmiga/wiki/Installing-a-Rapture-card

I believe they're working on their own stand-alone card but no details have been made public on that so far.

For out-of-the-box turn-key use the Sonnet G3/G4 is still the easiest solution to get running and provides excellent performance.

[trixster]

Motormouth, I would recommend you post on the eab thread. A bunch of people have had similar issues to what you're seeing, most of which have been resolved.

Have you tried a fresh workbench install? It is recommended to start with no more than wb3.9 + bb1 and bb2 to try and rule out a dodgy patch causing issues.

Have you tried tweaking the setcmemdiv parameter? Sometimes allowing the sonnet to autodetect the cachemem speed causes instability.

SetCMemDiv (0-5): Sets the speed divider of the L2 Cache memory. 5 = 3, 4 = 2.5, 3 = 2, 2 = 1.5, 1 = 1, 0 = Handled by library. Default = 0. For example: A Sonnet with speed 500 MHz and setting 5 will run the L2 cache at 166 MHz (500/3).