Workbench 2.10 and screenmodes, using IndivisionECS V2

[brostenen]

Hi all.
My hardware is an Amiga600 with an a604n 1mb chip memory upgrade and an IndivisionECS V2.
My software is kickstart 2.x version 37.350 and Workbench 2.10 on an SD Card.
My monitors that I have issue with are these that I own: IBM Thinkvision 19 and 21 inch and Samsung
syncmaster 172v and finally a Sony that can sync to 50hz for my ScanPlusECS in my a500.
They are all 4:3 format. As I own no 16:9 LCD monitors. On a laggy LCD television, I get wrong colour
and horrible response time (screen lag) yet it is the only one that display a correct picture without
screenmodes being set up.

Now.
I have the Indivision currently set at 800x600 on the VGA output, yet it is not border to border on my monitor.
When gaming from disk, it shows the same border, yet I can live with that as it is black.
I just have to use a bigger monitor in order to get a bigger picture. Anyway. I am happy enough with colours and so forth.

Now in Workbench.
It is displaying that image yet the 800x600 are displayed as a small picture, and I think the issue is the monitor not
realising that it need to display it full screen. You know, like when I game with a Dos machine it is border to border and
on a Win98 machine it is border to border. And if I use overscan settings, I can not fill out the border on the right.
On the right, it is displaying the black border, and on the left it is grey.

Now...
I have tried to fiddle with screenmodes, and shure enough, there are only 3 or so standard modes in WB 2.10.
Though, and here comes the fun thing, and something I know absolutely nothing about what it is.
If I go into the storage/monitors on the system folder, I will find a couple of monitors.
If I click on them, I get more screen modes avaliable to me, untill I reboot or do a power cycle of my Amiga.

One of the screenmodes that I will temporary get, are called something with "72", and will give an 800x600 option.
And shure enough, the monitor will display 800x600 in full screen.
So the big question now, is how can I make these options from "monitors" avaliable in "screen modes" permanently,
and have a full screen, border to border image on any of my 4:3 monitors?

[pyrre]

I have the same issue with my A500+
but i hva not had time to go in deapt with the issue.
someone suggested that kick 3.0+ is required, but looking at the wiki link kick 2.X should be sufficient.

Have you tried running the config tools?

You need to to put indivision's own screenmodes into screenmode folder.
I do not remember if "vgaonly" should/not be present.

try reading the wikiarticle about it.

[brostenen]

I have the same issue with my A500+
but i hva not had time to go in deapt with the issue.
someone suggested that kick 3.0+ is required, but looking at the wiki link kick 2.X should be sufficient.

Have you tried running the config tools?

You need to to put indivision's own screenmodes into screenmode folder.
I do not remember if "vgaonly" should/not be present.

try reading the wikiarticle about it.

It is working the same on kick 2.x (37.350, the last 2.x series) and on kick 3.1 on my Amiga600.
And I did run a clean installation of WB 3.1 on Kick 3.1 to test out if the tool would work better there.
It is mostly the same, and equally hard to use the tool. I genuinely think there might be a bug or two in it.

The tool is indeed really hard to figure out, and sometimes it will refuse to switch to the selected mode.
Even if I select 800x600 for the 800x600 mode (the little arrow were you can finetune resolutions).
Yet after a clean flash and a new WB installation, it asks if I want to run 800x600 as the default.
And in some cases it is possible to kick it into 800x600 if I get lucky. I have yet to master the tool.
As I have noted before, then the config tool is really strange and far from easy to work with.
Hmmm... Putting them into screen-mode folder. Hmmm.... I never really thought of doing that.

Anyway...
I have all them Monitors listed in the monitor folder in WB, and because they will work temporarly,
untill a reboot, then I would mostly like to know how to make it show up in screen-modes permanently.
They will be removed from screen-mode selector list again, once I do a cold or warm boot of the machine.

[nbache]

It sounds to me like the step you are missing is to move the monitor icon you want from Storage/Monitors into Devs/Monitors (and probably move the existing one from Devs/Monitors to Storage/Monitors).

Then it should be active upon a reboot.

Although I'm only using 4.x these days (and know nothing about the IndiVision), I believe this is how the Storage<->Devs system has worked always since it was created.

