General ZZ9000 questions

  • Amiga model:A4000 Desktop
  • 680x0 CPU: 68040
  • RAM Configuration:16MB On Board / 256MB On Card / 2MB Chip
  • Kickstart, AmigaOS Versions:KickStart 47.96 / WB 47.2
  • ZZ9000 Firmware version:1.9.1
  • ZZ9000 Driver version:
  • Monitor model:HP 27vx
  • Other Zorro cards:None

1st question: It appears that the Amiga initializes faster than the ZZ9000 card. When I first turn the Amiga on, the power light will flash and the screen stays dark. If I wait about a minute, I will get a guru and click the left mouse button. The system will then boot just fine. If I turn on the computer and do a Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga, then I can get the error message to come up quicker and the system will boot. After I click the left button the system works awesome with the card. I get all the RAM and the screen looks fantastic! Is this normal?

2nd question:
Is there a document or a cheat sheet on best configuration settings for the card and Picasso software? What are the best setting for optimum performance? What are the best settings for the Picasso96 Variable setter (PVS)? How can I test performance and settings?

3rd Question:
The Amiga seems to just chew up cpu cycles (100%) dealing with pictures and images. Is there a way to offload this onto the ZZ9000 card? Is there a way to utilize the ZZ9000 gpu for compression/decompression, video decoding, or audio coding decoding? I can see that I am asking a lot of the little CPU in my Amiga to do a lot of modern stuff it just was not optimized for.

Thanks everyone! The card is awesome!

Offloading my CPU with the ARM processor is what i hope for in in the future.
It would also be fantastic if network performance could be increased by offloading internal cpu with ARM - fast surfing on my Amiga.
I highly agree, this card, and what it promises for the future, is awesome!

To chime in on number 3: Yes, acceleration of things like JPG and MP3 is the last unfulfilled promise that we still want to deliver. I think MP3 will be first.

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Do we know if this is going to use Linux or the original minimal on-board OS? I’ve been itching to write for the ARM side since getting the board, but I’ve never managed to get anything working, not even the example binaries. I think there’s a huge opportunity to do things like accelerated datatypes waiting here.