Subject: REVIEW: Picasso II graphics board
From: [email-masked] (Mike Meyer)
Date: 1 Feb 1994 14:37:11 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Picasso II graphics board

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	This is a multiple format graphics board that integrates into
the Monitors system found in AmigaDOS 2.04 and beyond, providing
screen modes ranging from 24-bit deep 320x200 to 1600x1200.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Village Tronic/Expert Services
	Address:	7559 Mall Road
			Florence, KY 40142
			USA

	Telephone:	(606) 371-9690
	Fax:		(606) 282-594

LIST PRICE

	There was some confusion about the price, caused by special "show
prices" for the boards.  I've heard either $500 or $550 for the 1 meg board,
and $550 or $600 for the 2 meg board.  I wound up paying $485 for a 1 meg
board at my local dealers, and $50 for the extra meg of RAM at a local nerds'
supermarket.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		Zorro II slot required. I don't know how well this
		works on the expansion boxes available for the low-end
		Amigas, but would be interested in finding out.

		Two meg of Fast RAM required, and more would be useful.

		SVGA or multisync monitor required, and the board is is
		happier with a high-speed multisync.

	SOFTWARE

		AmigaDOS 2.04 required, 3.0 makes more features available.

COPY PROTECTION

	None.

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	A3000/25, 16 meg Fast RAM and 2 meg Chip RAM.
	AmigaDOS 3.1.
	NEC MultiSync 4FG monitor.

	I bought the board specifically for use with Amiga Mosaic 1.1.

VERSION INFORMATION

	The Picasso support software used was:

		village.library 2.53
		vilintuisup.library 2.7
		PICASSO firmware v1.43 (22.09.93)

	These are the versions of the software that the North American
distributor recommended until January 29, 1994.  PICASSO firmware v1.44 is
available, but it's recommended that 1.43 be used instead.

	Later versions of this software are available in Europe, and as of
January 29, 1994, one is available in North America.  Users are not
uniformly happy with the upgrade. It corrects all or most of the bugs
mentioned in this review, but introduces some rather annoying new ones.
Whether you prefer the upgrade or the reviewed version will depend on what
applications you use.

WHY I BOUGHT A PICASSO

	Those of you who know me - or at least know my views on graphics -
are probably wondering what I'm doing reviewing a graphics board.  After
all, I always claimed that more colors weren't very important, and for
resolution favored width (and lots of it) over either depth or height.  Well,
there's one application that is sufficiently important and useful that I
think it deserves the environment it expects.

	Amiga Mosaic is an Amiga port of NCSA's Mosaic. It's a World Wide
Web browser, with support for gopher, ftp, and news as well as the http
protocol used by the web.  One problem with this program is the large number
of documents on the web that assume a 256-color display for embedded images.
Indeed, many of those images are no more than links to photographic quality
jpeg images.  Surfing the web on a high resolution, interlaced 16 color
display meant looking at many poorly rendered pages.  The thought of being
able to display those photographic images properly, as well as view the web
pages the way the author intended, was too much.  I went out and bought the
card.

INSTALLATION

	Installation of the hardware and software is dealt with in
the HARDWARE and SOFTWARE sections below, respectively.

HARDWARE

	The hardware is the basis for the entire product; if it's poor,
nothing else really matters.  This is a very solid piece of hardware.

	The card installation was straightforward, though it was a tight fit
in my aging A3000.  The provided cable for connecting an SVGA video socket
to the Picasso fit nicely in the A3000 deinterlacer port. The card plugged
in and worked the first time, with no problems.  Installing a second meg of
memory was straightforward, though the tight fit caused a few worried
moments while unplugging it.

	With either one or two meg of memory, the provided viewers, as well
as MultiView and the ADPro driver, all produce truly stunning images on the
NEC 4FG monitor. Mouse scrolling is smooth and fast, whether the sprites are
the good old Amiga low resolution sprites, or sprites that use the same
resolutions as the screen. Screen scrolling up and down is also fast and
smooth, though you can't move the mouse pointer above the top of the screen
it's on, and 256 color screens don't scroll. These are apparently a software
limitation fixed in the next release.

	Screen flipping between screens with the same mode is as quick as for
Amiga screens.  For screens more than 4 bits deep, which use chunky pixels,
redrawing the screen is something you can watch happen.  Screen flipping with
a mode change has a noticeable delay, and in some cases an audible click. If
you're changing between standard Amiga modes and Picasso modes, the click
always happens.  If you're changing between Picasso modes, it seems to be
random.  If you're used to Amiga screen-switching, this might be annoying,
even though it is brief.  If you've been using other multi-screen systems, it
probably won't be.  In comparison to the multi-screen window managers for an
X workstation, you get to watch the Picasso screen go briefly blank and then
your new screen appears, as opposed to watching an X screen slowly redraw
all the windows you had open.

