folks,

after gazing longingly at the X1000 for so long now, i gave up a few weeks ago and decided to get a pegasos. i love my SAM very much, but it just doesn't have the performance i need. for example i'm in the middle of copying a DVD onto a hard disk, browsing the web, and watching a standard-resolution video in DVplayer. with no dropped frames. and as i type this, the CPU monitor is showing around 35% usage.

nice.

on the SAM we'd be near 100% between the copy operation and the video. and that's what i missed: the ability to do multiple thingss at once without slowdown.

the new rig is a pegasos 2 with a 1GHz G4 processor, 1GB of memory, a radeon 9000 pro AGP video card, USB2 card, and netgear wireless card. i've reused my SATA DVD and hard drives from my SAM, using EIDE-to-SATA adapters. a few minor observations:

1. the installation of OS4 on this thing is way too involved
2. i despise the peg2's firmware. with a passion.
   a. the onboard help isn't helpful
   b. it seems to repeat every key i type, making it horrid to work with
   c. would a menu-driven option kill the designers?
3. IDE is slow. to the point that DVD watching can be difficult

Last edited by eliyahu on 10-Jul-2012 at 03:44 AM.

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

@eliyahu

Quote:

eliyahu wrote: folks, ... browsing the web, and watching a standard-resolution video in DVplayer. ...

Wow!
How do you achieve that?
Watching the browser with the left eye while watching the video on DVPlayer with the right one (making a face like Marty Feldman)?
Now that's what I call true multitasking!

Last edited by Dandy on 10-Jul-2012 at 05:49 AM.

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Dandy

Quote:

Dandy wrote: @eliyahu Wow! How do you achieve that? Watching the browser with the left eye while watching the video on DVPlayer with the right one? Now that's what I call true multitasking!

I was just thinking that myself... (How many eyes he got)...

Gawd... even this 2.1GHz iMac can't do all that at once, mind you it is running OSX 10.5.8 and takes 3 days to boot up, so no surprises there...

_________________

@eliyahu

Quote:

2. i despise the peg2's firmware. with a passion.

I never used it except to type 'boot' or 'boot boot.img'. What else is needed?

Quote:

3. IDE is slow. to the point that DVD watching can be difficult

IDE should not be slow on that board but it is known that OS4 IDE drivers are/were slow. In fact it is the fastest OS4 machine with PATA. You should get pretty decent performance out of it. I would consult OS4 manual if DMA is enabled or if you have installed required updates.

Last edited by itix on 10-Jul-2012 at 10:41 AM.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@eliyahu

I feel your pain with regards to the firmware for Pegasos 2. I sold mine a month or two ago, it was a brilliant machine it was sad to part ways with it.

The doubling up whilst typing into the firmware maybe because you are using a USB keyboard instead of a P2 keyboard. If you are using a USB keyboard try sourcing a P2 keyboard this should fix your problem with typing into the firmware interface. There was a firmware upgrade that could be performed on certain revisions of the Pegasos boards to improve USB compatibility but it can potentially destroy your Pegasos ability to ever boot again if installation of the upgrade failed.

IDE on my machine ran at a respectable speed so I can't really advise anything there, try optimising/defraging your partitions maybe that will help?

Good luck.

_________________
Amiga A1200T - TF1260 - R9200 - Indivision AGA MK3
Amiga A500 - PiStorm EMU68
Pegasos 2 G4 - AmigaOS 4.1 FE / MorphOS 3.16

@Dandy

It can be done with dual monitors.

_________________
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@eliyahu

Maybe you have to enable UDMA for the IDE to work faster.

@_ThEcRoW

Quote:

_ThEcRoW wrote: @Dandy It can be done with dual monitors.

That's what I meant - one for each eye.
The result should be a look like the one of Marty Feldman...

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Dandy

Guys, dont you have better things to do?

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@eliyahu
You should check and adjust the necessary environment variables for the Peg2 firmware as well as the transfer settings for IDE regarding AOS4. Maybe this even solves your "double typing" (by changing appropriate firmware values).

Unfortunately I do not know them by heart but you should find how to read/change the first ones wihtin your Peg2 manual (hopefully you got one - otherwise they should be available maybe in the web, at bplan, within MOS/Peg2 fora or use this one: Pegasos2 Firmware Manual). You need to check which of the nv-vars are appropriate for you in order to change them accordingly (not all of them are described within the manual).
The latter ones are described somewhere inside the AOS4 docs.

Sorry for not being more precisely but hopefully this will help you.

Bye

@thread

the drives are all in DMA mode, at least according to idetool:

Quote:

7/0.System:> idetool -l peg2ide.device -------------------Unit 0 information------------------------ Flags : $0000011D - present, supports DMA, removable media, ATAPI, interrupts used, Xfer mode : best pio 12 (PIO 4, 16 MB/s) / best dma 69 (UDMA 5, 100 MB/s) / current 69 (UDMA 5, 100 MB/s) Total blocks : 0 Blocksize : 0 SCSI devtyp : 5 Packet size : 12 Current medium read speed : x 65535 ('65535' stands for max.) Current medium write speed : x 65535 (idem) Power mode : 2 / idle (ready for operation) IO1 / IO2 / BMCR @ : $1040 / $104E / $1060 *** Error opening device peg2ide.device / unit 1 -------------------Unit 2 information------------------------ Flags : $000001A7 - present, LBA48 used, supports DMA, ATA, supports acoustic mgmt, supports cache flush, interrupts used, Xfer mode : best pio 12 (PIO 4, 16 MB/s) / best dma 69 (UDMA 5, 100 MB/s) / current 69 (UDMA 5, 100 MB/s) Total blocks : 976773168 Blocksize : 512 Power mode : 2 / idle (ready for operation) IO1 / IO2 / BMCR @ : $1050 / $105E / $1068

i'm not sure why DVD playback is so slow -- it certainly isn't the CPU usage. according to the CPU monitor i use, i never get above 40% during decode, and copying data from the drive does seem to take longer than i would expect. perhaps this is a consequence of using a SATA DVD drive combined with a EIDE-to-SATA adapter?