Best regards,

Niels

[brostenen]

It sounds to me like the step you are missing is to move the monitor icon you want from Storage/Monitors into Devs/Monitors (and probably move the existing one from Devs/Monitors to Storage/Monitors).

Then it should be active upon a reboot.

Although I'm only using 4.x these days (and know nothing about the IndiVision), I believe this is how the Storage<->Devs system has worked always since it was created.

Best regards,

Niels

Thanks Niels.... (Tusinde tak. Den er en dejlig lille dims kan jeg sige)
Yeah... It is a nice little thing that IndivisionECS V2, though it is completely different than the V1. More features and stuff like that, yet they have removed the option of sandwiching the for dual monitor. This however have resulted in not needing the Denise chip. I have not tried the RGB out on any of my 500's, so I do not know if the RGB will work with the IndiECS V2 installed. Yet on my 600, the RGB will still give output at the same time. Though it is installed in a completely different way. I think I read somewere, that the V2 has a core in the fpga chip, that are acting the same way as a Denise chip.

Thank's for the tip of just copying the files. I will try that and then report back if there were any beef or it was all bone.

[brostenen]

I copied the files between "dh0:storage/monitors" and "dh0:devs/monitors", making the same files in both directories. And the screen is now full-screen and border to border. This actually worked like a charm. Thanks for the help on this issue.

Now.
I do not know what files came from were, yet I have tried some different monitor/screenmodes from aminet, and that is why I have so many files in those directories. So I have made a backup of them onto floppy disks. I will see if I have a spare SD card, and then test out if it I will get the same result again, by doing a WB installation from scratch. Just installing WB 2.10, the IndivisionECS V2 tool and then a straight copy of the monitor/screenmode files directly from floppy into these two directories.

I think this information here, will help people having issues with the IndiECS V2 untill they can do a better config tool.

[nbache]

It's not necessary to leave a copy back in Storage, you can just move them instead of copying them. Then when (if) you need to change back and move them back again, you won't have trouble because of duplicate files.

If you are afraid of losing any of them or whatever, the solution would be to make a proper backup of the whole volume before making potentially risky changes, not to leave identical copies of files in both places.

Best regards,

Niels

[brostenen]

Thanks... I will remember this.
Right now I am able to change to full screen and border to border if I want to, and I know how to do this now. Yet, because it drains the speed and is a real resource hog, then I will be keeping to the non-border-to-border settings. Once I get an accelerator card, then I can do the whole full screen thing. At least now I know how to do this, and thanks 1000 times for the tip.

Yeah.... I am not an Amiga newbie, I am only workbench noob. (I have gamed on Amiga's since 1988)

[mindprober]

Glad to see this post. I recently picked up the ECS v2 and will be testing it using WB 2.1 also.

I had heard about the difficulty with the v1 and screenmode creation as well as complaints with 50Hz content not quite working right.

I thought this would be eliminated with the v2 and I wouldn't even have to create any screenmodes if the default display looks correct.

Unfortunately, it does not look quite correct. There are top and bottom borders and the actual Amiga screens are shifted more to the right side than usual.  The default signal it is sending out is 800x600 at 72Hz. My particular LCD monitor also has the annoying habit of auto adjusting this to shift the image too far up vertically. When I readjust it back down, it is not being recalled properly. Since I tested this on another LCD and it did save, I have to blame that on the first monitor. Yet another monitor did not even support 800x600@72Hz. I was surprised by this since it is relatively modern. 

So, in short, it looks like I need to create some custom screenmodes but I have no idea what I am doing. Are we supposed to "map" a native Amiga screenmode to a VESA standard and try to keep it from being distorted? I'm not sure if this will be possible for most of the display modes. My preferred Amiga screenmode will be a PAL Hi Res (interlaced also) but I will need to open NTSC Hi Res screens too from time to time.

Is it possible to get this working with no top and bottom borders as well as support for the overscan area? That is nice for the Workbench side to be able to use more of the image area.

Thanks.

[brostenen]

Yeah. The tool is quite a pain to use. And I have yet to figure out how the stuff is supposed to work. However... I ahev figured out that I can use the workbench screenmodes tool and not the indivision, to set it to 800x600 after I have set the indivision. The sreenmode that I have used, have come from one of those packages that I have downloaded from Aminet. What exact package that I got the 800x600 from, is something that I can not remember, as I have installed 2 or 3 different packages. Yet it might be the one that are named something with SuperPlus.

