Setting Up Picasso96

The Picasso96 card was a 2D graphics card with true colour support that ran on all the desktop based Amigas. It allowed accelerated graphics at up to 16 million colours and lucky for you guys WinUAE supports it. Unfortunately it's not that easy to set up so I'll do my best to explain it to you.

What You Need

You need two files to get picasso96 running. They are the picasso96 drivers and the lha archiver which is needed to extract the picasso archive in WinUAE. I've created an adf disk with both files on it and you can get it from here.

Configuration settings

Install Workbench using the "Installing Workbench" page but use these setting for your configuration...

Rom - Kickstart 3.1
CPU - 68020+FPU or 68040 (Move the JIT slider about half way to gain speed)
Ram - 2MB Chip, 8MB Fast, 16MB or 32MB RTG Memory (depending on you video cards memory)
Hard Drive - Any size over 10MB (See the Setting Up Hard Disks Page for info)
Chipset - AGA
Screen Size - 800x600 and Full Screen RTG enabled

Installing the drivers

Once you can boot into workbench put in the picasso96 adf file. Double click on the Workbench disk icon and then the System drawer. In the drawer you need to double click in the Shell icon. The shell is like DOS on a PC so you'll need to do some typing.

At the prompt type DF0: and press enter. Now type lha x picasso96.lha dh0: and press enter. You'll now see the lha program unpack the picasso96 archive. Once done type endcli to close the shell.

Close all the windows and then re-open the Workbench disk icon. If you use the slider at the bottom of the window you will find the picasso96 install folder so double click it. Double click on the "Setup" icon and press proceed until you are asked whether you want to read the instructions. If you do want to read them press yes or if you don't press no.

On the next screen select the "uaegfx" button and press proceed. Click the buttons saying "SYS:Libs", "SYS:Devs\Monitors", "SYS:Prefs" and "SYS:Devs\Picasso96settings". You will now be asked where to put the files so press the "Select Another Location" button and then click Workbench: from the list and press proceed. Now keep pressing yes and proceed until the installation finishes. Now eject the disk and reboot WinUAE.

Now if you open up the Prefs drawer and the screenmode icon you'll see the new screen resolution.