SysInfo V2.12 by Nic Wilson -------------------------- Nic Wilson Software 138d South Street Toowoomba Queensland 4350 Phone (076) 358539 A/H (076) 358384 W/H Fax or voice (076) 358522 W/H FAX voice only This program was written due to the lack of such a program on the Amiga. It was written using HiSoft Devpac Assembler. I have placed this program on Shareware so that it can be used by everyone. I hereby give permission for commercial publishers to distribute this program as long as the conditions below are met. If you like this program, a donation would be gratefully accepted. CONDITIONS This doc file and the icons must ---------- accompany the program. Remember who wrote it, credits please. The executable is not modified in any way, except for crunching, and as long as it is tested prior to distribution. Further updated versions are distributed as available and as soon as possible. The program hunks have been written to use Public memory so it will load into fast ram if its available. The program requires about 100k of chip memory and 36k of public memory in order to run. This program is now tested with the new program 'Enforcer' from Commodore. Please be patient if you are running this program on a standard Amiga as it will take a while to perform its tests. SysInfo really interrogates your system and has to perform many timing loops to test ram speed, type etc. At times it also disbles multitasking and blanks the mouse pointer, but it will return to multitasking when finished and the mouse pointer will return as soon as you move it. HISTORY (only the version numbers below were released from myself) ------- V2.12 GVP 32 bit ram boards in the $200000+ range were still being seen as 16 bit boards, fine tuning of the testing routine seems to have cured this slight problem. The A3000 speed comparison has been changed. It seemed unfair that all other boards had their rating at their absolute best mode, but the A3000 was crippled to its supplied standard. So now the 1.00 is for an A3000 with INSCACHE INSBURST DATCACHE DATBURST and Ramsey BURST OFF and STATIC COLUMN ON. GVP timings were made more accurate. Maximum memory could also return invalid results if you had ram boards in the $200000 area. All these problems have now been fixed. V2.11 Fast memory free was slightly inaccurate in V2.10, now fixed. Added Memory Address location of Kickstart. V2.10 By popular demand printing ability after screen display or instead of (-p). Better 32 bit ram testing with support for recognising and displaying 32 bit ram boards within the 8 meg area ($200000-$A00000). V2.01 Added ability to recognise 32 bit ram and is displayed in all areas if found. Also free fast ram is split into 2 banks of 16 and 32 bit ram. V2.00 Modified because of 2 'enforcer' hits. Although enforcer hits will still occur at memory location $2c. This vector is temporarily modified in order to trap the exception when testing for a MMU. An exception would normally occur if you do not have a MMU. V1.99 Finally included the clock check for the A3000. V1.98 Fixes a couple of bugs. RAMSPEED VS CHIP was incorrect and could give wrong results. CHIPRAM VS A3000 was totally wrong and and results were garbage. Both these new routines should be much better. USAGE ----- From CLI -------- run SysInfo -p Print info to standard redirection output instead of on screen. EG. SysInfo >prt: -p (for printer) SysInfo -p (for CLI window) -t Mainly internal, time testing. See 'NOTE ON SPEED COMPARISONS' below. NOTE 'run' should always be used from a CLI launch as the program is much more stable and accurate. I have no idea why, it just is. Anyone explain this? From Workbench -------------- Double click the SysInfo icon. Printing option is within the main screen in the form of a gadget. After the speed comparisons are complete, you will be able to access one of three gadgets in the bottom right of the window. These are QUIT, AGAIN or PRINT. Quit does just that, exits the program completely. Again runs the speed comparisons etc again, so you can average your results. Print will close the main window and then print full info to the prt: device and then exit. IMPORTANT --------- Amigas that have a maths co-processor using kickstart 1.3 or earlier, MUST use SetPatch 1.34 or later otherwise this program will crash. This is because this program uses 68881 & 68882 instructions and a bug in the kernal causes a guru. SetPatch patches this bug. This is not as important for V2.0 users but remember that you have a Setpatch aswell now, so use it. SPEED COMPARISONS ----------------- The A500 STANDARD comparison is against a PAL A500 totally unexpanded (ie. no Fast Ram). This program has a 3 bitplane screen open, this shows how much the processor slows when running a program in chip memory while having to contend with Agnus working overtime. Try running with the -p option also. The B2000 EXTRA RAM comparison is against a PAL B2000 with SLOW RAM or FAST RAM. The processor returns to normal speed even though the 3 bit plan screen is open. This can show the difference in speed between slow ram and zero wait state memory boards. Our experience shows that it only makes a difference of around 0.02 or two hundredths on average. The GVP A3001 comparison is against a B2000 with a GVP A3001 acellerator card, with a clock speed of 28MHZ. All caches and bursts on. The board also contained 4 megs of 32 bit wide, 80ns ram. The A2620 comparison is against a standard A2500 with a A2620 card running at 14MHZ. All caches and bursts on. The A3000 25MHZ comparison is against a standard A3000/25MHZ with 4 Megs of 1MX4 SCRAMS 32 bit wide, and 2 Megs of CHIP. All caches and bursts , Static column mode on, and Ramsey burst off (default under V2.0 V37.74+ is on). I have written a program called 'SetRamsey' that can be used to turn SCM and Burst on or off and is available from me free of charge, send a disk and return postage. NOTE that this has changed since V2.11 to put the A3000 at its best speed to make it fairer