exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Amusingly even though the desktop is set to mono, Doom and Tyrian will play in colour :lol:

Do you have any better luck with 8bpp or 16bpp modes?

It's probably not it, but here's a zip of what I'm using currently in case I somehow included the wrong stuff in the previous zip. It's the rom + software that's on my machine currently.

Flash the rom and copy the "rvnova/default" driver to your computer.
I really don't think you need to copy anything in the auto folder but I included rvnova.prg and rvbios.prg as found on my computer just in case.

What you could do though, is to remove the following files from your existing auto folder, just in case there's a bug in my copy-if-different code when switching driver:
emulator.bib, sta_vdi.bib, xmenu.inf

What does the Cirrus log say?
The entire log from "InitVga" and onward is very useful information.

And likewise for the S3, even if it stops at the "Starting TOS" line.
Knowing if it says something like "32Kb VGA Bios at 800C0000" or if it failed already at locating the VGA bios is useful.
Some cards VGA bios prints its own things too right after that line and if it does then that's useful as well :)

PhilC wrote: 17 Aug 2025 14:53 Amusingly even though the desktop is set to mono, Doom and Tyrian will play in colour :lol:

Yep, with the "default" driver every VGA card should be able to correctly switch to 320x200x8bpp when asked to, regardless of desktop setting :)

Default is probably a bad name for the driver.. but it makes it end up first in the driver list before the official ET4000 and Mach variants.

@agranlund Ok just copied your rom etc over, wow, do I get a whole lot more over serial or what!

I've booted in to 800x600x8 with the gd5429 which wasn't selectable before.

I also get the following:

Will try S3 next

For the S3 I get the following but still the screen is in sleep mode

Oh nice, thank you so much for those logs!
It does sound like I must have zipped up some stuff wrong last time because it was suppose to print the same stuff as you've got now, and it was also intended to have all the resolutions selectable :oops:


What S3 card is that by the way?
My Spea Mirage (S3 86C801) boots to the standard VGA resolutions but I don't have any other S3's to test.
Though most of my old cards can now do that there are definitely still issues to sort out.
I've got a Trident 8900D that locks up during vgabios initialisation which is annoying because I really wanted to test that card and make an SVGA driver for it. I do have one of those super low budget 9000i cards coming my way and it'll be interesting to see if that has the same problem or not.

I had some other card, but I can't remember which one it was now, that had a bunch of dipswitches that had to be configured right to get working but I can't remember which one it was now. I saw a bunch of jumpers and switches and in the end I managed to find the jumper descriptions for that particular card on theretroweb.com

One old card had switches for telling it the type of monitor and maximum supported resolution, some things were definitely not better before :)

This is the S3 card I have.
The Raven is pretty happy at the minute with its ESS1868F and CL-GD5429. I've ordered some more ram for the card to take it up to 2mb.

There's a better S3 card out there, supposed to be one of the fastest but also very expensive.

BTW, the 5429 is slower than the W32i at blitting surprisingly.

Hmmn, we've got different cards and bioses but the S3 chipset is the same.
Perhaps related to the x86 emulation for vgabios then.

BTW, the 5429 is slower than the W32i at blitting surprisingly.

Interesting, I thought the 5429 was supposed to be quite fast. But then again, the W32i blitter is really quite fast.
Perhaps it's worth double-checking the datasheet if the 5429's 32bit bitblt engine needs to be enabled (though it seems strange if that was the case)
That 5429 does have support for memory mapped IO which would reduce blitter setup cost but since my 5426 doesn't have any of that fancy stuff I can't add support for it myself. It's not the type of code I would want to iterate on blindly.

The GD5434 is supposed have 64bit bitblt when equipped with 2MB memory but those cards are crazy expensive on the used market so I'm not getting one of those :)

That being said, even the GD5426 is a heck of a lot nicer to use than a standard ET4000AX now with the blitter working.
Sure still things to work out and no doubt bugs to find and fix but I can see this perhaps ending up being a viable alternative.
I was really only aiming for "let's at least support VGA 640x480 in 16 colors" for when you don't have an ET4000 or Mach card, but got a little bit carried away :)


Right now, the driver interface supports a standard SRC_COPY bitblit only.
I intend to refining the interface to allow accelerating solid fills and transparent blits also.

Then eventually expose some new fields in the NOVA cookie so stuff like games could ask for and use hardware blitter.
But first I think the next logical step is too hook the system up so it can accelerate the VT52 console as well. Right now it's basically just vro_copyfm that is being made aware so scrolling in EmuTOS console is completely unaccelerated.

Oh wow, I tested my second GD5426 card and the results are really interesting.

Gembench in 1024x768 256 colors.

Card1 (Diamond Speedstar Pro)
Blitting: 2173
VDI scroll: 1800

Card2 (FastMax by Vidtech Microsystems)
Blitting: 1280
VDI scroll: 1143

The slower one has only 10ns slower ram and I doubt that can responsible for such a huge difference?
Feels likely that the Diamond bios is configuring the chipset better and/or much more aggressive by default.

agranlund wrote: 17 Aug 2025 17:38 Oh wow, I tested my second GD5426 card and the results are really interesting.

Gembench in 1024x768 256 colors.

Card1 (Diamond Speedstar Pro)
Blitting: 2173
VDI scroll: 1800

Card2 (FastMax by Vidtech Microsystems)
Blitting: 1280
VDI scroll: 1143

The slower one has only 10ns slower ram and I doubt that can responsible for such a huge difference?
Feels likely that the Diamond bios is configuring the chipset better and/or much more aggressive by default.

That sounds interesting. I'm wondering if I try a different bios on this 5429 whether I can speed it up. The Diamond Speedstar Pro also uses the same GPU.