SysInfo V2.55 10th Dec 1991
---------------------------
written in Assembler with Devpac Amiga
--------------------------------------
Written by Nic Wilson
Nic Wilson Software
138d South Street
Toowoomba Queensland 4350
Phone (076) 358539 A/H Voice only
(076) 358384 W/H Fax or voice
(076) 358522 W/H Voice only
EMAIL {cbmvax|cbmehq}!cbmaus!wilson!nic@uunet.uu.net
This program was written due to the lack of such a program
on the Amiga. It has been written using HiSoft Devpac Assembler,
but since V2.55 is now being assembled with Macro68.
I have placed this program on Shareware so that it can be
used by everyone. All code, graphics and documents remain
copyright Nic Wilson Software.
If you like this program, then help me to help you more by
sending a small donation. Any amount will be gratefully
appreciated and in return you will be sent the latest of
this and other programs.
*********************************
IMPORTANT FOR KICKSTART 1.2 - 1.3
*********************************
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 program uses 68881 & 68882 instructions and a
bug in the kernal causes a guru. SetPatch patches this bug.
This is not required for OS V2.04 users but remember that you have
a Setpatch also now, so use it.
DISTRIBUTION CONDITIONS
-----------------------
This program may be distributed freely on the condition that
no profit is gained from its distribution. An amount of the
average retail price of a single 3.5 inch DSDD disk is allowed for
a copying fee.
THIS PROGRAM MAY NOT BE CRUNCHED IN AN EXECUTABLE FORM, DOING SO
IS CONSIDERED A VIOLATION OF THIS AGREEMENT. THIS HAS BEEN DONE
BECAUSE ALL CURRENT CRUNCHERS ON THE AMIGA FAIL ON THE 68040
PROCESSOR. IF YOU HAVE A 68040 AND ARE HAVING TROUBLE RUNNING
SYSINFO OR OTHER PROGRAM, MAKE SURE THE PROGRAM IS NOT CRUNCHED.
LHARC'ING IN AN ARCHIVAL FORM IS PERMITTED FOR DISTRIBUTION.
Output results from the program may be reprinted without any
form of permission. But please state the SysInfo Version number
used to obtain the results.
This doc file and the icons must accompany the program unmodified.
Additional document files of your own may accompany the program.
Results from different Amiga configurations may be distributed
along with the SysInfo files.
The executable is not modified in any way, except as specified.
Further updated versions are distributed as available and as soon
as possible. You can always obtain an update by modem if you wish.
COMMERCIAL COMPANIES
--------------------
I would appreciate being informed that you are distributing it
although this is not a requirement.
If a commercial company would like all their products listed by
name and manufacturer in the 'BOARDS' function, then send me your
manufacturer number and your product numbers for each board along
with a description of what each board is, and I will add them in
to the program. We will then return you a copy of the program
with these changes, that you can distribute with your products.
To have your hard disk recognised as a hard disk instead of an
'other drive', all I need is the name of your device driver.
INTRODUCTION
------------
Sysinfo is an Amiga Sytem Information program. It interrogates
the Amiga and determines types of hardware, software, modes,
speed etc. Users have found it very useful for determining
correct operation of an Amiga before purchase and that the
unit actually contains hardware that they are paying for, without
having to open it up. It is under constant revision, and these
revisions are available from myself at any time. My goal is to
make SysInfo the most informative and accurate information program
on the Amiga. To do this I need your feedback and suggestions.
This program is tested with the program 'Enforcer'.
Please be patient if you are running SysInfo 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. Some other programs sacrifice
accuracy by speeding the tests up, SysInfo takes time but does
an intensive test. At times it also disables multitasking and may
blank the mouse pointer. It will return to multitasking when
finished and the mouse pointer will return.
