higher resolutions

[blanning]

A bit of a newbie question...

How are people getting the higher resolutions?   I have a 2000 and a 600.  I eventually plan to add an aga machine, either a 1200 or 4000.  For the 1200 and 4000, it seems like the best solution is to get PCI slots, then add a PCI video board.  Is this right?  What happens to the native amiga modes?  Can the PCI video boards display them or do you have two monitors?

Is there a higher resolution solution for the 2000?  Does the amber board just flicker fix and give you a vga connector or does it support higher resolutions?  I'm guessing this is what the picasso board is for?

It would be nice if there were an amiga video card tutorial somewhere.  And I'm not even sure I would use these higher resolutions anyway.

brian

[derringer3]

on all amigas the question is not just the resolution, but the colors too. For example an aga machine can display all of its modest at 256 color. AFAIK aga can display similar the today standard 1024*768 or 1284*1024 but you can use it only for displaying pics, because anything will be horrybly slow for an aga. (workbecn desktop, games etc.)So max 640*256 at 256 color for wb.
With a pci busboard you can use some standard vga pci card. (voodoo,s3, and with the mediator tx Ati radeon 9200-eseries card.) It is much faster than aga, and you can display 1600*1200 or anything if you want. Only limit is the size of the vga card memory.

Unfortunatelly vga card's cannot display the native modes. You can use a lcd-tv monitor to do that, or use a tv card on your amiga. (with pci busboard of course.) But keep in mind that the PIP mode on your tv card will be not the highest!

[DamageX]

OCS is stuck on low-res monitors without a scan-doubler/de-interlacer.

ECS and AGA have programmable scanrates but the max pixel clock is 28.6MHz NTSC or 28.3MHz PAL. So you get 720x480x60hz on a standard VGA monitor, plus a bit of overscan maybe. Any higher resolution than that will have to be interlaced or trade off refresh rate. For instance, with a medium resolution arcade monitor (24KHz) or an old EGA-compatible analog monitor (21.8KHz) you can get roughly 800x600x72hz interlaced or 1024x704x60hz interlaced.

[alexh]

OF course you could get a Zorro gfx card like a Picasso IV or a Cybervision. Then you could display native gfx as well

[clemenza]

With HighGFX (from Aminet) you can have up to 1024x768 from ECS/AGA machines (interlaced) and up to 1024x384 (non-interlaced). Maximum 8 colors on ECS and 256 colors on AGA. All these with the use of a Multiscan monitor (eg 1438) or a VGA adapter+VGA monitor.

[alexh]

Today's VGA monitors are (unfortunately) most likely to reject an interlaced input and display crap or more likely nothing. :-(

[blanning]

Thanks to everyone for all the info.  I guess I'll plan for a picaso board at some point and a mediator/1200 or 4000 in the future.

brian

[gklinger]

If you're using a VGA monitor with an adaptor and using a higher resolution and you run a game that uses a lower standard resolution, how does it display on the VGA monitor? That's what I'm not getting.

[NovaCoder]

gklinger wrote:
If you're using a VGA monitor with an adaptor and using a higher resolution and you run a game that uses a lower standard resolution, how does it display on the VGA monitor? That's what I'm not getting.

Most (all?) non-WB games will just ignore the current WB monitor driver and use their own low-res driver.

For my current 1200 setup, I connect my VGA monitor to the RGB output (for WB use).  When I want to run a game, I have to switch on my VGA box which is plugged into the composite output (soon to be upgraded to S-Video).  All of this mucking about will soon be over with Jens new video chipset  :-D

On a side note, I find it quite funny that only one AGA specific driver was released back in the day (VGA only) and even that is not a driver in its own right like the others.  The only other one I could find was HighGFX.  All the other monitor drivers (even the ones with OS3.9 say 'requires ECS'...what happened to 'requires AGA'  :lol:

I guess by the time that OS3.9 was release eveyone had given up on AGA and moved to RTG  :idea:

[LoadWB]

Gotta say that, at the time, my Picasso IV was one of the best investments I made on my Amiga system (circa 2004.)  Though now with a little hind-sight, I might have better invested in a PCI board for my 4000D.  I was just being silly and kept passing up on the Mediator hoping to instead find a G-Rex... what a douche I've been.

For the prices things are selling for on eBay, I could probably easily finance a PCI board and respective cards with the sale of my PIV and X-Surf.  Though I'd be more likely to sell off the Spectrum.

hrmmmmmmmmmmm