exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I have a 520 STE with switchable TOS (1.62 and 2.06) and I have seen that if I boot to a clean desktop (without Floppy or HD) the Blitter is enabled by default in TOS 1.62 but disabled by default in TOS 2.06.
I can´t seem to find any explanation to why it is disabled by default in TOS 2.06.

Is there a good reason to why you must enable the Blitter “manually” in 2.06 and then save the desktop so that it will be enabled at the next boot (and boots after that)?

Maybe this is a stupid question, but it´s been nagging me for a while now…… :?

odd.. I always thought it was enabled by default as well odd..

As you say, enabling it and saving desktop is probably the only way to go.

Yes, that is odd. I guess you could find out what part of the ROM controls that and edit 2.06 to do the same.

Personally I have a HDD so I just save my desktop.

When the Billter is faulty as an an example, you can not longer boot up the machine ...

... so the setting with TOS 2.06 is good.

frank.lukas wrote: 25 Aug 2020 19:54 When the Billter is faulty as an an example, you can not longer boot up the machine ...

... so the setting with TOS 2.06 is good.

That seems to be one reasonable reason :thumbup:

I also usually start from HD and have the Blitter enabled in the Desktop.inf and the Newdesk.inf.
I found this odd 2.06 disabled Blitter behavior a while ago when I played around with GemBench and wanted to see if there were any difference in performance if I ran my STE with stock 1.62 or as a stock 2.06 machine.
When I started GemBench from a diskette under 2.06, it stated that the Blitter was disabled and I first thought that I had accidently turned it off when I changed from low to medium resolution in the dropdown menu on the desktop.
After some reboots I soon realized that the Blitter is off by default in 2.06 and thought that there was something wrong with my Swedish 2.06 version in my STE.

I started up Steem on my PC and tested the TOS 2.06 ROMs that I have there (UK, US and SE) and all behave the same way in Steem.
I started to Google around (of pure curiosity) to see if I could find a reason to why Blitter is off by default in 2.06 and on in 1.62, but found no answer at all.
So that´s why I turned to all of you here, to see if someone could still my curiosity 😊

bj_kock wrote: 25 Aug 2020 21:50I started to Google around (of pure curiosity) to see if I could find a reason to why Blitter is off by default in 2.06 and on in 1.62, but found no answer at all.

I guess the reason is TOS 1.62 is STe-only, so it is guaranteed that the machine will have a Blitter, while TOS2.06 is mainly for MegaST which may or may not have the Blitter installed.

tzok wrote: 11 Nov 2020 10:12 I guess the reason is TOS 1.62 is STe-only, so it is guaranteed that the machine will have a Blitter, while TOS2.06 is mainly for MegaST which may or may not have the Blitter installed.

Actually, 2.06 was for the MegaSTE, which always had a Blitter too. However, I imagine that because the code base has much in common with 3.06 for the TT that it had to be more flexible and test for hardware during initialisation.

I half remember the same conversation recently maybe with @agranlund ? Its disabled as the blitter can cause issues with some hardware or software. Also when using a 030, the blitter option gets replaced with "cache" so you can't turn it on or off anyway, so it makes sense to have it disabled by default. You can turn it on and save newdesk.inf to load when you get to desktop anyway.