kim@amdahl.amdahl.com (Kim DeVaughn) (06/18/87)
[ "Send lawyers, guns, and money ..." ]
I called New-Tek yesterday to check on the status of Digi-Paint, and
heard something that disturbs me more than just a little bit.
I talked with Paul Montgomery, New-Tek's VP of Marketing (BTW, until very
recently, Paul was with EA, and was also one of the Founder's of FAUG, the
First Amiga Users Group).
Anyway, Paul said that Digi-Paint would still be shipping in June, and
then went on to talk about the (latest) stumbling block that's delayed
getting the product out.
Seems that just about the time Digi-Paint was "ready to ship", New-Tek
got their developer A500/A2000 machines in. Naturally, they tested
Digi-Paint with the new machines, and found that it wouldn't run correctly
on the A500.
The problem(s) were traced to Digi-Paint not working correctly with the
A500's extra "slow fast ram" (sorry, I just *have* to call this kind of
memory "half fast ram" :-) ). Since discovering the incompatibilities,
they've been busily changing their code to accomodate "half fast".
Up until this point, I have been under the impression that "half-fast"
ram is as transparent to an application as is "fast" ram (albeit, slightly
slower under certain circumstances). Apparently this is not quite correct.
So ... I'd like to ask CATS what kind of coding one should do (or more
likely, AVOID doing), to prevent having problems with this kind of
memory? Enlightenment, please!
I'm sitting here wondering now just how many applications that are already
on the market are going to have problems with half-fast, and how many new
Amiga owners will get bitten by this ...
On a positive note, New-Tek is moving into new quarters (6000 sq. ft.), and
now has 13 employees (I think that was the number). All that from the
Digi-View product ... not bad! Paul also mentioned they are working on
several new products (mostly hardware). One that I've heard a little bit
about at a FAUG meeting, is a small box that will allow you to do *color*
digitzation from your VCR, among other things.
/kim
P.S. If you're interested in "compatibility discussions", tune in over
on comp.sys.mac ... there is a war going on over there ...
--
UUCP: kim@amdahl.amdahl.com
or: {sun,decwrl,hplabs,pyramid,ihnp4,seismo,oliveb,cbosgd}!amdahl!kim
DDD: 408-746-8462
USPS: Amdahl Corp. M/S 249, 1250 E. Arques Av, Sunnyvale, CA 94086
CIS: 76535,25spencer@eris.BERKELEY.EDU (Randy Spencer) (06/24/87)
In article <8796@amdahl.amdahl.com> kim@amdahl.amdahl.com (Kim DeVaughn) writes: > >[ "Send lawyers, guns, and money ..." ] > >Seems that just about the time Digi-Paint was "ready to ship", New-Tek >got their developer A500/A2000 machines in. Naturally, they tested >Digi-Paint with the new machines, and found that it wouldn't run correctly >on the A500. > >The problem(s) were traced to Digi-Paint not working correctly with the >A500's extra "slow fast ram" (sorry, I just *have* to call this kind of >memory "half fast ram" :-) ). Since discovering the incompatibilities, >they've been busily changing their code to accomodate "half fast". > >UUCP: kim@amdahl.amdahl.com Actually this is a very interesting point (oh, Hi all, good to be back, I have been having some feed problems, like no disk space). I don't usually like to talk about things going on at work, but We (meaning Infinity Software) just got our developer machines (thanks CATS) and we put our tennis simulation game both the 500 and the 2000. The 2000 ran just like one might expect, like a 1000, but the 500 ran noticably slower than the 1000 or 2000 did. So we figured that we had contention on the Chip buss with program code. So we took the memory board out of the 2000 and ran the program again. Still as fast as ever, but it ran slow on the 500. The graphics are animated BOBs and the 500 is unexpanded (512K in other words). I don't know, but it seems like a not completely compatible machine if it has different timing. I don't know what caused it. Oh, on to bigger and better subjects: I had to speak to Carolyn today and she helped me put my 2000 together, and I thought I would share my expirence on the net so that she don't have to tell thousands of people the stuff that she told me. I wanted to add a second internal disk drive to the 2000 and I looked inside and there was already a power cable and a ribbon cable set up. So I took a drive out of a 1000 and hooked up the cables to it. But when I booted the machine I discovered that it now didn't recognize either df1: or df0: So I looked at the drive I had put in as df1: and there was a unit number jumper so taking a clue I moved it from 0 to 1. I booted this again and it was back to recognizing df0:, only when df0: was running the motor for df1: was also turning. Weird, I thought, so I called Carolyn and asked, she said to look under the power supply, there is a jumper there labeled J36. It should be unjumpered. This controls wheather or not the second drive gets power (I think). I jumpered J36 and re-booted and boom, up and running! If you want to try this yourself, recognize that you will need lifters (or spacers) to go around the screws that hold the drive assembly to the chassis. The lifters raise the drive up to where the mounting hole is, and also keep it from shorting or dragging on the mounting bracket. Ok, so that is half of my story. While Carolyn had me on the phone she said "want to know how to increase the memory in the 2000?". So I said "yeah" and she directed me to look at the memory board that ships with the machine. This is the German 2000 now, so all you who bought West Chester machines, this doesn't apply to you. The German machines ship with 512K of memory plugged into the CPU slot. There are also sockets for some 41256's. I got 16 of them together, ready to install. Carolyn said "look just below the memory chips near the front of the board are some jumpers." They look like this: +---------------------------+ | + + + + + | From left to right notice | | // // // | | that jumpers 2, 3 and 4 are |\ + + + + + | jumpered already. +---------------------------+ ^ | This is the default configuration little What you want to do is to move the yellow jumpers from pins 3 and 4 and put triangle one on pin 5. Then put in the new memory chips to get one Meg. And once I did that you know where I put the extra jumper? You got in! -=*J36*=- !!!! What a nice plan, works out so perfectly... I don't know know what all the memory jumpers mean but I heard that you should be able to set it up to kickstart off that board (but I didn't hear that from Carolyn). Actually, I'm supposed to say I didn't hear any of this from Carolyn, but since it worked, might as well spread the word. Now I can run the EHB demo!! BTW: Is there anyone who got a developer 500 that the bottom hatch would actually stay on? I had to tape up ours, hope this isn't the final caseing. Now I need to get memory expansion for our 500s. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Randy Spencer P.O. Box 4542 Berkeley CA 94704 (415)284-4740 I N F I N I T Y BBS: (415)283-5469 Now working for |||||||||||::::... . . BUD-LINX But in no way |||||||||||||||::::.. .. . Officially representing ||||||||||||:::::... .. ....ucbvax!mica!spencer s o f t w a r e spencer@mica.berkeley.edu -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-