@Spirantho

Made it home tonight with a black Sony 1.44MB drive and swapped out the faceless Teac. The Sony works fine. Yeah, it does look like finding a black 1.2MB 5.25" drive will not be easy, although they were made. Might have to go beige until I do find one.

So perhaps rather than messing with Vice I'll end up writing C64 floppies from downloaded disk images and use those in my actual Commodore 128, which is attached to 1541 and 1571 drives. For the heck of it, my Datasette is also connected to the 128. That's the piece of computer equipment I've kept the longest, having bought it at K mart in December 1983 when I was 18.

Yes, happy birthday, old girl.

@Spirantho

Ian, it's working very well. Thanks! I have successfully read, written and formatted Amiga DD and HD floppies. Right now I have TD0 mounted instead as DF0 (makes me feel all warm inside!). I'm leaving that mounted all the time and will only mount TH0 on the rare occasion when I might need it. Haven't tested the other formats yet.

Only weird thing has been that if I boot up the Sam with a floppy in the drive, the OS reports a read-write error. But the disk is fine if inserted after boot.

Now I need to track down a 3.5 inch floppy drive with a black bezel. The drive in there now is missing a bezel, and it spoils the looks of my pretty new Lian Li case.

And now I also am intrigued about finding a 5.25 inch drive to read and write Commodore 64 floppies. What should I look for? Can those be utilized with Vice?

Got my CatWeasel Mark IV today and have it installed in my Sam along with a Teac 3.5 floppy drive (missing a bezel, but it's all I had on hand). Now wondering about the software side of things...

Is it as simple as installing catweasel.device into devs and creating a mountlist and then using the imager program to read and write? Is there a sample mountlist somewhere? For the moment I'm merely interested in reading and writing Amiga DSDD disks.


EDIT: Nevermind! Got it figured out. Here's the mountlist that worked for me...

Device = catweasel.device
Unit = 0
Flags = 0 /* format #0 = Amiga DD */
Surfaces = 2
BlocksPerTrack = 11
Reserved = 2
mask = 0x7ffffffc
MaxTransfer = 0x00200000
Interleave = 0
LowCyl = 0
HighCyl = 79
Buffers = 5
BufMemType = 1
StackSize = 4096
Priority = 5
GlobVec = -1
ACTIVATE = 1

I probably don't have time to make an disk image of a DVD tonight but will try that soon.

Chris, what is my encoder that needs the priority changed? Point me in the right direction and I'll give it a go.

I've probably confused matters by talking about so many different areas of performance. As far as DVD playback goes, I've about decided that changes in resolution and color depth are having no (great) impact on playback with DvPlayer.
Setting overlay or not via ToolTypes produces no change I can discern.

However, MPlayer won't play a video on the Workbench screen if I have the screen in 32 bit mode. And MilkyTracker has audio playback problems if run too big and Workbench is set to 32 bit, regardless of whether MilkyTacker is set to run in a window on WB or fullscreen. If Workbench is in 16 bit mode, MilkyTracker is fine all the way to the full 1920 x 1080.

I again booted the Sam from the installation DVD, and it's the same level of performance. The one thing I've done that has made an improvement was set interrupts to "YES" via the monitor ToolTypes.

Had to go to work, but just before I left home I put in a "Farscape" DVD that is in 4:3. the style of shooting has a lot of camera movement and the playback was very jerky with DvPlayer. I wouldn't want to watch it. I put in a widescreen animated movie ("Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs"), and the jerkiness was less severe but to me still bothersome.

Interesting that Daniel reports similar performance with a 733mhz "complete system" from AmigaKit. So maybe it's the LiteOn DVD drive, assuming we have the same drive and others with better playback have a different model drive??? Of course, as mentioned, I've already ordered another copy of this drive so I'll have the drawer cover.

EDIT: Squashed a couple of typos.

