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Eclipse Installation
Source : Joshua Kaijankoski
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I had always lusted over the Eclipse. When I first heard that it was in
production I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. My Falcon at the time
was pretty stock and slow for me so I could have used some extra juice.
However, I was forced to sell my Falcon in Spring 2000 for a 3 month trip
to Finland. While I was there I managed to get a good deal on a TT
equipped with a 16bit Crazy Dots card. It was great running an Atari at a
resolution of 1024x768x256, but it was still a little slow. I got back to
Canada, sold the TT because it was too german for me and found another
german Atari. This time it was a MK-II Falcon for a great price and
shipping wasn't that bad either. I easily changed the NVRAM settings to
US-English but the keyboard is still german, oh well...
After having the Falcon for about three months I had already maxed out the
RAM and bought a CD-ROM and HD and I was quite happy with it. Out of the
blue I decided to to finally get an Eclipse. I wrote to David Encill at
Cortex and asked him if he had any Eclipses in stock. He did and I wired
him the money. A week later I was told that there were no more ATI cards
in stock and that they had to be ordered in. I waited for a few weeks and
David told me that the Eclipse was on its way. A few days later I received
a nice little package from England. I was so excited.
I opened up the package and neatly packed away was the PCI controller in a
anti-static bag and a little white plastic box containing the PCI slot and
the ATI card. There was a ribbon cable with one end as a 50 pin SCSI
connector and the other end was split in two. There was a manual with
installation instructions that looked simple enough. There was also a disk
with the drivers in them. After reading through the manual a few times I
proceeded with the installation. No special tools were needed other than a
soldering iron. I took the Falcon apart (routine for me now) so that I had
the PDS slot in clear view. I took out the jumper from it and slid the
controller card in. I then plugged in the ribbon cable on the controller
card. One of the wires on the ribbon had to have +12V fed to it and I
found it easily from the Falcon PSU. That's where the soldering iron came
in. That was easy enough. I then plugged the other end of the ribbon into
the white box containing the card.
Well, time to try it out. I re-assembled the Falcon back together so that
the ribbon came out through the back. The white box slept on top of the
Falcon case. I slapped in the floppy disk and turned on the Falcon. It
went through the regular motions and by holding down the ALT key I booted
off the Floppy. A program called PCIBIOS.PRG loaded up first and then
FVDI.PRG. Soon as FVDI.PRG loaded it bombed on me. I then booted normally
to the desktop and installed the drivers to my HD and edited the FVDI.SYS
file to make sure everything was fine. I re-booted with the drivers. Same
thing. Soon as FVDI.PRG loaded it crashed. Crap. I then went to Johan
Klockars website to get the latest drivers. I installed them and voila! It
worked. So the drivers on the disk were old crap. After extensive emailing
with Johan and Jo Even Skarstein, a fellow Eclipse user, I got it working
somewhat how I wanted it to. I will write more on the fVDI side on another
review. I had quite a few un-explainable problems and only after changing
the PCIBIOS.PRG were all my problems resolved.
Wow, now that it is working great I can really enjoy it. The speed is
phenomenal! Scrolling is super fast and smooth! Nothing like the Crazy
Dots on the TT. It's so much more fun to use the Falcon now. Benchmarks
show a remarkable increase in VDI operations. fVDI and NVDI don't really
like to co-exist so I don't use NVDI anymore. I don't even have a printer.
I am a MagiC user with Jinnee 2.5 and there were some issues with colors
and palettes. I found that installing ERS Winframe the color problem was
rectified. So now, in 1024x768x256 at 70Hz everything is perfect. I would
like to use 16 bit color but the icons in Jinnee appear as black boxes.
Other than that, 16 bit mode works perfect as well. There are some
compatibility issues with some programs, especially if they require NVDI
to work. More on that in the 'Compatibility Pages'. I have now transfered
the Falcon along with all the HDs and CD-ROM and Eclipse into a PC tower
case. It looks pretty good but it's so big and heavy. All in all, Eclipse
is probably the best thing you can put your money on for a Falcon today. I
have enjoyed it immensely and I recommend it to everyone!
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