	Most of the new screen modes work just fine, including the 1600x1200
mode, though two modes (1120x832 and 1152x900) refused to sync on my
monitor.  Again, I'm not sure if that's because the hardware is trying to use
a mode my monitor can't use, because the software isn't working properly, or
because those modes are to close to the limits of my monitor's capabilities.

	By choosing one mode for my main working screens (1024x768, in
depths ranging from 2 to 8), I avoid all of these problems, and get a more
usable work environment than I previously had. Since the Picasso II seemed a
rather expensive investment for one program and viewing pretty pictures,
this was a relief.

	Again, those who have discussed graphics with me before will recall
that I'm willing to trade speed for wider, but not for deeper.  In going
from super high resolution interlaced to 1024x768 I lost bits but got a
tighter image.  I managed to recover the lost display area by going to a
smaller font.  As for speed, here are the results of using the IntuiSpeed
test that came with the board, for both the super high resolution interlaced
screen I used to use, and various depths of 1024x768.

          Super-High Res Laced | 1024 x 768 | 1024 x 768 | 1024 x 768
                      4 colors |   4 colors |  16 colors | 256 colors
-------------------+-----------+------------+------------+------------
Draw Points        |     75186 |      61154 |      55530 |      59639
Draw Lines         |      6124 |       3046 |       1593 |       1395
Draw Boxes         |      2051 |       2575 |       1468 |       1000
Draw Circles       |       630 |        427 |        378 |        455
Scroll vertical    |       193 |        690 |        368 |        183
Scroll horizontal  |       196 |        192 |         97 |         94
Draw Text          |      4388 |       6101 |       4085 |       2835
Draw Frames        |      2716 |       2570 |       1569 |        671
Window open/close  |        46 |         41 |         27 |         17
Window size change |       101 |         91 |         85 |         75
Window Move        |       467 |        409 |        313 |        229
-------------------+-----------+------------+------------+------------

	The test measures the number of various operations that are done in a
fixed amount of time.  While super high resolution interlaced is faster for
simple drawing, the Picasso using 1024x768 mode with the same number of
colors is faster for text (notably for the important operation of vertical
scrolling) and in the error range for window operations.  Notice that the
256 color mode is faster for drawing points and circles than the 16 color
mode, almost certainly thanks to the chunky pixel memory organization used
for that mode.

	For those interested, my primary work screen is 1024x768 with four
colors.  Mosaic gets a 256 color screen, as I use it for displaying GIF
images.  While I seldom use my Workbench screen, other users of my Amiga
seldom use anything else, so it's set to a depth appropriate for them. My
5-year-old child enjoys his 16-color icons.

SOFTWARE

	Without the software, the hardware is just a board. While the
software isn't rock solid, it's already usable, and apparently fixable. I'm
going to cover the various programs provided in order of increasing
importance.

	Software installation uses Commodore's Installer program, and I had
no problems with it.  Running it multiple times works fine. I haven't tried
the "uninstall" package; I don't plan on doing so soon.

	The least important program is PicassoPhoto. The documentation
doesn't mention it, but it apparently lets you save Picasso screens as IFF
images.

	The package includes TVPaint Jr. and MainActor and their
documentation.  MainActor didn't impress me as an animation player nor
viewer.  I have so little interest in TVPaint that I haven't bothered
installing it yet.

	Next is PicassoSwitch.  This is a commodity that allows you to
switch between Picasso and Amiga graphics output.  Since you can set the
graphics drivers to do this automatically there isn't much need for
PicassoSwitch.  Except for some long delays after odd modes, the driver
handles this perfectly.  The only time I've dealt with PicassoSwitch was in
checking to see if the two modes that didn't work on my monitor might have
been a failure of the mode sensing software.  It does what it's supposed to
do.

	StyxBlank is a screen blanker commodity that uses the Picasso screen
mode.  It's the now-relatively-old moving, color-changing line.  The blanker
is simple, with few features, but it does the job.  Your old blanker may work
just fine, even with Picasso mode promotion, if the program uses system
calls for graphics, and checks the size of the screen it opens.  For the
modular blankers, this could require configuring every module separately.  I
use ShadowMaster, which has this problem.  On the other hand, every module
now runs in a Picasso screen, ranging from 320x240 up to 1600x1200.

