Grex1200 and revision 0 BlizzardPPC card

[x56h34]

Well...it worked for me, finally. :-)
I was lucky enough to obtain a revision 0 BPPC card that is tolerant of Grex1200 busboard. :-) This card belonged to doctorq and was originally an 040 card, however after conversion to 060 it became compatible and fully working with Grex1200. I guess less power consumption now makes it work...that's the only logical explanation that I can think of.

Here's a screenshot of the working setup. ;-)

So it's true...some revision 0 cards really do work with Grex1200 just as well as revision 2. You must try and see before making a judgment. :-D

Posting this from the A1200T PPC Grex setup.

[amigakit]

Great work..

Morphos next Nenad?

Would be nice to see how fast Quake 3 and Virtual Grand Prix 2 work on the A1200

[_ThEcRoW]

Hey your os4 theme on os3.9 looks really nice!!!!
How do you have done that? Visualprefs?

[amigakit]

Probably VirgoloWB using VisualPrefs/Birdie

[x56h34]

amigakit wrote:
Great work..

Morphos next Nenad?

Would be nice to see how fast Quake 3 and Virtual Grand Prix 2 work on the A1200

Thank you. I will eventually try MOS on my A1200 Grex and A4000 Grex setups, but as I already have a Pegasos II system as well, I'm kind of not in a hurry to try MOS on classics yet. :-)

@_ThEcRoW:

I got the theme from Amiga Theme Experience website. It's a theme installer for dummies that involves Birdie and VisualPrefs. Very easy to install.

[Dragster]

Awesome! I knew it worked! :-)

cheers Nenad

[Dragster]

er.. what's the URL for Amiga Theme experience website? Can't find it with google  :-?

thanks!

D.

[Boot_WB]

Well, it never worked for me even on a revision 2 card with 040 and no scsi.
I even tried it with a different logic board in case that was the problem, but no go.

The weird results I got were:

On revision 2 board:

Painfully slow startup - no video output through the Voodoo3 even on early start menu.
When OS3.9 eventually started up, a check in sysinfo revealed that although the 040 was detected, the speed was actually the same as an a1200 running on the original EC020 cpu at 14MHz.

On revision 0 board:

Same as above, however sysinfo speed was the same as the 040 running at 14MHz

Suggesting that, yes it is a power issue - the grex is not distributing power effectively to the BPPC.

Also tried running a floppy power cable to the motherboard (as well as AT to the Grex board) to see if that helped, but no difference.

For now, I give up on G-rex - although your success is heartening, the endless hours spent adding and removing that damned fiddly logic board are just not worth the disappointment when it NEVER WORKS :madashell: .

[x56h34]

@Dragster:

Here you go mate. :-)

http://turricandm.altervista.org/hosted/ate/

[x56h34]

@Boot_WB:

I also have a revision 2 060 card with SCSI (200Mhz 603e) that will only "sometimes" work with the same Grex1200 board. 80% of times it doesn't want to detect Grex. Definitely due to lack of power, as I'm 100% sure that its BVision mini-connector works fine, as if I use BVision I get no problems whatsoever.

It seems that even if revision 2, if a BPPC card is too old, it very well may not have an efficient power management in order to whitstand Grex, since after all old hardware is old hardware and it is performing less and less efficient as the years go by. :-(

[VooDoo]

@amigakit

Quake 3 dont work for now under MOS PowerUP..game need minimal 256mb ..but MOS 1.4.5 pup work only whit 128 ..for Virtual Grand Prix I don't know..?

[AmigaMance]

@All
 So, is there a BPPC revision in which the g-rex works properly?

@voodoo
 I see that you have a BVision. Quake 3 will still not work even if the next version of MOS-PUP will support 256MB of ram. That's because there are no 3d drivers for this card and so, none of the MOS native programs that make use of 3D acceleration hardware, works with a BVision. There is a bounty for a permedia2 driver, though. ;p
 Btw, what happened to your voodoo card?

[keropi]

@AmigaMance:
G-REX works 100% on my DCE v2 BPPC...

[x56h34]

AmigaMance wrote:
@All
 So, is there a BPPC revision in which the g-rex works properly?

It seems that nothing is really guaranteed to work or not to work. :-)
Revision 0 may or may not work. You have to try and see.
Revision 2 should work, but...as you can see sometimes even revision 2 cards don't play along nicely.

Originally, I really didn't want to bother with Grex, however as it is not limited by the 8mb ZII memory window like Mediator, I've decided to really try hard in order to make it work :-) as it is annoying for your 16MB rtg card to be crippled to only 8MB. Now I don't need to remove my OS backdrop in order to be able to use W3D without an instant crash. ;-)

[x56h34]

keropi wrote:
@AmigaMance:
G-REX works 100% on my DCE v2 BPPC...

I see that you use FastATA with Grex. How did you manage to fit it under the Grex? AFAIR, you can do it, but Grex has to be a little crooked in order for this to work.