against other boards. The A3000 with the 68040 25MHZ board from Progressive Peripherals & Software. Comparisons were calculated from the '-t' information given to me over the phone by them. I hope to have one of these boards soon to do some more testing on, and I will give further info in later versions. FREE MEMORY ----------- This shows the amount of free memory as if the program is not running so may not be accurate to the byte, but is a very close indication of the free pool. The TOTAL MEMORY is the total amount of memory that the Exec memory list reports. Tests have showed that this figure is around 800 odd bytes short of actual. This is because the amount of memory that exec takes itself never gets added to this list. RAM SPEED vs CHIP is a calculated performance test of your CHIP RAM vs your PUBLIC RAM. The result is shown as a percentage increase in the speed of the PUBLIC RAM. If no FAST or SLOW ram is available then the result will be around 0%, and this figure can change depending on CHIP ram usage at the time. This figure cannot be used as a speed comparison between machines. For example the A3000 Chip ram is around 4.5 times the speed of an A2000's CHIP with a 68030 board installed. Therefore the A3000's Fast ram will not show a comparable increase to the A2000. It was mainly designed to test the difference between fast ram cards or chips on the same unit. NOTE: Any mounted devices that the program does not recognise will be seen and counted as a hard partition. DH0: DRIVER IN shows you what type of memory your hard disk device driver is in. This is interesting, as it shows if your hard drive is running at its best. If it is not in FAST then try to get it in FAST, as it will operate better. If it is found in 32 bit wide ram this will also be reported. You can always use SetCPU to place it 32 bit ram. HARDWARE CLOCK only looks for the standard 2000, 500 or 3000 Hardware clock. It does not look for the multitude of different clocks that were available for the 1000. INTERNAL HARDWARE ----------------- This shows internal harware as the program has found it. ECS stands for ENHANCED CHIP SET. If Agnus or Denise show this then they are the lastest custom chips. The number that is shown in brackets is the actual chip number, this helps in physical identification of the chips. CPU's 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030 and 68040 are supported and will be displayed if found. This information is fetched from Execbase. If incorrect then Exec is incorrect and can be corrected by running SetCPU or CPU on the A3000. FPU's or Floating Point Units 68881 and 68882 and internal 68040 are supported and will be displayed if found. These chips are also often referred to as maths co-processors. Wether or not you have one is fetched from Execbase, so it must be correct (as above), but then an actual test is made to see which one you have. Exec 1.3 only knows you have one, not which type. (also see IMPORTANT above). MMU's or Memory Management Units 68851 or the internal 68030 and 68040 are supported. These are actually tested for as Exec does not carry this info. The 68451 never became very popular so is not supported. SPEED IN MHZ is a rough indication of the clock speed. This is not totally accurate but is a good indication. It at least allows you to know wether your system is 7MHZ, 16MHZ or 25MHZ etc. All caches, bursts and copyback modes are temporarily disabled during the test for greater stability, but this should be transparent to the user. Clock Speed is difficult to find out unless you take the unit apart and even then is difficult. Fast ram must be available for this to be anywhere near accurate, as the timing loops were all based on machines with some Fast ram available. WR.ALLOC or Write Allocation is only applicable to 68030 and 68040 processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled. When enabled (always in an A3000) the processor updates the data cache on cachable writes. COPYBACK is only applicable to the 68040. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled. INS. CACHE or Instruction Cache is applicable to 68020, 68030 and 68040 processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled. This bit can be manipulated with SetCpu. INS. BURST or Instruction Burst is applicable to 68020, 68030 and 68040 processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled. This bit can be manipulated with SetCpu. DAT. CACHE or Data Cache is only applicable to 68030 and 68040 processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled. This bit can be manipulated with SetCpu. DAT. BURST or Data Burst is only applicable to 68030 and 68040 processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled. This bit can be manipulated with SetCpu. THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO ADD -------------------------- 1. Ability to check Amiga model (A1000, A500, A2000) is it possible? It is on the A3000 because of its specific hardware. 2. Ability to split the XT and AT bridgeboard. Anyone know how? 3. Your ideas! Any suggestions preferably in assembler but I can translate C if I have to, but it is such a pathetic language (sorry C programmers but Assembler is so much nicer). NOTE ON SPEED COMPARISONS ------------------------- If you have any of the machines listed above, or even a totally different configuration, run the program with -t option (eg. sysinfo -t ) then phone me with the resulting numbers that will be printed to the screen. My phone number or fax is at the top of this file. Happy Computing Nic Wilson PS. Send for latest NoVirus V3.52 (now V2.0 and Amiga 3000 compatible) ONLY Australian$49.95 For latest free brain file update send S.A.S.E. with disk to above address. Registered NoVirus owners (V3.00a - V3.51) also get free code update, so send original back for update! Registered owners of V2.00+ get an update for A$10.00 which includes new manual, so send your original back for update! DONT FORGET TO INCLUDE POSTAGE OR WE CANNOT REPLY.