	The various viewers rank next, and we'd be getting into some really
useful software with those.  However, IntuiView needs to be discussed first.
It implements a good idea - it's a configurable file viewer and manipulator.
It's also a common idea; most of the directory utilities available already
provide these kinds of facilities, as does Amiga Mosaic.  Thus, I haven't
used IntuiView at all.

	The software includes viewers for IFF, GIF and JPEG images.  The
first thing you notice about the viewers is their speed.  Not only do they do
the conversion quickly, but also they open the display and you get instant
feedback about what's going on.  Compared to something like MultiView with
appropriate datatypes, they're a marvel.

	Their disadvantages become obvious quickly - they try to choose the
smallest resolution on which your image fits. In at least one case, that
means they chose a resolution that my monitor couldn't display.  The IFF and
GIF viewers will let you specify a resolution, but won't let you scroll the
image if it doesn't fit in that resolution.  The JPEG viewer lets you pick
the color depth, but not the resolution, and only lets you scroll if you use
the undocumented scroll switch.  The net result is that I wasn't using any
off them as external viewers in Mosaic, until I stumbled over the scroll
switch for ViewJPEG.  I recently turned that on, and will probably leave it
on.

	The program you'll probably use the most is ChangeScreen.  It's a
commodity that watches for other programs to attempt to open screens, and
lets you change the screen mode they've asked for.  ChangeScreen helps
programs that don't give the user a chance to chose a screen mode from the
2.04 monitors list.  Programs that let you select a screen mode will offer
the Picasso modes as a choice, and everything should work fine.

	If the program that's having its screen promoted is smart enough to
check the size of the screen it opened, this can work quite nicely.  Even if
the program doesn't do that check, many of them can benefit from being
opened on a Picasso mode screen.  A few don't work very well.  It takes some
experimenting for each program that you're going to do this for to find out
whether it will work, and the best resolution to use.

	When in use, ChangeScreen allows you to promote screens of a
specific type to some other type automatically, or to choose a mode for a
program opening a specific screen name.  Being a little paranoid, I've never
tried the first option.  The second works quite nicely, barring bugs in
programs that cause their screen name to change.

	In normal use, ChangeScreen brings up a requester every time a
program that's not in its database tries to open a screen mode that's not
automatically promoted, and you have to deal with that.  This is what causes
problems with blankers, as noted above.  Normally, you tag the program as
"always promote", or "never promote", and forget it.  You also have the
option of promoting (or not) for just that invocation.  Once a program is in
the database, you can change its screen mode, including back to "leave it
alone."

	The ChangeScreen window also allows you to select programs from a
requester and select a mode, but this doesn't appear to work.  The requester
puts the programs path in the database, so it fails to match when the
program runs.

	ChangeScreen can also force old programs to use Topaz 8 instead of
the default system font, and can be set to patch only the programs that use
the AmigaDOS 1.x OpenScreen call.

	In practice, ChangeScreen works fairly well.  The only program it's
caused a problem with has been my screen blanker, because I had to set it up
for each module.  While this took some time to fix, it was worth it.  Some of
the old standards - StarBlanker, Swarm - look fantastic on a 1600x1200
display!

	Now we come to the heart of the package:  the Picasso Monitor.  This
program, and its support libraries, are what hook the Picasso card into the
system so that its modes show up on the system screen modes list.  It also
maps the systems graphics calls into their Picasso equivalents, so that
programs that use the new mode have a chance of working properly.

	There aren't very many options you can set here.  You need to say
what bandwidth your monitor is; the installation script sets that for you.
You can arrange things so that the software uses the Amiga's blitter instead
of the CPU, which is useful if you have a slow CPU.  You can control whether
all the bit planes in a screen scroll at once (recommended, if nothing
breaks).  Finally, you can control whether you get a sprite in standard Amiga
resolutions, or in the Picasso resolutions.  This last feature caused some
troubles, because the documentation doesn't mention that if you haven't
created a custom mouse pointer, the default shows up as a Picasso resolution
sprite even if you've disabled that.  This is not only confusing, but also a
bit ugly.  They recommend using standard Amiga sprites if you're going to
use high resolution, as the high resolution sprites are tiny, and hard to
see.  I heartily concur!  You can get the default pointer as an Amiga
resolution by invoking the pointer Preferences program, and Saving it as is.

	This software works.  It's not 100 percent yet; there are problems
with sprites getting lost, or stuck in the menu bar.  There are problems with
program rendering small things that wind up on the wrong screen.  It
interferes with things that monitor the input stream, like AutoPoint, Snap,
and WShell's DHOpt.  Also, the system just feels less stable than it used to.
It seems as I find it frozen after being left alone for long periods of
time, and that it crashes more often than it used to.  I don't have any
concrete evidence, just a feeling.  On the other hand, the vendor claims
there is a new version coming out soon that should many of the listed bugs,
plus the problems mentioned in the section on hardware.  That could go a long
way towards making this feeling go away as well.

