EzdineG wrote: ↑Thu Dec 17, 2020 5:44 pm
Anders, what of our blitter if installed on your adapter? Seems it’s pretty much universally deactivated if there’s a TF installed.
Perhaps I just need to move away from the TF534 to see the newest goodies?
It's a bit of a complicated mess, but the short answer is to use blitfix.prg and it should help with letting games & demos use the blitter.
TOS cannot actually disable the hardware, it can only lie to programs that are politely asking - blitfix tries to stop those lies.
You'll usually find three different types of programs.
1. The ones that only interacts with the blitter exclusively through TOS (ex: TOS itself or desktop applications such as Gembench)
2. The polite ones that will first ask TOS if the blitter exists and/or is "enabled", but after that it will use the hardware directly (ex: BLITB.PRG)
3. The ones that ignores TOS completely and just talks to the hardware (ex: Blitter enhanced Hard'n'Heavy)
The last category is never a problem since TOS cannot prevent anyone from talking to the blitter directly.
blitfix.prg attempts to help with the other two:
For the second category it will make sure the asking program is getting the truth about the hardware instead of TOS's filthy lies
(as long as the asking program is running from ST-RAM which should be the case for any old game or demo)
The first category will only be helped under TOS2.06, unless you are using NVDI in which case the blitter will be "disabled" for the desktop anyway.
On EmuTOS or TOS3.06 these wont be able to use the blitter.
Blitter on the desktop is really not that interesting on an accelerated machine anyway. NVDI in fastram will accelerate the desktop many times more than the blitter will - I'd almost go as far as saying it's borderline a bit of a waste of accelerator not running NVDI
But if you don't like NVDI for some reason then well, blitfix will make TOS2.06+blitter+fastram actually work.
I'm not very interested in blitter under the desktop but I do appreciate that the blitter expansion & blitfix.prg is letting me launch blitter games/demos even if TOS & EmuTOS are trying their best to stop me
I wonder what other non-STE games or demos there are that are using the blitter.. anyone know of some list somewhere?
Edit: to be 100% clear, I am not in any way disagreeing with why EmuTOS by default is "disabling" the blitter when fastram exists - it's the safest thing to do. However, when a program from ST-RAM is asking about it, it's probably a safe-ish assumption that it should be allowed to use the blitter, most of the times at least.