bertambala wrote:
Hello everyone,
I'm having some issues with my Picasso IV in my A4000D, namely:
- Scrolling in some games (e.g. Deluxe Galaga) is not perfectly smooth - it seems to "jump" a little bit here and there in the Meteor Storm
There's a very good reason for this, it's because the default PIV scandoubler settings are wrong.
First thing I did when I got my new card (Thanks Red! :pint:) was fire up Pinball Illusions. Right away, I noticed the screen would jump a bit every few seconds, and visible "tearing" like the vsync was off. (Anyone with an Indivision can play with the config tool, changing values only slightly and then loading a Pinball game. It doesn't take much to fuXor your scrolling.)
Sure enough, my Eizo reported different different sync frequencies between the A3K scandoubler (which scrolls perfectly smooth) and the one on the PIV. As noted, these frequencies have to be as close to spot on as possible or scrolling will be affected.
Resetting the card to its defaults made no difference.
To make a long story short, I noted some values from Jens' tool that comes with the Indivision (which also scrolls perfect) and spent a few hours playing with the PicassoTNG program tweaking values around until getting something close to acceptable.
PAL line frequency (in the TNG tool) needs to be as close to 31.5552 as possible. A hair above is OK, anything below, even slightly, and scrolling will be trashed.
NTSC hsync needs to be at or slightly above 31.4857.
(At the above settings, vsync will automagically be near where it should.)
One caveat:
DO NOT let the line frequency fall on
31.525 for either PAL or NTSC. There is some bug at this setting, and the frequency delivered to your monitor at startup will be ridiculously high (something like 180 kHz and 250 Hz).
My card seems to be a late revision PCB, with the latest chips and firmware installed. Obviously, this may not apply to other cards. The best thing to check for sync issues is a good pinball game, as any problems will be be easily seen. Look for tearing, and the screen to jump a bit every few seconds. If your scrolling is perfect, I'd be interested to know the values set in your TNG program. (I managed to get mine *much* better, but the difficultly of using the TNG program means I can't get it perfect... or maybe I just need to RTFM after getting some sleep, LOL.)
