exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

Posted: **31 Dec 2025 22:25**

An update on the Mach64 testing: Since I was a little bit un-sure about the status of my card, I tested it using my TT + NOVA. Initially I had some troubles getting it to work with Joebar's latest driver, but after testing with version TT_Mach64_V3.01 it worked really good. I also added some extra DIP RAM IC's to get 2 MB of mem, since I had empty sockets on the board. That also worked perfectly and I could run 1280x1024x256, which was really beautiful :)

Since it's driver version 3.03 in the Raven distro, I of course wanted to try with driver version 3.01, and the results were quite good. There is still something very unstable when executing the VGA BIOS. First boot it said "No VGA bios detected" and it didn't seem to work at all. Second boot it sorta worked, but the display was offset in Y direction by like -100 pixels or something (notice that the mouser cursor is not offset):

: 20251231_221206798.JPG (488.7 KiB) Viewed 527 times

Third boot was the charm, and it worked perfectly:

: 20251231_221335323.JPG (496 KiB) Viewed 527 times

The instabilities could of course be related to my Raven, I haven't really had a chance to stress test it yet. With the Mach32 however it seems to be quite stable. It seems to fail when initialising NOVA from a cold boot every once in a while (garbled screen), but haven't seen any oddities related to VGA BIOS. With the Mach64 VGA BIOS seems to be sometimes not detected at all, sometimes taking a very long time to execute (like 30+ s) and sometimes executes in a few seconds. However it never prints out anything (like the model of the card) and it always says 8-bit vgamem.

I'm afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to draw any smart conclusions from the above... Do the NOVA drivers depend on VGA BIOS set-up at all or are they supposed to be able to set everything up on their own? If they are supposed to be totally decoupled from VGA BIOS I guess the VGA BIOS instability might not be the cause of the NOVA start-up instability. Maybe some general instability when accessing video card registers which gets much worse with the Mach64 than with the Mach32?

Hope all of you have a Happy New Year!!

Posted: **01 Jan 2026 12:05**

I can not start Magic6 on my Raven. I copied the newest files from Th Otto https://tho-otto.de/snapshots/magicmac/ ... 20-bin.zip
Then I rename the raven.ram to magic.ram
I put the startprg mgxboot.prg in auto folder
the running auto order is
rvbios
xboot
isa_bios
rvnova
magxboot
extendos
truedisk

But the new start end with a white screen and a message Magic- BOOTER 1990-96 Andreas Kromke
i change the auto order but no start

Posted: **01 Jan 2026 19:19**

bbisi wrote: 01 Jan 2026 12:05 But the new start end with a white screen and a message Magic- BOOTER 1990-96 Andreas Kromke
i change the auto order but no start

I'm doing some tests too, with the same results.
Stupid question: do you have the byteswap adapter?

Posted: **01 Jan 2026 19:22**

bbisi wrote: 01 Jan 2026 12:05 I can not start Magic6 on my Raven.

Did you see the guide which Anders wrote earlier in the thread? https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/view ... 50#p133714

I believe you also need byteswap adapter, HDDRIVER and a suitable partition type (FAT32 is probably ok, see other posts close to the MagiC post).

Posted: **01 Jan 2026 21:15**

Yes i use the byteswap Adapter
But no hddriver
All other Software is running.Mint,Thing, Theradesk…

Posted: **01 Jan 2026 21:47**

bbisi wrote: 01 Jan 2026 21:15 Yes i use the byteswap Adapter
But no hddriver
All other Software is running.Mint,Thing, Theradesk…

As far as I recall it, MagiC needs a Atari style partition as boot drive, not a FAT16 one
It should work with EmuTOS, but the Atari style partition needs to be created with HDDRUTIL

Posted: **02 Jan 2026 00:57**

bbisi wrote: 01 Jan 2026 21:15 Yes i use the byteswap Adapter
But no hddriver
All other Software is running.Mint,Thing, Theradesk…

MagiC is a full TOS replacement and cannot use the driver which is part of EmuTOS.
So you'll need something installed for that to work.
I have only used HDDriver myself so I don't know for sure but I suspect other options such as AHDI, CBHD, ICD etc may work too.

