Siamese RTG Upgrade

Updated Sunday, May 4, 1997 Firstly thank you for your increased support of the Siamese System by purchasing this RTG upgrade pack. Whilst this is the first release, we (Paul mostly) have spent the past year developing and testing this product up to a point where we feel it can add something to the Amiga environment and experience to improve the Amiga / PC (and hopefully others) integration. This will allow you to get the best from your computer hardware, however, without the continuing support of customers buying Amiga products the Amiga market would fail immediately, so again I thank you.

Stephen Jones MD HiQ Limited

Contents of Upgrade pack:-

You should have received a pair of disks, one PC Siamese software and the other Amiga software. Also will be this short document explaining the RTG system which is pretty straight forward. However a complete new manual is being worked on and either an addendum covering RTG or a new Siamese System manual will be supplied with the V2.1 upgrade when available.

Installation:-

Please be sure to backup your existing Siamese drawers and the setup for the v1.5 software installed on your system, this should include the libs/ng directory. Once you have backed up your existing setting you are ready to install the new v2 software.

PC Installation:-

This is a simple operation, just drag the Sisys drawer from the PC setup floppy over to the C: drive on you PC. Existing short cuts will work with the new program, as long as you do not rename the Sisys drawer.

Amiga Installation:-

This is even easier as we have an install icon ready for you to just click and go.

Differences between V1.5 and V2.0:-

Prefs:-

You now have an RTG icon instead of the ControlPC icon, as this is now built in as standard. Keep this selected and it will add the modes to the Display database.

MountPC:-

This is now much faster at directory scans and searching through windows in the PC: device window. This makes finding your files much quicker than before. However, actual file transfer is not speeded up as this is down to bandwidth still, but SCSI networking is still supported, although Parallel support will soon make it redundant for most users..

Workbench backdrop:-

In the PC Sisys drawer are two image files called wb_backdrop.bmp and wb_win_backdrop.bmp, these are the default WB backdrop files and will replace any settings that you may have in your WB backdrop program, but as this is much faster than the Amiga could handle even with a graphics card we think you will like it, especially the 24 bit backdrop on an Amiga 256 Workbench. To change these images just convert any image up to 24 bit and convert to a Windows BMP file and rename. The names should be obvious as to there destination but just so you know the wb_win_backdrop.bmp is the Amiga window backdrop and the other is the Workbench backdrop.

AVI Player:-

This program allows you to play windows AVI video files excluding sound within the Amiga RTG workbench display. This is just for fun at present but will be improved to become a proper RTG animation player as the software progresses.

Overall improvements-

The whole Siamese system was almost completely rebuilt to improve system integrity with improved methods of handling packet errors and retries caused by the Amiga's not very advanced serial handling especially when in high frequency modes on AGA machines, which slow the serial port right down.

And of course RTG:-

Well this should speak for itself, you can now open system friendly programs on the PC graphics card in up to 256 colours. The only limitation to this system is the bandwidth available. At present most users should on AGA machines be able to crank up the Serial port in the Prefs program upto 115200. The only reasons that stop this are running the Amiga in DblPal or MultiScan modes. In other words if not necessary then don't.

One VERY IMPORTANT thing to understand about the RTG system is that the display uses NO Amiga ram to create the screen apart from a few Kbytes for a buffer.

Bandwidth is a very important issue which becomes more important when transferring image data to the Amiga display. Obviously we do not have a direct connection to ram like the Amiga chip set and at present all we have is an 11kbyte/sec transfer rate. However most things take very little bandwidth for example to draw an Amiga window is basically made up of drawing about 25 lines and filling with colour. Each line takes probably five bytes of information to draw, so that is about 150 bytes of data for a window which the PC card can draw faster than the fraction of a second that it takes for the Amiga to send it to the PC Sisys Server. Then you have text which once the PC knows about the font makeup it takes about 10 bytes to tell the PC which character and where to put it. Finally the small images for the gadgets are tiny so the transfer is negligible. So this is why we are very fast.

Slow part:-

Now the crunch comes with transferring raw bitmap data down the connection cable used. Obviously this has to be raw data and it gets transferred at whatever speed the Siamese link is set up to. This you will find is not a problem with a lot of graphics programs like ImageFX which can have a small preview window for overall changes or a Pal Amiga screen for viewing.

Slow part:-

As the Siamese link gets faster this will become irrelevant for all but Animation playing applications, and of course we have a cure for this also.....

Speeding up graphics:-

One way of speeding up the graphics is through being a bit clever and fully utilizing the Siamese principle of Share to improve. For example the backdrop of the Workbench, this is basically impossible to do via the Amiga WB backdrop function as it would take for ever to draw. So, we have created the backdrop on the PC side and the PC updates the Amiga WB backdrop using PC memory and speed.

The same thing happens with the solid window moving which is part of RTG, the PC can Blit data much faster than the Amiga can and therefore on an average PCI graphics card it is incredibly fast.

Video and animation's will be accelerated the same way, by using the PC to render them into the RTG screen, however, at present, this is limited to the AVI format and the Amiga animation's must be converted first. However we hope to write an IFF player one day which will be much better. In the mean time conversion to AVI is possible with shareware utilities and you can still use the Amiga's Pal resolutions to do this.

3D is something that we will incorporate into the RTG system in the v3 upgrade if all goes to plan, and this will benefit from PC Graphic cards 3D chips now becoming available.

As you can see plans are being worked on to address the only flaw that we can see in the RTG software, and I believe that this is not a problem with the Amiga's great Pal output used either with a 15khz compatible PC monitor eg. Microvitec or the two monitor setup which is possible by connecting the Amiga video to your old monitor and the PC to its high frequency unit. You may of course find this unnecessary as not everyone does animation.

How Do I Use the new modes:-

Well just select the mode from the display database and then select "USE" for the first couple of attempts to make sure that application is RTG friendly. Once you are happy please do the following, email or write to us with your experiences of the program and how efficient it was, and secondly you can save the settings if it behaved itself.

Workbench can be saved to boot into RTG immediately, but please note that at present the software boots to original Workbench setting then switches automatically. You can do as I do and only have RTG displayed and no other Amiga display if you so wish.

What if I save the Workbench setting to use RTG and it won't boot:-

Firstly you can bypass the RTG mode by holding down the left "Amiga" key during the Sisys boot period. Also it may be that the PC Sisys Server did not lock on, so just re run the PC server and reboot the Amiga.

Windows NT Support

Siamese v2 supports Windows NT.

Trying to use F12 as a hot key fails under NT, so you must use control-F12. Updating the SCSI drives is not supported under NT (the function just isn't implemented in the OS), so SCSI networking is out of the question until a solution can be found.

Alpha Support

To run the Siamese software on the Alpha requires the FX!32 translation software from digital. If this did not come with your Alpha machine, it is downloadable from http:///www.digital.com or contact the dealer you purchased the machine from.

Further help

If you want any questions answered please email them to us for a quick response, try to be brief and concise as I receive lots of emails every day and cannot write War and Peace for each email.