Shapeshifter - getting direct mode to work with my Voodoo

[Angus]

Hi,

Can anybody offer advice on how I can get Shapeshifter to allow me to use a Direct graphics mode on my 1200 060 Mediator/Voodoo system.

I tried using the Cardtrick External Video Driver, but whenever I selected Direct, it failed to open a screen, and told me so.

I found an old article where somebody said the the p96 driver (which works) that comes with Shapeshifter DOES use Direct mode, but apparently there is some doubt about if this is actually correct.

Can anybody help?

Cheers.

[Angus]

I understand its not just a problem for Mediator/Voodoos....

Anybody?  

[motorollin]

ISTR having the same problem. I'll check when I get home to see whether I resolved it. In the end I think I had to use Fusion though.

--
moto

[Angus]

by motorollin on 2006/9/6 8:57:47

>>ISTR having the same problem. I'll check when I get home to see whether I resolved it. In the end I think I had to use Fusion though.

Thanks Moto, that would be very kind.

I used to do a bit of emulation with Shapeshifter and Fusion a few years ago, and on my AGA system it seemed easier to setup.   :-/

[adolescent]

What is a "direct" mode?  I use the Picasso 96 driver and it works with Mediator/Voodoo3.  

[Angus]

I'm not really the person to answer this but its something like Direct mode writes directly to the memory on your graphics card rather than using graphics.library and Amiga ram, thus speeding up the operation considerably.

....I think.    


There's some discussion about it here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga-Mediator/messages/2301?viscount=100

[Flashlab]

I'm also very intrigued by this topic so I thought I'd do some tests. I used Speedometer 4.02 which is a Mac benchmark program. I tested ShapeShifter 3.11 with different graphics drivers(P96 internal, external and CardTrickEVD) and Fusion 3.2 in two resolutions(640x480 and 800x600) and two colour depths(8 and 15 bit). The test is called Color Quickdraw.
Speedometer 4.02 compares the results to a Mac Quadra 605; all results for this machine would be 1.0.

The results are a long list of boring numbers so I'll just give the conclusion. (Also I'm too lazy to make a table for it;-))

P96 internal is by far the fastest; about 1.8 times compared to Quadra 605 in all tests. P96 external is about 0.5; so is CardTrick. Fusion is about 1.5...

I also did some CPU/FPU tests; ShapeShifter and Fusion are about equal with about 3 compared to Quadra 605.

These results/numbers are for my system config as it stands in my signature.

[Angus]

>>P96 internal is by far the fastest; about 1.8 times compared to Quadra 605 in all tests.

That's some very useful data. Thanks a lot.

Moto, did you get a chance to revisit your config?

And do you use a Mediator? I can't seem to get Fusion to start at all since I've had mine.

[zipper]

I made some more tests but on my Prometheus/Voodoo3/CSPPC060/233 to get more speed results.
Shapeshifter 3.10, 640x480. Tried drivers and modes:
Amiga 16bit window 0.475
Picasso (for old PicassoII) 8bit 0.534
Winner EVD (good for ECS) 8bit 0.606
P96 8bit 2.426
    15bit on PicassoIV 2.314 (no 15bit on Voodoo)
CardTrick EVD 8bit (direct) 2.443
              16bit (MMU+Delta) 1.074 (allows Voodoo to work)

[Flashlab]

Interesting to see that you have CardTrick giving about the same result as P96.

You have all those cards in Amiga at the same time?

[zipper]

PicassoIV and Voodoo, sometimes even CVPPC (which slows the other cards a little).

[Flashlab]

Update:

We now know that standard CardTrick works faster with 3.10 than 3.11 because of the blitter support that is missing in 3.11. But Piru has released a patched version that works full speed with 3.11: http://piru.dyndns.org/~p/sw/