@328gts

Maybe so, but as said I discern little jumps in playback of .VOB files from the HD too. But coincidentally I have ordered another DVD drive, but it's an exact replacement for the drive I have. It's only a $33 US drive (I used to pay $300 for such things!). I only did it because I have rehoused my Sam system into a better case, and the drive supplied by AmigaKit is missing it's drawer cover. Maybe I'll even get a new SATA cable with the new drive.

Now, any idea why MPlayer is refusing to play any video all when I reset Workbench back to 32 bit? (Maybe I better quit now!)

The DvPlayer tooltypes...

??? Icon by Viktor Soponyai ???
SKIN=nucleo.dvskin
DEFAULTDIR=Work:Data/Video
(LOOP)
(AUTOEXIT)
(XPOS=CENTER)
(YPOS=CENTER)
(NOOVERLAY)
(NOALTIVEC)
(USEBAND=YES|NO)
(AUDIOBOOST)
(NOTRIPLEBUFFER)
(DEPTH=16|32)
(DITHER=ON|OFF)
(SUBTITLEFONT=Helvetica.font)
(SUBTITLEFONTSIZE=24)
(SUBTITLEPOSITION=-8)
(SUBTITLECOLOUR=white|yellow|orange|green|blue|RRGGBB)
(SUBTITLECHARSET=4)

I turned off everything in WBStartup (nothing really unusual was there) and rebooted to observe no difference in playback. As mentioned, a CPU monitor shows nothing is gobbling up CPU cycles.

With your Sam, are you running Workbench in 16 or 32 bit color? As mentioned, my situation improved quite a bit by dropping to 16 bit, although I wish I could muscle on through with million of colors all the time.

I have experimented this afternoon with lots of screen modes and color depths, with and without the transparency effects turned on, with the DvPlayer tooltypes configured different ways, and I haven't improved anything beyond where I got this morning. To be clear, the little jerks in the DVD video playback occur whether I'm playing an actual DVD in the SATA drive or a .VOB file on the hard drive.

I'm pasting the DvPlayer tooltypes below with most everything in parenthesis, which is how it's configured now. I've messed with the NOOVERLAY and other things to no discernable effect, but maybe there is some combination I haven't tried.

MPlayer gives smoother playback of the .VOB files, but the sound is way out of synch.

I mentioned the jerky playback of DVDs to the DvPlayer author via e-mail a while back, and he commented that he Sam440ep is a bit underpowered for DVD playback. Fair enough, I figured, but what is giving me pause (no pun intended) is that so many of you report better performance with the same hardware. Maybe I'm too picky????

Hey, guys...

Here's where I am: The situation is much improved, although I am frankly looking forward to having an AOS4 machine with some more multimedia muscle.

I have dropped my Workbench color resolution down to 16 bit. Between that and changing the monitor tooltypes line to enable interrupts, I can now run MilkyTracker all the way to 1920x1080 without penalty.

And now video playback is much improved, although I am still not 100 percent satisfied. So far MPlayer is outperforming DvPlayer on most things, although MPlayer won't play a DVD .VOB file with the sound in sync. Smaller-resolution AVI files play fine. One of my test files is the Big Buck Bunny animation I downloaded from the Blender site -- at about 800 x 480 resolution it's the largest thing I've tried. It plays much better now in MPlayer but has little jerks in DvPlayer. One thing I notice on this video is that when there is a lot of movement it will update the video in large horizontal bands that are distracting. Also, between shots when the whole scene changes, you can easily detect the big refresh from top to bottom rather than all it once.

Oh, my DVD drive is SATA -- no adapter. And a CPU monitor shows idle is at 1 to 3 percent, and that network component that was mentioned is not running.

Folks, I'm on to something. I don't know why I didn't think of this to start with, but I have booted my system from the AOS4.1 installation DVD. After doing so, I just ran MPlayer and have opened several of the video files I've been working with and all play smoothly.

So clearly something is configured incorrectly on the system on the HD.

It's getting into the wee hours here in the States, so I'll work on this some more tomorrow.

@K-L

Hey there. Thanks for the input, and what you say is encouraging.

Yes, now the tools type command is INTERRUPT=YES. And here's the output from the DMA check...