TIMINGS FROM ONE VERSION OF SYSINFO TO THE NEXT
-----------------------------------------------
If you are wondering how come SysInfo may give different results
from one version to the next, this is because it is under
constant revision and accuracy is improved with each version as
YOU THE USER gives me feedback on varying models and
configurations. This feedback is very important, as it allows
SysInfo to grow into the most powerful and accurate Sytem
information and an invaluable tool for the Amiga.
USAGE
-----
FROM CLI
--------
run SysInfo <switch>
<switch> -p Print info to standard redirection output
instead of custom screen.
EG. SysInfo >prt: -p (for printer)
SysInfo -p (for CLI window)
SysInfo >filename (for a file)
-t Mainly for internal, time testing use.
See 'NOTE ON SPEED COMPARISONS' below.
The custom screen will still open to keep
the timing accurate, but no information will
be printed to it. On completion the screen
will close and the information printed on the
CLI window or redirected output.
FROM WORKBENCH
--------------
Double click the SysInfo icon. After launch and various information
has been printed to the window you will be able to access one of five
gadgets in the bottom right of the window. These are QUIT, MEMORY,
BOARDS, DRIVES, SPEED and PRINT.
QUIT Does just that, exits the program completely.
MEMORY Is explained below
BOARDS Is explained below.
DRIVES Is explained below.
SPEED Runs the speed comparisons and displays the result accordingly.
This can be selected as many times as you wish so the results
can be averaged. This now works differently than older versions
of SysInfo. Users of standard speed Amiga's had to wait quite
a long time before the other gadgets could be accessed. This was
a nuisance if you only required certain info. This change has
not affected the -p function in anyway.
PRINT Will open a window and prompt for a filename and an optional
heading string, This heading string will be printed at the
top of the page and can have a maximum of 100 characters.
Enter a path and filename to save to, or to choose the default
'PRT:' for output to a printer by clicking the 'OK' gadget.
DRIVES GADGET
-------------
When this gadget is clicked another window will open and display
a gadget for each floppy, hard or rad drive you have connected
to your Amiga. In the middle of the window you will see Information
on the paticular drive that has its gadget highlighted. To select
a particular drive, just click on its gadget. To re-read the same
drive, click in its gadget again (useful for rereading a floppy
when the disk has been changed).
SCSI GADGET
-----------
NOTE This function may not work on some brands device
---- drivers as they may not support the required
commands. If this happens you may just see an
error message in the window for each device it
found that failed to respond to the direct scsi
command. Each device's unit number will still be
displayed at the start of each error string under
the 'ID' heading. In this case contact the
manufacturer of your hard disk controller and
enquire if they have an update that supports CBM's
'HD_SCSICMD' command and RigidDiskBlock structure.
This gadget will be ghosted for drives that are obviously not
SCSI drives. The SCSI function will display info on all drives
that are operated through a single device driver, there is
no need to click the SCSI gadget for all drives, unless some
use a different device driver name as shown in the 'drives window'.
Select one of the drives and click the SCSI gadget. A new window
will open an attempt to read all SCSI drives on LUN (Logical Unit
Number) zero. If valid drive is found, various information will be
displayed. This information consists of the drive 'ID', its 'TYPE',
the 'MANUFACTURER', 'MODEL', and 'VERSION'. Also displayed is the
number of blocks the drive has. The drive's ACTUAL size is displayed
and if the drive supports CBM's RigidDiskBlock, the formatted size
is also displayed beside the actual size. This allows you to see
if a larger drive than you thought you had is in the computer. I
have seen some A2500's with a formatted size of 40MB that actually
had QUANTUM 52 Meg hard drive. If your drive's supplier has
not followed CBM's RigidDiskBlock then the formatted size will not
be displayed, but most user already know the size they beleive is
in the system. If these sizes are different then your hard drive
will require reformatting correctly. If the 'ACTUAL' size is smaller
than your formatted size then you will eventually have problems so
your drive will still need formatting correctly.
