SEAL Meeting Report Archive

SEAL Meeting Reports from September to December 2000

22nd December 2000

Some members really got into the Christmas spirit!

Sadly this was as close as 3.9 came to the A4000 :( The highlight of this meeting was going to be an OS3.9 installation, Alf brought along his A4000 and the CD as planned but he also had a new Oktagon SCSI card and a CyberVision 64/3D graphics card. Unfortunately installing the CyberVision proved very troublesome so in the end we didn't have time to try 3.9, although Alf tells us he now has it up and running. On the graphics card front Alf will be trying the CV64/3D (which is a new DCE model) in his A1200 with Zorro IV to see if he has more success there.

Apart from that little hiccup many hot mince pies were eaten and several members got an early presie from Mick Sutton who was selling all manner of goodies for the princely sum of one pound!

Happy Christmas from everyone at SEAL!

8th December 2000

SEAL's latest member!

Setting up the 4000. The centre of attention at this meeting was an A4000/030, just aquired by SEAL as the new club machine. The system, which has a Picasso 2 graphics card, GVP SCSI card and CD-ROM will be used for demonstrations at meetings, and particularly for beginners tutorials. The A4000 with a CD-ROM and a graphics card will allow us to cover much more in these tutorials and is easier to transport than an A1200 with all manner of periferals hanging off!

During the meeting Mick, Robert and several other members reformatted the hard drives on the new machine and reinstalled Workbench, CyberGraphX and a few useful utilities.

23rd November 2000

Members watch the scanning presentation.

Members watch the scanning presentation. Robert Williams and Mick Sutton gave a scanning demonstration. Robert explained some of the basics of scanning and the types of scanner you can connect to the Amiga. Rob brought along his Epson GT5000 scanner and was able to show the Betascan, Scantrax and ImageFX driver software. Mick has just given his wife Sharon a new Mustek 600 CD II scanner for her Birthday so he demonstrated it with ScanQuix 5 (supplied with the scanner by Eyetech), Betascan and Scantek. Mick has fxScan (complete with OCR, Optical Character Recognition) on order so hopefully he'll be able to show us that in the future.

Several members were interested in a new spreadsheet, DataM II, which Robert had found linked from Amiga-news.de. DataM is MUI based and has a WYSIWYG display including embedded graphs. DataM seems more "presentation" orientated than existing Amiga spreadsheets like TurboCalc and FinalCalc. The main draw back of this initial beta version is that it is quite slow, particularly the screen re-draw. The author says he is keen to receive feed back and suggestions so we hope he will continue with development and optimisation.

20th November 2000
Mediator... the saga continues!

A brand new Voodoo 3 just waiting to be installed! Last week Elbox released their initial Voodoo3 driver for the Mediator, the driver uses the Picasso 96 RTG system. Chris Emmins was lucky enough to find a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI with SGRAM on offer at PC World so he snapped one up. He then asked Mick Sutton and myself (Robert Williams) to come over and help him with the installation. Installing the hardware was easy, the Voodoo replacing Chris' Virge card. We installed Picasso 96 and then the Elbox driver as detailed in the readme. As none of us were particularly familiar with Picasso 96 (both Mick and I use CyberGraphX) it took us a while to sus it out. Finally we got it configured, loaded a set of pre-defined settings and saved them out as the default. This gave us a nice list of screenmodes. However whenever tried to use a screenmode either in Screenmode preferences or by testing in the Picasso96Mode program the machine hung up with just a black screen on the Voodoo.

We tried changing any settings we could think of and using less demanding pre-defined settings in Picasso 96Mode with no luck. One person on the Mediator mailing list mentioned that he couldn't get his Voodoo working under Picasso 96 without completely deleting his old CyberGraphX installation so we tried that too (although it really shouldn't make any difference as long as you don't try to run both monitor drivers) but it made no difference.

The Voodoo 3 installed on the Mediator in Chris' tower. At this point there didn't seem much else to try however we suspected that the accelerator might be causing the problem. All the people on the Mediator mailing list with a working Voodoo were using '040s or above and Chris' system had trouble booting with the Blizzard 1230 (although once booted it seemed stable). After a long evening we admitted defeat (for the time being) and reinstalled the Virge and CyberGraphX.

Over the weekend Chris managed to get hold of an Apollo '040/25 accelerator which we fitted on Sunday evening. With this accelerator the Voodoo worked straight off, we simply removed the old Virge monitor driver and replaced it with the Voodoo3 one... we didn't need to delete CyberGraphX. In their documentation Elbox say this is an early driver and many of the hardware acceleration features of the Voodoo 3 are not yet supported. Bearing that in mind it seems to perform well, scrolling (of web pages etc.) seems fast and smooth, however some operations such as redrawing the Workbench backdrop are noticeably slow (but far from unusably so). Bear in mind that there is also no support for 3D acceleration at this time although it seems that Hyperion are/will be working on this.

There will be a Preview of the Mediator in issue 7 of Clubbed magazine which is due just before Christmas or very early in the new year. We will have a full review when the drivers are better developed.

For more information on the mediator try:
Elbox, the makers of the Mediator.
VGR.com's comprehensive mediator page.

