ScuzzBlog: Diaries June 2017
Entry 22nd June 2017: Post: 03
GVP Issue
Hi
I have a 1230 Turbo GVP with just 4mb ram in an Amiga 1200. I bought the
card new in 1994. If I recall it cost me £350 at the time. Know the card
well, and what it can do. I use it on the games machine playing
Settlers, Ishar and Arcade Snooker plus Sensi. I don't use the machine
for anything heavy, though I was mucking around with VidiAmiga. The
computer was last used to Parnet over the Checkmate. More on that in a
while.
Thing is I have been wanting to move a load of animations off the hard
drive. Anyone who knows about disks and the Amiga will appreciate the
difficulties of files bigger than 1.6mb. Anyway I have a few in the
range of 2.2 to 2.7 created on this Amiga and now I have the ZIP
attached I can move them to ZIP disk. Which I have done.
Here is the thing.. with a combined RAM fast .. graphics plus I have the
residue of 6mb less the stuff I need to run the Amiga. So a 2.5mb file
shouldn't be a problem. But I am able to play through DOpus say once and
then when I call up another file say 2.1mb it says out of memory. We are
talking animations created in DPaint. Sometimes it does work but not all
the time. I started to suspect the Surf so I umhooked. Same issue. I can
play once or twice but then if I select another anim it fails.
Now if I fire up DPaint I can play the animation always. I have set up a
menu to use the DPaint Player and that works all the time no issue. Even
with bigger files. Also using Main Actor I have no issue. I even set up
the Main Actor Player in DOPus .
So I dug out the GVP install disk and ran the utilities to check the
memory and it says the card is working perfectly. Took a while to check
the whole memory but no issue.
Thing is DOpus plays anims on the run. It uses SHOW to play them. Which
got me searching just where SHOW is cus it aint in C. So it must be a
DOpus function. This means that anims load and play at the same time and
are almost instant. Whereas Main Actor takes the time to load the file
fully before playing.
I am of a mind to suggest that this is not an issue, though I am hard
pressed to recall if I ever had an issue with the card in the nineties.
Thing is , cus of the 1.6 watershed I would have not created anims
bigger than that number. My main Amiga has 32mb so maybe I'm just spoilt
now.
Anyway odd. If you understand what I'm talking about.
scuzz
|