BOARDS GADGET
-------------
When this gadget is clicked another window will open and display
various information on any AutoConfig boards found in the
system. This information consists of the memory address of where
the board was configured, its size, and the type of board. The
types to date, can be ZORRO II or ZORRO III, any others are
not yet defined by Commodore and will be displayed as UNDEFINED.
The boards Product number, manufactures ID and the serial
number will also be displayed. If SysInfo recognises the
manufacturer of the card and or the product itself it will display
the names instead of the numbers. Note that a standard A3000 has
no AutoConfigure boards as such, its extra hardware is known
by the special Kickstart files and its memory and hard drive are
added to the system by this kickstart. A2000 users using zkick to
load V2.0 will also notice that their memory boards will not show
in the AutoConfig list, as they were actually configured by 1.3 and
zkick patches them in to the memory list.
MEMORY GADGET
-------------
When this gadget is clicked another window will open and display
various information on any memory in the system. The first section
displayed will be the first memory section that was configured by
the system. At the bottom left of the display are two gadgets,
'NEXT' and 'EXIT'. The next gadget changes the display to show the
next memory section, until no more sections are found. At that time
the window will close and return to the main window. The exit gadget
exits immediately to the main window.
SPEED COMPARISONS
-----------------
THE SPEED COMPARISON CODE HAS BEEN WRITTEN TO GIVE A FAIR INDICATION
OF THE SPEED OF A PARTICULAR AMIGA. IT USES A COMBINATION OF ALL
MOTOROLA INSTRUCTIONS TO BOTH REGISTERS AND MEMORY IN A PERCENTAGE
THAT POPULAR AMIGA PROGRAMS AND COMPILERS HAVE USED.
The A500 STANDARD comparison is against a PAL A500 totally
unexpanded (ie. no Fast Ram), or expanded to 1 Meg chip only.
The B2000 EXTRA RAM comparison is against a PAL B2000 Rev 4.4 with
a Microbotics 8-UP Fast Ram board fitted with 80ns DRAMS.
The GVP A3001 comparison is against a B2000 Rev 4.4 with a GVP A3001
acellerator card, using a clock speed of 28.33 MHZ. All caches and
bursts on. The board also contained 4 megs of 32 bit wide, 80ns
nibble mode DRAM.
The A2620 comparison is against a standard A2500 with a A2620
card running at 14.3 MHZ. All caches and bursts on.
The A3000 25 MHZ comparison is against a standard PAL A3000/25 MHZ
with 4 Megs of 1MX4 SCRAMS 80ns 32 bit wide, and 2 Megs of CHIP.
Caches and Bursts on except Data Burst (default under V2.04 V37+).
Ramsey mode was set at default, BURST ON and STATIC COLUMN OFF.
The A3000 with the 68040 25 MHZ board from Progressive Peripherals
& Software. Comparison are now exact. I have one of these
boards in my A3000 (Thank-you to Progressive for your generosity),
It reflects the 68040 running with ICACHE, DCACHE and COPYBACK
modes selected, running under A3000 Kickstart ROMS V37.175 with
68040.library installed.
IBM PC/XT compares your Amiga to a standard old IBM PC, such
as Norton Utilities did. Because the IBM world still use
this in their adverts, it allows you to compare your system
to the ones being advertised. The test results are comparable
to the 'Norton SI' speed tests.
CPU MIPS (Million Instructions per Second) This test calculation
has been coded from all information I have been able to find
to date. It seems quite debatable how this is supposed to be
coded and I received different information from people. It does
a very large loop performing a total of 4.25 million instructions
ranging from general instructions, divide, multiply, logic shifts,
rotations etc. I CANNOT AND DO NOT GUARANTEE ITS ACCURACY, except
to say it is accurate to the point, it did do the number of
instructions per second that it stated. Comments on this approach
or a better one are most welcome.