The bad part, is that it is sucking up quite some resources. So in order to make this happen, you will need an accelerator. So I have found a different approach. That is installing borderblank and centering the workbench, using workbench overscan. In workbench 2.10 the title screen are black, so I need to find a tool that can change colours of things in workbench, and untill I have found it I have made the titlebar slightly brighter. Not by much, yet just enough to make it a slightly diffrent colour.

If I run games from floppy disks, then my monitor will make overscan. Hence colouring pixels outside the "screen" the same as the one used. And I have compensated size, by using a 21inch IBM thinkvision monitor. As an example, the ProjectX will show the spaceship, before I push the firebutton. If the monitor were not overscanning this bad, then I would have not seen the spaceship. I guess I can see if a game is not being programmed correctly this way. You know. If the programmer jumped over too many small fences. Or cheated or did some unortodocs programming things.

So... I think the monitor it self have a lot to say. Just choose one that are large enough. I will sertainly look after never versions of the tool and new versions of the IndiECS V2 core/firmware in the future. As of now, I think this is the best we can expect untill updates.

[mindprober]

That left me even more confused now.    So I should try to match an Amiga screenmode (a non-standard one) to what the Indie is outputting (800x600 in this case) to get something more useful? On top of that, I should give up trying to use overscan and instead enable border blanking? I will search for those "alternate" screenmode collections.

I got some good news today-- it seems my preferred monitor *did* remember the vertical settings change I last made so at least that did not get in the way this time. I do not think I can trust it, though. It could decide to auto-adjust at any time. Perhaps I need to try to configure a 60Hz refresh of 72Hz. That might be more friendly to my LCD. Since I am not using a CRT, it should not matter.

I also need to get some shorter VGA cables or I will have to suffer with the inevitable noise creeping into the picture also. Ghosting artifacts and the like. Uhg. I wonder if it is worth trying to shield the ribbon cable coming off the Indi board itself. There's gotta be some RF noise inside my A2k.

[brostenen]

Sweet...
I have been digging a bit in the configuration tool my self. I am on version 1.7 as of now. And I have updated the firmware with the one that came on the 1.7 rescue disk.

Anyway.
For some odd reason, the "testmode" and the resolution you change/add to the one choosen in the main menu. Are tied together. Indeed as why I got 800x600 in full screen. I had it set up in 800x600 when I turned the Amiga on today. And then I went into screenmode in Workbench, and tried to see what happened when I switched the screenmode. For some reson, it kicked the Indivision into 640x512 or 640x400 (can not remember) when I lowered the resolution in screenmode. Now... That screenmode was used at that particulair resolution, that the indivision was set up to. So I am beginning to understand this config tool, little by little. Another thing is that the prefered output on the VGA cable, need to be in the top of the Indivision config tool's main menu. And it helps to disable all what you are not using, only having two active in total.

I still suspect that there are serious bug's in the configuration tool.

[brostenen]

I am now running full screen on my IBM Thinkvision L170 flatscreen monitor. I will post the config file, that I have saved from the config tool. I am running on version 1.9 of the config tool. It will be tomorrow, as it is 2:30 am right now.

[brostenen]

As mentioned... Then I have full screen now. Border to border. And there is still a tiny hint of ghosting, yet nothing really bad. At least it is not as bad as most ISA/VLB VGA cards, on modern flatscreen monitors. I have my IBM Thinkvision L170 attached to the IndiECS V2. My Sony makes horrible ghosting in fast moving gfx and my Samsung Syncmaster 172V is really bad. My IBM Thinkvision L190 are somewere between the L170 and the Samsung+Sony. I have taken a couple of pictures of how it looks, and I am sharing my config file for the IndiECS as well. Please update the IndiECS configuration tool to the newest 1.9 :-)


It seems as I can not upload attachments, so I will link to the post that I did on the Individual forum about my results.
https://forum.icomp.de/index.php?thread/244-indivisionecs-v2-setup-tool-are-extremely-confusing/&postID=1587#post1587

[mindprober]

Nice work! I will need to set aside more time for my own setup.