Piccolo SD64 (CU Amiga March 1995)
Picopainter is a very, very nice paint package. Based around a familiar looking toolbox, it is simple to use and fast. The palette has to rank as one of the nicest I have ever seen; move a slider and the possible colours available by moving the other two sliders updates (hopefully a glance at the screenshot may explain what I’m trying to put across here). Also on the colour side of things is a colour mixer. Here, a colour can be put at each corner of a square to produce smooth flows – nice. Some basic image processing tools are provided too. Convolution operations allow a variety of effects of differing use, as do the colour processing tools. Picopainter is fast, intuitive and pretty stable.
Dia is simply a viewer program capable of loading a variety of file formats. With a full AREXX port and a complete manual, it does pretty much everything you could ever want a viewer to do, though no doubt someone will prove me wrong.
EGS has the capacity to be a great thing – it provides a standard way of giving users a full colour desktop without having to write for each graphics card. Programming information is available to those who want it.
One thing that has not been mentioned yet are the manuals. These are possibly the most complete manuals that I have seen for a graphics card. Every aspect of every piece of included software is minutely detailed which is refreshing to see. It appears that the hardware manual is out of date, though. It seems to refer to the Piccolo SD64’s predecessor and not the SD64 itself when dealing with technical specifications. In use, it is much the same though.
Of vital importance is the speed of the card, too. The card’s raw hardware is fast. Very fast. Using the Intuispeed benchmarking program proves that the card outperforms a 3000’s graphics system by quite a way when in 1024×768 with 256 colours on basic operations such as line drawing, dot drawing, box filling and the like. However, on windowing operations it just about manages to keep up. This suggests that the software is not as optimised as it should be, which turns out to be the case. The current drivers are not making full use of the new features that the chipset allows over the older Piccolo; as you read this work is underway to remedy this. Quotes of “three times faster” are being mentioned but until this appears take it with a pinch of salt. Rest assured that as and when the updated drivers are available, we’ll give you the low down.