FPU MFLOPS (Million Floating Operations per Second) This test
calculation was similar to the above one, in that information
on the recognised way was very sketchy. If an Amiga does not
have an FPU, N/A will be shown in this field as any performance
test would be meaningless. The final code shows known boards
to be at or around thier advertised speeds. It does a very large
loop performing instructions that take an average number of
clock cycles, times the loop then displays the result. I CANNOT
AND DO NOT GUARANTEE ITS ACCURACY. If anyone has a better
routine for this I would be very interested. This routine is
not compatible with a 68881 on a 68000 system such as the Phoenix
board and will show N/A.
CIA TIMER TEST
--------------
This is a test of the speed accuracy of the CIA (A) timer
in the Amiga. I have recently had enquiries by users that
their Amigas were showing very slow or very fast speeds on
SysInfo. Investigation showed that their CIA's were very
inaccurate for various reasons. On normal use you may not
even notice that there is anything wrong. Symptoms can show
system clock running fast or slow, SysInfo type programs show
wrong results.
A correctly working system will show 'PASSED' beside the
CIA ACCURACY string and '0' beside the TICKS PER SECOND string
else if there is a problem it will show the number of ticks per
second the inaccuracy is.
The most common cause I have seen for inaccuracy on a B2000 is a
noisy power supply. This can be corrected by changing J300 jumper
(toward the rear right of the mother board (under the power supply))
to connect to the right set of the three pins. This will change
the system tick to the VBLANK connection and correct the inaccuracy.
NOTE Changing J300 to VBLANK can cause problems on GVP 68030
cards. I do not know why, but GVP owners should not change this
jumper. If you know why this is I would like to know.
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 under Kickstart 1.3. This
seems to be the amount of memory that exec takes itself, and 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
3.5 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.
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. The program is also
able to tell the difference between the 1MB & 2MB versions
of Super Agnus. Many users have queried the possibility of
doing this and beleive I check the memory amount. The 1MB and
the 2MB Agnus chips do not have any different signature registers
so in order to tell them apart I used a quirk of the way the
Amiga is designed. The 1MB Agnus only decodes the first meg
space and so the second meg space has a 'ghost' image of the
first. A 2MB agnus does decode the second meg space so no
ghost image is present. SysInfo checks for this a reports
the difference. This theory I beleive is quite sound, and was
tested on as many A3000's as I could find.
CPU's 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030 and 68040 are supported
and will be displayed if found. If Exec is incorrect then
a window will open, and ask you if you want exec to be updated
to reflect the correct hardware. This is mainly for Kickstart
1.3, as it is not normally aware of later processors.
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 tested by the program, and if Exec is incorrect a
window will open and ask you if you want Exec corrected.
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 enabled during
the test for greater stability, but this should be transparent to
the user and they will be returned to their original state after the
tests. Clock Speed is normally 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. For a 68000
based Amiga, the program will take into account if no fast ram is
available and calculate the correct speed accordingly.
WR.ALLOC or Write through is only applicable to 68030 and 68040
processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled.
When enabled (always in an 68030/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. When enabled, the processor only
updates the cache on writes and memory is only updated when absolutely
necessary or it is forced to do so.
INS. CACHE or Instruction Cache is applicable to 68020, 68030 and
68040 processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or
disabled.
INS. BURST or Instruction Burst is applicable to 68020, 68030
processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled.
DAT. CACHE or Data Cache is only applicable to 68030 and 68040
processors. This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled.
DAT. BURST or Data Burst is only applicable to 68030 processor.
This shows if it is currently enabled or disabled.
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. I think I have split the XT and AT bridgeboard, although it is
untested. Could someone try it and let me know please.
3. Your ideas!
Any suggestions preferably in assembler but I can translate
C if I have to. Yuk!! :-)
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 or email with the resulting numbers that will be printed to the
screen. My phone number, email address or fax is at the top of this file.
Happy Computing
Nic Wilson
Amiga, AutoConfig, AutoConfigure and Intuition are TradeMarks of
Commodore Business Machines.