10th November 2000

Mediator draws a crowd

So what are all these people looking at? A brand new Elbox Mediator PCI bus board fitted with a 4Mb Virge graphics card that's what! Chris Emmins had just received his and bought it along to the SEAL meeting for help (both spiritual and practical) setting it up. After many attempts, with all manner of jumper settings we couldn't get the board to recognise any PCI cards! We checked the software carefully and came to the conclusion there was a hardware conflict. Fortunately the club A1200 was at the meeting so we tried swapping Chris' Typhoon '030 accelerator for the club's Blizzard 1230. With the Blizzard card installed the Mediator started recognising PCI cards although for some reason his system now sometimes needs several warm reboots to get going:(

Typhoon owners please take note!

Chris Emmins wonders if it will ever work (have faith Chris)! With the hardware up and running we then installed CyberGraphX and despite a few problems (the default settings file for our monitor was not loaded even though we selected it during installation) got Workbench displayed in glorious 1024x768, 16bit! Although Workbench looked great screen re-draws were very slow, Robert Williams had noticed that during installation we were not asked to set any CyberGraphX options (as the CyberGraphX installer normally does). He set the SUPERLAYERS, SUPERGELS and WBPATSPEEDUP ENV: variables to 1 which immensely speeded up re-draws.

The Mediator has landed (with Virge and network PCI cards)! Finally Robert had brought a PCI network card based on the Realtek 8039 chipset, supported by the Mediator driver, to try. Initially Miami couldn't open the device, which turned out to be because the file was named MediatorNet.device when the internal name was MediatorNET.device which is important as device names are case sensitive. Once we used the correct case Miami could read the SANA-II parameters from the card but crashed as soon as we tried to connect... so maybe the PCI card was incompatible or the driver is buggy.

So altogether Chris was disappointed that the Mediator didn't work with his accelerator but SEAL has lent him the Blizzard board until he can get a new accelerator (which he was planning anyway). With CyberGraphX optimised the Virge provides a capable graphics card at a good price, certainly streets ahead of a Zorro II solution.

Ah... that's better! Alf Whitfield brought his newly acquired A4000 along which was still running a PAL Hires Workbench. We helped him install MagicTV and FullPalette to give a much better display until he can get a graphics card for the system.

As we reported from the last meeting Dave Kennedy had his A1200 with the slow IDE hard drive to test. This time we tried the club Blizzard 1230 in his system with only a slight increase in drive speed. After Chris Emmins swapped his Typhoon for the Blizzard we tried that board in Dave's machine and suddenly we were achieving nearly 2Mb/s. So the combination of accelerator and hard drive is obviously causing problems. Dave is considering getting a new accelerator with DMA SCSI as his main reason for improving drive speed is to write CDs.

27th October 2000

Alf Whitfield was deciding whether to buy an A4000 from SEAL member Tony Johnson so we had some discussion on the various upgrades available for this machine and their costs compared to A1200 upgrades. In the end Alf decided to buy the machine.

While the A4000 was available we tested David Kennedy's hard drive which seems to be rather slow in his A1200 with an Apollo '040 accelerator. On his machine it barely achieves 1Mb per second where as on the A4000 which is only an 030/25 machine it managed 2.4Mb/s (measured with SysSpeed). So it seems possible that something in Dave's configuration is causing problems, he will be bringing the hard drive, cables and his accelerator to the next meeting so we can test in the club A1200 (which has a Blizzard '030) and hopefully narrow the problem down further.

Heretic II

While the serious stuff was going on in one corner of the hall several SEALs including prospective member Sam Byford (who has recently moved to Benfleet) were salivating over the fantastic Heretic II on Robert's A3000/060/PPC.

Robert prepares to give his demo. At about 21:00 Robert Williams gave a presentation on CD writing, starting with a brief overview of the basic concepts of CD writing works he covered the hardware and software required and finished off with a demonstration of using MakeCD to backup a hard drive partition and to create a compilation audio CD. Several SEAL members present including Mick Sutton and Chris Emmins already use a CD Writer so they were able to chip in with additional information and experiences. As CD writing is such a broad subject the presentation went on almost 'till 23:00 and we had to rush to clear up!

13th October 2000

Members crowd around the Amigas.

Tony Johnson observes full anti-static precautions while changing Haydn's ROMs. Haydn Williams bought along his A1200 which refused to work with a set of 3.1 ROMs. The ROMs came from another A1200 motherboard which expired... so we didn't hold out too much hope they would work. We tried some 3.0 ROMs in Haydn's board which worked fine. Then we tried the 3.1 ROMs in the club A1200 with the same result. We therefore concluded that they were ex-ROMs, they had ceased to be:).

As several SEAL members have Olympus digital cameras Robert took the opportunity to test the GUI for DigiCam he is developing. This went well however one camera (Mick Sutton's C1000L) was incompatible with the underlying DigiCam utility. Several suggestions were made for improvements and new features.

Dave Kennedy in back to the 80s! Alf Whitfield had just got an account with Wirenet and needed a hand to sort out his YAM settings. We helped him set it up so he can collect mail from both his original and the new ISP.

When the club A1200 wasn't in bits it was put to good use by David Kennedy and Roy Burton playing some classic games.

29th September 2000

Robert's demonstration has a hypotic effect on the members watching. The highlight of the evening was a demonstration of the excellent structured drawing package DrawStudio. This was prompted by Kickstart acquiring the rights to distribute DrawStudio. Robert Williams and Mick Sutton showed Draw Studio's flexibility for applications from design and planning to web graphics and DTP. Several SEAL members were interested in the package and we are planning to visit a Kickstart meeting soon to pick up some copies in person.


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