Tried adding the boot param 3D (BM brings up the boot menu) for transparency and acceleration, only to find I don't seem to get anything noticable. I'm using the same standard 9250 that most are. Has anyone gotten this param to work on the Efika?

@ STK

http://kiero.binaryriot.org/scube.lha - Try this. Please make sure you read the included documentation first.

There will also be additional commodities which enable the excessive use of transparency and fading effects for windows. They simply have not been made available just yet by their third party developers.

Using 3d is the right way. And for sure you have seen transparency. Its just not that entire windows get transparent by default. When using the Ferox skin you have real alpha shadows around any window. Also MUI help bubbles are using real transparency for their round edges.

The system just provides the possibility to have transparency. Each application can decide about his windows have holes in it or become 100% transparent.

As Jobbo already mentioned the breathtaking fading you previously saw in videos is created by an external commodity which is not yet made available to the public. It is also not recommended to daily use as it automatically enables transparency for all windows on screen which may render applications useless, like windows using overlay.

But its really nice to see the little Efika fade windows in and out while playing a movie without any flicker or slow downs and without the need of having giant power eating cpus and gpus just for this effect. :D

Geit

unfortunately the 3D features makes ambient freeze at the moment.
i haven't been able to use MOS on efika for more than 10 mins without crashing actually.

I guess you're using a pci graphic card?

Geit

@geit

nope, AGP on the riser.

Well 3D does indeed seem to be working having just spent a bit of time playing with the cube example above. I have to agree that seeing those kind of transparency effects from the videos will definitely be fun for showing off what this little machine is capable of.

I have gotten so used to Debian (and compiz when I tried it) being slow and awkward to use that MorphOS has been a delight to use in comparison. I do also have some freezes after short times and do use a PCI card (via AGP riser for the record (I assumed this was the timeout kicking in) and I can't wait for audio too.

Of all the little touches I found so far that I enjoyed for `Amiga-ness` I have to mention the screensavers are exceptionally high quality (coming from someone who generally couldn't care less about such things), and the Bootpic alteration and customisation options for the text etc - as soon as I found that I plugged my wifi card into my trusty A1200 and copied my old Amiga bootpic images over to MorphOS.

Hopefully those freezes won't prove too troublesome to sort, I'll definitely be buying a license in a few days.

Don't mix that! Boot argument 3d is just short for "3dlayers" which is just a name for "gpu enhanced intuition", which enables transparency other stuff for applications. 3d Cube and 3d games (e.g. foobilliard, tuxracer) will work even without 3d enabled at bootup.
Its even able to play Quake and Quake2 on Efika. For Quake2 you need to disable 3D at bootup (saves memory) and avoid loading Ambient (same reason).

Geit

Unfortunately that's tantamount to PCI. It's possible that MorphOS doesn't do quite as well with only a bridged fake AGP port as it would with a real AGP adapter, although the only system bplan have ever made with "real AGP" has been the original Articia S Pegasos I. Simple benchmarks showed that bandwidth across this bus was not much better than PCI and in any case the 66MHz PCI bus provided on the Discovery II for the Pegasos II, and the Efika PCI bus, outperform it by a long way.

The problem comes when you run out of memory; PCI transfers cannot be pipelined and there is a seperate address and data tenure for every section of data meaning transfers can take twice as long as on AGP, which uses sideband addressing (for every 32-bit word transfered you can send a 8-bit address portion, this increases the performance of bursts).

However most AGP data is transferred in a mode, which is exactly the same as 66MHz 32-bit PCI, for all intents and purposes. Speeding up these transfers requires double- and quad-pumped buses, and sideband and pipelining gets turned off.

If you only have a 32MB or 64MB card then you may have many open screens with many windows and run out of memory, then the bus bandwidth will really show since textures have to be manually uploaded and downloaded. AGP can access through the GART any system memory which means texture management can easily pick data which will be rarely used and simply not upload it to the card, or push rarely used data out to make sure it is not in the way.

This may be the case if you put a screen to back, or something. If it is not being displayed you could get away with pushing all of it's graphics out to main memory.

On the Efika, only having 128MB of real memory is going to really cause a problem here. I would not recommend you enable it unless you have a 128MB graphics card.

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Matt Sealey

Sure it gets slow at some point, same happens on Pegasos2 when running out of memory. I have only 128 MB GFX Mem on both systems and its for sure getting slower as memory needs to be moved between GFX Card and system memory.

Same happens on Efika here, without any difference. Using AGP on both systems.

I asked because there were users having a radeon 9000 pro pci with strange sideeffects.
yeah, on Efika 128 MB is minimum for sure, but 256 MB cards are currently a waste of money as OF just supports the first 128 MB.

Geit

Are there any known issues relating to Bootpic on the Efika? Even the default .png pictures included aren't showing up on boot, font size changes are (though not colour or italic styles etc).

EDIT: Somewhat at random, after a half dozen or so reboots where I hadn't gone near BootPic at all it just started working. Weird, but cool.

This is very true but an unfortunate side-effect of the way the MPC5200B addresses memory and the PCI specification, and not the firmware. Any PCI address space allocated as per the PCI specification MUST be aligned to it's size, so if you have a 64MB graphics, it must be aligned at a 64MB-aligned location. With a 256MB card, there is no way to align it to a 256MB-aligned location and stay within the MPC5200B memory map.

This will cause problems for instance in a system where you have two 256MB graphics cards, even on a PC - you can have 8k of IO space mapped at an 8k boundary, then a 255MB gap up to memory, then 8k more memory mapped IO, then another 255MB gap up to it's memory again. You may have worked out that two 256MB cards actually take up 1GB of PCI address space.

If they are the first cards on the bus, this might be fine, but you must retain that alignment for further cards; so a 128MB card in slot 2 must also be aligned at 256MB, and an 8k IO space for an ethernet card will also be aligned there, with another 255MB of space afterwards :)

So there is not much solution even on a PC or Pegasos for having extremely large PCI memory banks unless you start talking about having 64-bit addresses (not PCI-X or 64-bit PCI, but a dual-address cycle).. which is a whole other story altogether.

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Matt Sealey

Out of interest, which version of Quake are you referring to? I tried the `official` Amiga Quake file from aminet with the full .pak files and it starts fine, runs the menu etc, until I click the new game option. A few seconds later it crashes out to desktop. Can't seem to get around it.

Now the window transparency and blending tool lucy is available:

http://www.amigazeux.org/index.php?name ... cle&sid=67

Geit

Excellent, top of my list of things to try tomorrow (along with IRC clients and finding that version of Quake that'll run...)