amiga-news.de - WinUAE 4.9.0: Setting up the Voodoo3 RTG emulation for AmigaOS 4.1, part 1

22.Dec.2021 WinUAE 4.9.0: Setting up the Voodoo3 RTG emulation for AmigaOS 4.1, part 1
At the beginning of March we reported for the first time that for the Amiga emulator WinUAE the emulation of the Voodoo3 graphics card is in development. This was then already made available in the beta versions.

With the release of the official version 4.9.0 the other day, this emulation is now officially introduced. So far I had defined a Zorro III board with uaegfx for the emulation of AmigaOS 4.1. Now I wanted to find out, also driven by a request in the forum, how the Voodoo3 emulation can succeed and whether it brings advantages for working with AmigaOS 4.1. With the friendly support of WinUAE developer Toni Wilen - thank you very much - and a little bit of my own investigative spirit, this task was basically mastered. However, I would like to emphasise that I am not a WinUAE expert, so comments and possible suggestions for improvement are very welcome for the benefit of all.

First of all the 'PCI bridgeboard' must be configured. For the Voodoo3 emulation, a Mediator, Prometheus or G-REX board can be used. The special thing about AmigaOS 4 is that all the necessary drivers are already included in the operating system. In contrast to the use for the AmigaOS 3 emulation, where among other things the BIOS ROM of the Voodoo 3 board must be added as a file. The same is true of the RTG driver Picasso96, now trading as P96.
'PCI bridgeboard' can be found under 'Expansions':

As is so often the case, you should also pay attention to the trivial things and check the 'Enabled' box. Otherwise, you can save your configuration as often as you like: the setting will be lost.
Then you can select the Voodoo 3 graphics card under 'RTG board':

If all this has worked, you should see the following under 'Hardware info', as Toni Wilen wrote: "It should list 2 Mediator boards, 'parent' and 'child' board with Voodoo 3 under the 'child'": board. :

That was it and it can be booted. I am omitting a screenshot of the Workbench that now appears: The resolution cannot look good because nothing has been defined yet. For the definition of the monitor type under Devs/Monitors I copied my uaegfx monitor and changed the name and the tooltype accordingly:

That was still easy. Now one or more screen resolutions have to be defined under Prefs/Picasso96Mode. I have never had anything to do with Picasso96 before - I would not call it intuitive after my current experience. I cheerfully click on the upper left icon, under which 'New Item' appears. Yes, but nothing happens. Only with the help of a YouTube video, in which the person fittingly failed to get it to work correctly, did I learn that you have to hold down the left mouse button and then drag the icon into the first window:

Then go to the menu 'Attach setting to' and select the Voodoo3 board.

And for each subsequent window, drag the 'New Item' icon from the top into the same window and adjust the resolution to your own monitor. Once everything has worked, you should find the new screen mode under Prefs/ScreenMode:

In a second article we will look at what added value this has brought us compared to the previous configuration. (dr)

[News message: 22. Dec. 2021, 06:53] [Comments: 0]
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