New Shell process 5
5.RAM Disk:> idetool -l sii3114ide.device
-------------------Unit 0 information------------------------
Flags : $000001A7 - present, LBA48 used, supports DMA, ATA, supports acoustic mgmt, supports cache flush, interrupts used,
Xfer mode : best pio 12 (PIO 4, 16 MB/s) / best dma 70 (UDMA 6, 133 MB/s) / current 70 (UDMA 6, 133 MB/s)
Total blocks : 976773168
Blocksize : 512
Power mode : 2 / idle (ready for operation)
IO1 / IO2 / BMCR @ : $1100 / $110A / $1120
-------------------Unit 1 information------------------------
Flags : $0000011D - present, supports DMA, removable media, ATAPI, interrupts used,
Xfer mode : best pio 12 (PIO 4, 16 MB/s) / best dma 69 (UDMA 5, 100 MB/s) / current 69 (UDMA 5, 100 MB/s)
Total blocks : 332769
Blocksize : 2048
SCSI devtyp : 5
Packet size : 12
Current medium read speed : x 65535 ('65535' stands for max.)
Current medium write speed : x 65535 (idem)
Power mode : 2 / idle (ready for operation)
IO1 / IO2 / BMCR @ : $1100 / $110A / $1120
-------------------Unit 2 information------------------------
Flags : $00000187 - present, LBA48 used, supports DMA, ATA, supports cache flush, interrupts used,
Xfer mode : best pio 12 (PIO 4, 16 MB/s) / best dma 70 (UDMA 6, 133 MB/s) / current 70 (UDMA 6, 133 MB/s)
Total blocks : 976773168
Blocksize : 512
Power mode : 2 / idle (ready for operation)
IO1 / IO2 / BMCR @ : $1110 / $111A / $1128
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 3
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 4
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 5
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 6
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 7
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 8
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 9
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 10
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 11
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 12
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 13
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 14
*** Error opening device sii3114ide.device / unit 15

Thanks, guys. Enabling interrupts via the monitor tooltypes definitely helps matters, but I am frankly still not satisfied.

Now MilkyTracker can be run in a window larger than 640x480 without playback difficulty, but not all the way to a 1920x1080 full screen. A 1024x768 window on my 1920x1080 Workbench now seems to work, however.

I have been testing with an unecrypted DVD as well as encrypted ones. The drive is the LiteOn one provided in the AmigaKit system. Playback has now improved a little, but I still find it unwatchable. I have copied the VIDEO_TS folder from the unencrypted DVD to a hard drive and observed the same results when playing from the hard drive.

Like I said, I can live without smooth DVD playback, but I'd like to be able to play non-HD resolution video files smoothly on this system while I dream of an X1000.

Could somebody point me to a video file online somewhere in a format supported by either DvPlayer or MPlayer that I can download and try out on my system? Something that is known to play back smoothly on a 733mhz Sam???

Oh, and thanks for the DMA tip. My two hard drives and optical drive all have DMA enabled, so that can be ruled out.

Might be my expectations are bigger than what can be realized with this system, but I want to make sure.

I also have MOS2.5 on an eMac and have an Imica Silent coming from Stephen, so I have higher-spec hardware to play on. But I really do feel most at home on AOS4.

@m3x

Here's what the Radeon 9250 ToolTypes say...

CMPLENGTH=11
BOARDNAME=Radeon 9250
DDCMODE=All
(VSYNCMIN=60)
(VSYNCMAX=60)
(HSYNCMIN=31000)
(HSYNCMAX=85000)
(MODE=640x480@60)
(MODE=1280x720@60)
(MODE=800x600@60)
(MODE=1280x720@60)
(MODE=1024x768@60)
(MODE=1280x720@60)
(MODE=1920x1080@56+RB)
(MODE=320x240@60)
(MODE=320x256@60)
(FAKENATIVEMODES=Yes)
(INTERRUPT=Yes)


Should I remove the parenthesis from the (INTERRUPT=Yes) line? Won't hurt to try, so I'll be right back...