Posted: **03 Jan 2026 08:23**

redpixel wrote: 31 Dec 2025 22:25 An update on the Mach64 testing: Since I was a little bit un-sure about the status of my card, I tested it using my TT + NOVA. Initially I had some troubles getting it to work with Joebar's latest driver, but after testing with version TT_Mach64_V3.01 it worked really good. I also added some extra DIP RAM IC's to get 2 MB of mem, since I had empty sockets on the board. That also worked perfectly and I could run 1280x1024x256, which was really beautiful :)

Since it's driver version 3.03 in the Raven distro, I of course wanted to try with driver version 3.01, and the results were quite good. There is still something very unstable when executing the VGA BIOS. First boot it said "No VGA bios detected" and it didn't seem to work at all. Second boot it sorta worked, but the display was offset in Y direction by like -100 pixels or something (notice that the mouser cursor is not offset):
20251231_221206798.JPG

Third boot was the charm, and it worked perfectly:
20251231_221335323.JPG

The instabilities could of course be related to my Raven, I haven't really had a chance to stress test it yet. With the Mach32 however it seems to be quite stable. It seems to fail when initialising NOVA from a cold boot every once in a while (garbled screen), but haven't seen any oddities related to VGA BIOS. With the Mach64 VGA BIOS seems to be sometimes not detected at all, sometimes taking a very long time to execute (like 30+ s) and sometimes executes in a few seconds. However it never prints out anything (like the model of the card) and it always says 8-bit vgamem.

I'm afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to draw any smart conclusions from the above... Do the NOVA drivers depend on VGA BIOS set-up at all or are they supposed to be able to set everything up on their own? If they are supposed to be totally decoupled from VGA BIOS I guess the VGA BIOS instability might not be the cause of the NOVA start-up instability. Maybe some general instability when accessing video card registers which gets much worse with the Mach64 than with the Mach32?

Hope all of you have a Happy New Year!!

I got a chance to test my Mach64 just now. I made sure I had all the components of the latest release installed and working first.

I didn't go as far as you in testing driver version 3.01 but here are my observations:

1. Screen output never worked in the BIOS. I always had to configure using another card.
2. It always output this:
32Kb VGA Bios at 800C0000
8bit VRAM access

Sometimes faster, sometimes took several seconds to display 8bit... after the previous line.

3. Out of all my tries, I got it to work once in TOS in 1024x768x8. It was glorious and super fast. The second closest I came to a white screen with mouse moving.but unresponsive. I sometimes got a glimpse of the drivers loading but that screen was offset and slightly garbly.

I suspect that it crashed/hung around when loading the desktop and now, while typing, I realise I should have disabled some ACCs and other auto-folder stuff. I'll do that later while attempting the 3.01 drivers as well. Point is, I suspect that it hung after loading the desktop as it was not responsive to ctrl-alt-del.

4. At every instance the monitor was receiving some sync info as it was clearly trying to display the output from the card. It would do that when loading the splash screen, xboot, desktop. Sometimes the monitor went crazy flashing that the output was out of range or similar.

5. I tried different resolutions but none worked other than that XGA one that one time.

I noticed that once Mach64 was selected in rvbios, the boot resolution was set to 640x480x8. Then, when trying to select resolutions, it offered 640x400x1 instead of 640x480x1 in the Mach32 profile.

Anyway, @agranlund, I feel we're really close with this one.

Posted: **03 Jan 2026 08:49**

@agranlund when turning copyback cache on, I get hung on EmuTOS white screen hourglass mouse with

Code: Select all

.f.f.v
.f.f.v
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repeating endlessly in the monitor. Writethrough is normal.

Posted: **03 Jan 2026 09:17**

Just fired up the Raven since a long time. Thought it would be fun to try the ES1868F based soundcard. The digital and opl works fine. I'm however having some problems getting the midi to the wavetable. Not sure if I forgot something. Tried the rvsound driver and the separate mpu one (it says midi out 330). But no activity on the wavetable in doom or scummst. Probably something stupid. As attachment my isa bios log.

ISA_BIOS.LOG: (2.45 KiB) Downloaded 50 times

Update. problem solved. It was me being stupid. Ess seems less noisy. Will keep this one in…

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