Titanium board

I’ve been using RISC OS on the Titanium board since before Christmas.

Installation

I used an old ATX PC case and power supply I had going spare from the last PC upgrade. It’s a simple process installing the board and plugging in all the cables. Even though the power supply was about 3 years old there were no problems powering up.

Display

The resolution seems to be limited to a maximum of 2048 × 2048. 2048 × 1152 @50Hz works OK apart from the screen occasionally jumps about when scrolling or moving windows. It gets worse the higher the resolution. This only happens in 16 million colour modes.
Again in 16 million colour modes pink shimmering pixels appear in various places depending on what is on the screen. The display manager icon has a few.

Display manager has 256 colours and greys greyed out so they can’t be selected. Any software that tries to change to a 256 colour screen fails too.

The screen modes are LTRGB format like the IGEPv5. Some software displays with the Red and Blue swapped. e.g. ArtWorks and PrivateEye.

Sound

Supported samples rates.

20833
22050
24000
27777
29400
32000
41666
44100
48000

You don’t get the problem with existing software playing sound too fast as on the Pandaboard and IGEPv5. There’s also no crackling as on the Pandaboard and IGEPv5 when IO is happening.

Network

The peak transfer speed is about 42MiB/sec to Ram disc. Averages about 32MiB/sec. Using ADFS it averages around 20MiB/sec although it does vary a lot.

USB

It’s very fussy about recognising certain devices. Sometimes unplugging and plugging in several times gets it to appear. Some don’t get recognised at all.
All the SSD and SATA drives plugged in always get picked up.

USB3 devices seem to be limited to 29MiB/sec read and 35MiB/sec write no matter what device is used.
If you have a USB3 SD card reader and a suitable SD card you’ll get these rates too. Quite a bit faster than SDFS.

ADFS

Having a Bluray writer as well as 2 SSD drives plugged in caused ‘Disc error 8’ and ‘bad free space map’ to happen all the time. Sometimes no drives appeared at all after rebooting. Rebooting normally fixed it but it would happen again seemingly randomly. No disc corruption was caused after rebooting.
Unplugging the Bluray drive cured the errors and they haven’t appeared since.
The Bluray drive did play audio CDs without any problems.

Write speed seems to be limited to about 85MiB/sec. The maximum read speed about 170MiB/sec. This is using various SATA 2 & 3 SSD drives.
The maximum read speed using a Ram disc is also about 170MiB/sec. Hopefully this is some sort of OS limitation and the read speed can be increased further.

General Use

The screen update in the desktop feels faster than any other RISC OS hardware.
For example Otter browser is a lot smoother compared to running on IGEPv5. Stability seems a bit better than IGEPv5 too.

screen occasionally jumps about when scrolling or moving windows. It gets worse the higher the resolution. This only happens in 16 million colour modes.

This has been solved [changes to skew and DMA priority] (I only saw it at my highest resolution of 1920×1200 16M, also with pink splodges) and both will be sorted in RC2.

peak transfer speed is about 42MiB/sec to Ram disc.

Having a Bluray writer as well as 2 SSD drives plugged in caused ‘Disc error 8’ and ‘bad free space map’

DVDs are not recognised – another fault report.

Sharefs currently requires the remote machine to have sharefswindow 1 for writing data to it at a sensible speed. This is a RISC OS issue not a Titanium issue.

Keep the reports coming saving the dollars up to buy one, might have to sell my iyonix & Risc pc’s as they are getting more expensive as the dollar drops.

.bq
Sound
Supported samples rates.
20833
22050
24000
27777
29400
32000
41666
44100
48000

I’m a bit surprised that it can’t work faster than 48k. The ARMX6 and ARMiniX do up to 96k. Is this likely to change?

Jim

Still wait for dual screen (even primitive/temporary support), Debian (or NetBSD), and dual boot (a !Linux bootlader app would be perfect). 24/96 sound could be nice too for semi audiophile music.

Lack of 256 colours is strange, but perhaps it’s time to use ADFFS/AEmulor and a possible RPC emulator for old and/or non windowed software. I already said it, but I can finance some of these projects.

@Chris (Hall) “peak transfer speed is about 42MiB/sec to Ram disc.” this was referring to network speed writing to a RAM disc.
This is quite a nice rate for a RISC OS machine, very very impressive! Drool!
I really hope the MX6 gets updated so it can reach at least this speed.

Anyone wanting to hear the what, how, and why(!) about Titanium from its designer, make your way to ROUGOL next Monday, 18th January, when Rob Sprowson will be our guest speaker.

http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/index.html

He’ll also have one of his rather nice BBC Micro styled mechanical keyboards for everyone to try out.

Bryan.

Any chance someone can video it so people like me down under can see it to.

If Sprow doesn’t mind (and I remember!) we’ll try to get an audio recording done.

Bryan.

Did anyone manage to get any video or audio of the new board at the last meeting???? i would love to see it if it is available.

Audio recording of the meeting now available. See link at the bottom of this page:

http://www.rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2016/jan.html

Pictures courtesy of Peter Howkins (hint – click pic in top right!)

Thanks to the recent RC2 rom release the screen flickering and pink pixels have gone.

After some more experimentation with network transfers. The peak to ram disc is about 47MiB/s. To adfs about 42MiB/s. Otter browser and QupZilla average about 20MiB/s.

The highest screen resolution seems to be 2048×1440@50Hz reduced blanking if you don’t mind non square pixels.