i've got a SIL3114 SATA PCI card on the way, and am hoping hooking up the DVD drive to the SATA controller will help. one of the reasons i got this thing was because DVD playback on the SAM was poky. i'd hate to think i couldn't play DVDs on the pegasos2 without reasonable performance.

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

@eliyahu

You could run SCSCISpeed just in case to verify performance. If HD access is fast then DVD should be fast also.

You could try using 2nd IDE channel for DVD drive, just in case.

Cablings can also cause problems. Old style IDE cables dont work reliably (was it 40wire vs 80wire, I really cant remember...).

Last edited by itix on 11-Jul-2012 at 01:35 PM.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@itix

Quote:

You could run SCSCISpeed just in case to verify performance. If HD access is fast then DVD should be fast also. You could try using 2nd IDE channel for DVD drive, just in case. Cablings can also cause problems. Old style IDE cables dont work reliably (was it 40wire vs 80wire, I really cant remember...).

thanks for your help here. i took a look at the hard drive, and performance wasn't too bad. scsispeed shows the following results:

Quote:

4/10.Work:Downloads/DiskSpeed> ScsiSpeed drive peg2ide.device:2 fast buf1=8192 buf2=16384 buf3=32768 buf4=65536 ScsiSpeed 4.3, OS4 version Copyright © 1989-92 MKSoft Development Copyright © 2003-04 Daniel J. Andrea II & Stéphane Guillard ------------------------------------------------------------ CPU: 68020 AmigaOS Version: 53.25 Device: peg2ide.device:2 Testing with a 8192 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer. Read from SCSI: 36252876 bytes/sec Testing with a 16384 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer. Read from SCSI: 44240076 bytes/sec Testing with a 32768 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer. Read from SCSI: 47049932 bytes/sec Testing with a 65536 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer. Read from SCSI: 48706355 bytes/sec

maybe the configuration of the machine is simply not be optimal? here's what i have:

1. the primary IDE connector is hooked up to an EIDE-to-SATA converter, and from there to a SATA hard disk
2. the secondary IDE connector is hooked up to an EIDE-to-SATA converter, and from there to a SATA DVD drive

i'm hoping that, once the SATA card arrives, i can connect the DVD drive to that instead and see better performance. it certainly showed better performance on my old SAM.

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

@itix

Quote:

itix wrote: @Dandy Guys, dont you have better things to do?

Has joking lateley been forbidden?

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

How about buy a New PC? It will do all those tasks and more and cost less than PPC hardware. I get people buying Amiga like systems to play around with but if its real performance you need, get some modern hardware

_________________
Amiga A1200, 3.1 ROMs, Blizzard 1230 MKIV 64MB & FPU, 4GB DoM SSD, Workbench 3.1

If the DVD drive is really slow, it might be the DVD drive.

I had a plextor DVD drive that was really terribly slow in my A1.

I swapped it for the (older, supposedly slower) no-brand DVD drive from my PC and it went much, much faster.

_________________
Playstation Network ID: xeron6

@A1200

i already have multiple PCs, but i'd rather consolidate my computing usage on my SAM or pegasos if i can. i know others can play DVDs just fine, so trying to find a solution that works for me as well.

@xeron

i thought about that, but the same drive had been used in my SAM and didn't exhibit any issues. the frame dropping is much worse on the pegasos; and unlike on the SAM, where occasional frames dropped due to insufficient CPU cycles, here it is definitely I/O-limited. plenty of CPU remains available during decode.

i'm hoping that once my SATA card arrives (it still hasn't arrived in the post), i can hook the drive to that. i suspect the issue is the buffering hardware on the SATA-to-EIDE adapter i'm currently using. we'll find out soon enough.

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."

@eliyahu

Just a thought, have you tried tuning caches? Even some AddBuffers 30 could help.

Edit: Btw
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=35910&forum=2&start=40&viewmode=flat&order=0

"That said, I tested it today and confirmed what you say - Mplayer doesn't work very well when reading from a physical DVD disc - audio stutters and video breaks up like a slideshow as you say .

On the surface I thought it looks like not enough buffer cache - I increased it to 20,000 instead of 8192 in Mplayer GUI settings but still terrible. I get the same result playing back DVD's from the registered DV Player software too so....hmmm."

That is on X1000.

Last edited by itix on 14-Jul-2012 at 02:09 PM.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

@itix

looks like the EIDE-to-SATA adapter was the issue. i received my SATA card yesterday (based on the sil3114 controller), popped it in, set sii3114ide.device to use interrupts and maxed out the transfer mode, and voila. everything works again as i would expect.

based on this experience, i think i'll get a small native EIDE drive for booting purposes, and put all other devices on the SATA card for performance purposes. thanks for your help throughout.

at some point i might try this configuration again but under MOS to see if the issue was really the EIDE-to-SATA adapter hardware or the OS4 peg2ide.device driver.

-- eliyahu

_________________
"Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. When the laws do not operate, there is no reality. All of this is unreal."