Cloanto's Personal Paint 7 Breaks Amiga Chip RAM Barrier

With the release of the new CPU blitting module just made available on Aminet (biz/cloan/PBlit_68K.lha), Personal Paint 7 becomes the first Amiga program to actively exploit the full functionality of both the Graphics library and the Amiga blitter applied to bitmaps stored in Fast RAM.

Normally, two crucial parts of the Amiga system require bitmap data to be stored in Chip RAM: the original (Agnus) blitter chip, and the Graphics library. Personal Paint uses both, which until now meant that it had to store in Chip RAM at least the bitmaps currently being manipulated. Thanks to its modular design, Personal Paint 7 already implemented a "virtual blitter" which optionally uses the CPU instead of the Agnus chip. The module just released extends this capability by implementing a faster, emulated 32-bit blitter (the Amiga blitter works in 16 bits).

The complete detachment from Chip RAM became possible when the developers of the famous CyberGraphX system completed the replacement of 100% of the original Amiga graphics.library with corresponding functions that can work on Fast RAM. This code is implemented in CyberGraphX version 40.100 and higher, which has just been released. After many sleepless nights of Cloanto's programmers, in cooperation with the CyberGraphX team, Personal Paint 7 becomes the first Amiga software to automatically detect and exploit this condition. To use this feature, users have to install the new CPU blitting library and the CyberGraphX software v. 40.100 or higher, and turn off "Settings/Graphics/Amiga Blitter" in Personal Paint.

We would like to take this opportunity to praise the developers of CyberGraphX for achieving this difficult objective. CyberGraphX "clones", like earlier versions of the original CyberGraphX (and the original Amiga libraries), still require bitmaps to be in Chip RAM in order to be processed by certain functions of the Graphics library. (Personal Paint 7 is not "confused" by CyberGraphX clones that do not provide equivalent capabilities.)

The efforts of the CyberGraphX and Cloanto programmers have finally made a dream come true for many Amiga users who had plenty of Fast RAM but never enough Chip RAM.