Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Little brother wants to play too!

Three years ago was the start of the development of the Sonnet PPC PCI card driver for the Amiga. It has been developed for the Mediator for the big box Amigas, the A4000(T) and A3000(T). The first few videos and pictures were showing quite simple programs like Cybermand and Voxelspace. But it was a start. Later Warp3D was made to work and the rest is history.

Over the years it was a big frustration that the little A1200 could not cope with the card. This, as I explained before, because of the bank switching needed in the A1200 mediator. Also, the address range used for the card which is automatically set by the Mediator was giving all kinds of problems

Over the past year, Elbox has been very supportive to get the library working on the A1200. Development on my side has been on and off due to other priorities.

The version of the pci.library went up from 11.0 to 13.5 to get to the point where the A1200 mediator could handle a PPC card.

Before I continue I have to say immediately that it still does not work correctly. But a lot of progress has been made. I guess we are at the same point in time like 3 years ago for A1200 support.

The below video is a PPC 7410 450MHz card with 256 MB of SDRAM running inside an Amiga 1200 with a Mediator TX running Voxelspace.


Simple stuff like this is working flawlessly, but at soon as stress is applied to the system, like with QuakeWOS, bus errors appear. Strangely enough, the crashes appear to be inside the AmigaOS.

Anyway, version 13.5 of the pci.library is still fresh and now we have a basis to further develop on. Stay tuned!

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