amiga 4000 not displaying picture

[Karlos]

hi pal

One other question if i put a picasso 2 into there system would most games work?.

Various Zorro graphics cards have options to pass through the native video. As far as I know the Picasso II is one of them - however, that doesn't mean it will automatically perform any mode promotion. You'll still need a 15kHz capable monitor.

[Karlos]

Just an addendum, if you are going the Picasso route, I'd recommend trying to get a Picasso IV (unless you already have a Picasso II).

I'm a bit hazy on the details these days, but I recall that the Picasso-II is a Zorro-II only card. It will work, but it places limits on how much fast ram you can have in the system before it ceases to be possible to map all of the card's memory in to the Zorro-II space, after which it falls back to using a segmented memory layout which is very slow.

Furthermore, Zorro-II is slow anyway. Believe it or not, but your motherboard Chip RAM has a higher bandwidth as far as writing from the CPU is concerned.

The Picasso-IV supports more memory, will run in Zorro-III mode, has a faster/wider blitter and equally supports pass through of native modes.

Hopefully someone with the hardware can confirm this, as I said, I am a tad hazy.

[Karlos]

so if i use there graphics card i cant conect it to a lcd monitor i best buying a aga indivision.  I have noticed with my amiga 4000 when i move there mouse it resets itself and sometimes i get a error message guru in red at top of screen

Sorry, is this with, or without a graphics card attached?

[Karlos]

hi m8

i dont have a graphics card yet just seen a picasso 2 going on ebay for £70 so was wondering if it is worth buying a card or a indivision from amigakit?.

Tough one, it depends on what you envisage using your Amiga for. As it's an A4000 I'm guessing more than just retrogaming. After all, you said you had an A1200 too?

The Indivision is certainly one of the better scan doublers out there. The ECS version is incredible, adding all sorts of interesting features that go way beyond scan doubling. The AGA version is, however, pretty much just a scan doubler but it does have the advantage of supporting the full 24-bit colour definition AGA is capable of. Most other examples on the market have a tendency to truncate the RGB channels to just 4-bits each, resulting in some unsightly banding. I'm pretty sure you can get some half decent resolutions out of your AGA system using the indivision too (I've seen 1024x768 displays in the gallery here).

The indivision AGA, however is no substitute for a proper graphics card if you want to do productivity work. At higher resolutions and colour depths, a genuine graphics card with onboard blitter/rasterizer outperforms AGA in (almost) any 2D operation you can throw at it.

[Karlos]

hi

Im getting a guru error message when i try to move or press there mouse button when my amiga has loaded up into workbench.  Could that be a fault with there mouse itself?.

Nope, or at least it's extremely unlikely to say the least. Can you make a note of the hexadecimal codes reported in the guru?

[Karlos]

hi m8

guru screen saying software failure
task 07c03270
error code  8000 0003
                       0004  either one comes up

The last digit in the error code is the 680x0 trap number. Without checking the 680x0 programmer's manual, these are:

2: bus error
3: address error (misaligned access)
4: illegal instruction
5: divide by zero
6: chk instruction
7: trapv instruction
8: privelege violation
9: trace
A: line 1010 emulation
B: line 1111 emulation

I suspect that in your case the 3 and 4 are related since a 68030 should be able to perform misaligned accesses to data - the only penalty is extra bus cycles. However, I'm pretty sure the 68K does require that instruction words are aligned. Perhaps some dodgy patch or stack overflow has resulted in a jump to an odd address?

What, if any, patches are installed on your system?

[Karlos]

Also, can you try booting without startup-sequence?

Hold down both mouse buttons on power-up and wait until the early startup screen appears.

If you can safely drop into a shell and use the mouse without any issues, then some dodgy bit of software would seem to be the cause.

[Karlos]

Swapping the ROMs completely messes up the word order - even the init vector is nonsense. You can't expect the ROM checksum routine (which turns on the red background) to work under these circumstances...

Very true. Guess I wasn't wearing the smart trousers that day :lol:

[Karlos]

hello

whats happening is when i boot up showing disk insert its ok until i move the mouse in either port it will go off into a grey screen and it will reset itself eventually showing error code

Umkay, that doesn't sound at all good. Mouse movement shouldn't just crash the system, especially whilst you are just on the "insert disk" screen.

Ropey CIA chip I wonder?

[Karlos]

where are they on motherboard m8

Sadly, unless you are well versed in replacing surface mount components, knowing that isn't going to help.

The CIA chip being at fault was a wild stab in the dark anyway. Right now I'm fresh out of ideas, except for one (now that you can boot it at all).

Power down the machine completely.
Hold down both mouse buttons and keep them held.
Power up the machine whilst holding down the mouse buttons and wait.

Do you get to the "Early startup" screen, and if so, does using the mouse cause any problems then?

My thinking here is that perhaps some really dodgy patch messes up some resident component of your system such that every boot except the first one has a problem.

[Karlos]

hi

It boots into a start up control but the mouse pointer wont move and im getting a couple of lines when i move the mouse around

You mentioned you'd tested the mouse in both ports, so I have to ask, is it in the regular one?

[Karlos]

yes m8

The lines that you see when you move the mouse around. Are they just random corruption or does it look like it could be the mouse pointer, but just smeared across the screen? For example, does the position of the lines vary systematically as you move the mouse around?

Perhaps the sprite hardware is borked.

I'm starting to grasp at straws here. Hopefully another user can step in and offer some suggestions.

[Karlos]

Actually, you can.

You can use the Left-Amiga key in conjunction with the cursor buttons to move the mouse pointer around the screen. Still holding the Left-Amiga key and pressing the Left-Alt button will issue a left-click...

[Karlos]

its not letting me move the mouse cursor its toggling between pal and ntsc mode when a press any button on the key board

Ah. Actually maybe the feature doesn't work on the Early Startup screen. It certainly works after you boot, even if you boot without a startup-sequence.

To be fair, it has been a while since I ever used an Early Startup screen that wasn't routed through my graphics card.