DOCUMENTATION

	Without the documentation, the software is just code. This is where
the Picasso II package has the most problems.

	The documentation is a 100-page spiral-bound pamphlet.  It could
have come from your local copy shop.  Besides the omissions already
mentioned, it contained a large number of typographical errors, and was
apparently printed on a 300 dpi laser printer.  It gets low marks for
overall quality.

	It provides detailed instructions for installing the card.  If you're
comfortable working inside an Amiga, you don't need this.  If you're not,
you should have someone else install the card for you.  The effort spent on
this section should have gone elsewhere.

	It also included a long and somewhat muddy explanation of how
various monitor frequencies interact, and culminating in a specious
explanation for why they don't provide 24 bit color on 1280x1024 screens.
While this may be interesting, it isn't relevant, and this section be moved
into the technical section.

	The software documentation covers most - but not all - of the
included programs.  Most notably, CheckPicasso and PicassoPhoto are missing,
and the IntuiSpeed documentation tells you little more than the name and
display tell you.  Since these three programs do not have English
localization, this is particularly painful.  What does exist is somewhat
muddy and badly organized.  Lack of an index makes this particularly painful.

	On the plus side, they include a troubleshooting guide that seems to
cover the obvious and some not-so-obvious problems, and complete programming
information.  They also include a glossary of technical terms.

LIKES AND DISLIKES

	The board provides a much more usable work environment than ECS
Amiga graphics; provides beautiful renderings of deep images; and takes
Amiga Mosaic to a new level of usability.  This board shows that working in a
modern graphics environment is no longer just a luxury.

	On the hardware side, the noticeable delays in switching screen
modes, even from one Picasso mode to another, and the two unusable modes are
annoying.  These may caused by the monitor and not the Picasso.

	On the software side, I dislike the problems it creates in other
software, and the low quality of the documentation.  The interference with
input commodities is annoying, as is the instability of the software.
Likewise, the provided viewers are suitable only for very specific purposes.

	Fixing the stability problem has to be first on the list of
suggestions.  Tools for creating screen modes - especially if I could
disable some of the current standard modes - would be excellent additions.
Having the ChangeScreen facility use a multiselect file requester would
help.  Reworking the viewers to make them more intelligent, and providing
scrolling where needed, would be useful improvements.

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	The similar products are the GVP Spectrum and the Piccolo board. The
Picasso seems to have the best Workbench emulation, which was high on my
list.  It also has an edge in price, which never hurts.  Its major
disadvantage is missing a Zorro III mode, which makes it slower.  Since
Jochim Worringen's review of the Piccolo card seems to indicate that a
faster CPU is more important than bus width in this regard, this is not that
critical:  the fastest Piccolo/Picasso configuration was a 33 MHz 68030,
being 30% faster with 256 colors than the same card in 8 colors in Zorro III
mode.

BUGS

	I've mentioned most of them: lost sprites and things rendering on
the wrong screen.  In addition, text cursors sometimes get misplaced, and
wind up being erased to the wrong color.  The vendor believes most of these
to be AmigaDOS 3.x related and expects to solve those bugs with their next
release of the Picasso software, due out soon.  In addition, that release
will solve the limitations on screen scrolling, and should include more
English text for the programs that need it.

	Before I installed the second meg of RAM, the graphics problems were
even worse.  Normally, this involved artifacts from an already-open Picasso
screen appearing on a newly opened screen.  In one case, using the console
clear screen sequence to clear it up caused a checkerboard to cover the
console window.  You can usually clear these by flipping screens away from
and back to the dirty screen.  All these problems vanished with the
two-megabyte upgrade.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	I contacted the US vendor on a Saturday, to find get the chip types
for the second meg of RAM (another omission from the manual).  I also
discussed the bugs mentioned in the first paragraph of the BUGS section.
They were polite, provided the information I needed, or quickly admitted when
they didn't have it, suggesting I call back during the week.

WARRANTY

	One year from the manufacturer.  Local support depends on your
dealer.

CONCLUSIONS

	This board does what I bought it for.  With two meg of RAM, the
hardware seems to function quickly and reliably.  The software still needs
work, but that is apparently happening in a timely fashion.  In this case,
those of us in North America are on the slow end of the pipeline.  While I'm
not 100% satisfied with the board to date, I don't regret the purchase.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	Copyright 1993, Mike Meyer.

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