Dang, folks, way to try to kill the motivation of a developer. We need to remember this platform is a part-time endeavor at best for most everyone involved.

I appreciate having OWB very much on AOS4. It renders most of the sites I visit perfectly and quickly. I admit that I like the download manager in the MOS version very much and miss it on the AOS4 version, but that doesn't diminish OWB being the best browser on AOS4 right now.

I'll tell one thing about the MOS version I prefer that might be a quick thing to implement if the author is inclined (and I wouldn't blame him if he walked away from the whole thing now).... On MOS the two keyboard shortcuts I use most work with both the left and right command keys. Amiga-T (not M) opens a new tab, and Amiga-+ increases text size. This way, I can hit the commande (Amiga) key with my left hand and the other key with my right hand. It's less awkward for me.

I was acutally planning to e-mail the author with this suggestion when I started reading the bashing against him. With all the hoopla over Timberwolf, I was already fearing he would lose motivation.

Joerg, whatever you do, thanks for what you have done in bringing OWB to AOS4.

I'm not sure that it is.

I have read that this system will not achieve 100 percent smooth DVD playback but that it should be "close." Mine is not even close. It stutters and skips to the point of being unwatchable. I'm using the latest registered version of DvPlayer. I really don't intend to use this computer for DVD playback as a routine, but I'm more concerned that various other video files do not play smoothly with DvPlayer or with MPlayer. No, I'm not attempting to play HD video files and don't expect that level of performance from the Sam.

Another problem area... With MilkyTracker, the playback is so bad at any program window or screen size other than 640 x 480 that the program is only useable at that size. I saw another thread here with another Sam user complaining of the same thing.

What gives me hope is that others said in that thread that they can run MilkyTracker at larger sizes and achieve smooth playback.

So my hope is there is some setting or something in my setup that is slowing me down. Is that a realistic hope?

My system is a 733MHZ "complete system" from AmigaKit. I am running OS4.1u2 and driving a 1920x1080 LCD screen at native resolution. I've tried running at lower resolutions and with the transparency effects off, and that hasn't helped.

Any ideas? Are my expectations just too high? I got better performance with multimedia files and DVD playback with a 1999 PowerMac G3 at 400mhz, a computer that's still in my collection.

So, should I order a Catweasel Mk4 for my Sam440ep-flex? I just rehoused the board into a better case, so now there's a lot of room and I can fit a floppy. Do I fit any old 3.5-inch PC floppy to read and write Amiga floppies with the 'weasel? Are we waiting for better drivers or is what's out now fine for reading and writing Amiga floppies under AOS4.1u2?

Finally, the spot for a SID chip.... is it of any use under any AOS4 software?

Quote:

Yes! I agree with that completely.?Looking forward to the bells and whistles, but the basic operation totally works and brings something a little different to this particular type of software.

@ChrisH

Very nice work, Chris. It's quite useful in its present form, and I look forward to watching this one develop.

One question: Is Amiga-O for zooming in a conflict with the "open" shortcut? Seems to be on my setup.

@nubechecorre

Took me a couple of days to get around to clicking on that "A," but yeah, I've got the same problem. I see a tvpaint.ini file with configuration information, including a whole section pertaining to fonts/text.

What should it say? Here's mine...

[Fonts]
Display=OFF
WIN_X=145
WIN_Y=151
Size=50
Name=CGTimes
Angle_F=Off
Angle=45
Outline_F=Off
Outline=2
Border_F=Off
Border=2
Ratio_F=Off
Ratio=50
Space_F=Off
Space=0
Smooth_F=Off
Smooth=1
Italic_F=Off
Italic=50
FontPath=fonts:
Tracking_F=Off
Tracking=100
Text0=
Text1=
Text2=
Text3=
Text4=
Text5=
Text6=
Text7=
Text8=
Text9=
Text10=
Text11=
Text12=
Text13=
Text14=
Text15=
Text16=
Text17=
Text18=
Text19=
Text=