Picasso II issue (not caused by fblit)

[save2600]

-sigh-

Received and installed a Picasso II video card today and cannot seem to relieve it of the garbage/colourful lines it throws up on the screen when opening larger drawers. It's almost as if for every second the HD lights up, a new line of garbage gets drawn on the screen. OS3.9 (boing bagless) and no fblit or any other graphics manipulating cheaters are installed.

Bad ram chip? Chips need reseating? Something not configured right? Or ultra noisy SCSI bus?

I've tried ALL Picasso graphics drivers to no avail. In fact, the latter 2 Picasso drivers crash my system, so I keep going back to the original and lowest revision. Only other thing in the system besides the GVP 030 accelerator is a 2mb Agnus board and a DKB multi-start II (both jumpered properly).

1mb Picasso II, A2000 w/ KS 3.1, 2mb Chip, 9mb 32-bit fast and card NOT in segmented memory mode. There are no other Zorro cards installed.

What do you think is going on here?
 

[mikrucio]

bad ram chip is my educated guess.

[clint]

Maybe you should have got one from Jim (redrumloa)

clint

[Computolio]

    Since it only has 1MB of VRAM, you might as well upgrade anyway.

    Also, installing the Boing Bags shouldn't hurt. Try that and then install the latest Picasso96.

[Framiga]

@save2600

what resolution and color depth?

With 1MB of videoram, you have to stay at 800*600 at 16 bit at max

[save2600]

I've tried ALL the various Picasso resolutions and depths. Doesn't matter which one as I still get the bloody lines. Sometimes, the mouse pointer carries with it, a large distorted square around the screen as well.

Machine crashes/resets before too long if I use any drivers besides the Picasso96 one from '97.

Have reseated the chips and moved the card farther down the Zorro line. Problem still exists.

Upon real close observation of the board, there is a cooked resistor. It's designation is blocked by the component itself, but it's the closest resistor to the bottom VGA passthrough port. In between the pass through relay and bottom VGA port. She still has resistance to her, but is burnt so badly, I could barely make out what her original value should be. After some cleaning and using an eye piece, I managed to determine that she's supposed to be the same value as the ones around her. And she tests within tolerance. Still, wouldn't be a bad idea to replace the old gal. I do not use the pass through feature of this, so was thinking this really isn't *the* problem.

I guess the next step would be to start replacing the 256x4 DIPS.

Anyone know where they can be had in quantity?

[rkauer]

 Futurlec and Digiview are two very good start points.

 Or, on the "scavenge" side, old ISA Cirrus VGA boards.

[57goldtop]

The burned resistor is common in that location, I replaced mine with a 1/2 watt size but I don't remember the value ( i believe the values vary from revision to revision ) and I no longer have the machine it was in. Replacing the resistor will unlikely fix that problem.

The symptoms you describe sound to me like it's caused by a weak/under-powered power supply or one that is just about to die. Check the voltages with the PSU under load. I've had the same problem in a couple of systems where lines would appear on the wb screen caused by dragging & resizing windows, hd activity caused it too. The symptoms seemed to increase as I added more to the system.. at least they did in my case.

[save2600]

@57goldtop:

Was easy enough to figure out the value of that resistor and it does test within tolerance, despite its discolouration. And sure enough: it was indeed the old power supply that was causing the extraneous garbage out of my Picasso II - thank you very much. Replaced it with a different one and the video output looks great now. Played with it all night last night. You know... an 060, Picasso II, X-surf equipped Amiga 2500 is really more than "good enough" for surfing, e-mailing, news reading, etc. I'm more than impressed with the system as-is, but would still like to add a Deneb and AHI compatible soundcard though. Someday...

[57goldtop]

I'm glad my suggestion helped you solve the problem. A failing power supply is not so obvious to detect until you start adding stuff to the system and in your case, it would be easy to suspect the Picasso card when you could not reproduce the problem without it.

I had the exact same problem except my power supply was so on its way out that it was not providing enough power to the card to even kick over the relays that somehow are responsible for utilizing the special screen modes, the result was a rolling/scrolling display that filled up the screen with total garbage.

[save2600]

Yup - she's working like a charm. In fact, I'm using my A2500/Picasso to reply to this! Coincidentally, I ordered and bought 16 new 256kx4 dips today. Well, so I thought. Went through their internet checkout system and a few hours later, received a reply explaining they had only 3 of the 60ns chips left  :-(   What a bummer! At about $4 a piece, I figured I'd throw the old ones in my 2091 that's been begging for some ram.

Still on the lookout for 256kx4 dips if anyone happens to have and is reading this  :-)  

[touringsedan]

Just received a Picasso II last week for my A2000, and oddly my system does the EXACT same thing.

The more I access the HD or large folder the more horizontal lines I get, making something full screen or dragging windows around can help clean it up, but they eventually start up again.

The mouse also will turn into a large square of garbage.

Hoping your incident will be the same with me, ordered an ATX power supply adapter as I have an extra ATX power supply around to test it with.

I know this is an ancient thread, but did replacing the power supply last?

[dougal]

Just received a Picasso II last week for my A2000, and oddly my system does the EXACT same thing.

The more I access the HD or large folder the more horizontal lines I get, making something full screen or dragging windows around can help clean it up, but they eventually start up again.

The mouse also will turn into a large square of garbage.

Hoping your incident will be the same with me, ordered an ATX power supply adapter as I have an extra ATX power supply around to test it with.

I know this is an ancient thread, but did replacing the power supply last?

I had exactly the same problem WITHOUT a Picasso II. It happened when i replaced the 2.0 Kickstart with a 3.1.

Turned out to be a faulty Agnus :-O   ... I replaced Agnus and no more horizontal lines and garbage on the mouse pointer.

[dougal]

Thats what my pointer looked like... Excuse the crappy picture