Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Picasso96 and blitter  (Read 5152 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline HeiroglyphTopic starter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jun 2010
  • Posts: 1100
    • Show all replies
Picasso96 and blitter
« on: June 14, 2011, 03:34:39 AM »
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?
 

Offline HeiroglyphTopic starter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jun 2010
  • Posts: 1100
    • Show all replies
Re: Picasso96 and blitter
« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2011, 12:06:37 AM »
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.
 

Offline HeiroglyphTopic starter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jun 2010
  • Posts: 1100
    • Show all replies
Re: Picasso96 and blitter
« Reply #2 on: June 16, 2011, 12:16:59 AM »
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.
 

Offline HeiroglyphTopic starter

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jun 2010
  • Posts: 1100
    • Show all replies
Re: Picasso96 and blitter
« Reply #3 on: June 29, 2011, 08:34:38 AM »
Quote from: Crumb;647527
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.

Quote

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.