The definitive Macrosystem Casablanca hack thread!

[SimonV]

Originally Posted by retromax

I remember reading about them about 1998 but owning one back then was just a pipe dream for me, I started editing video on a pc around 2000 when Adobe Premiere came bundled with my capture card. It’s only taken me 20 years to get one! Lol but now it’s about the fact that I always wanted one and one just came within my grasp, I love old technology and learning about this is gonna be fun as I’m gonna capture some vhs and pretend it’s 1998, life was good Back then I still had my parents and what seemed like all the time in the world. Currently I’m using google translate to get my head around this, it would be nice to have it in English but if that never comes to fruition it seems like a simple interface to learn via buttons. I know bewerken means ‘edit’ so my translation there is I bewerken on this video... Lol

I am sure someone can write you an English disk with his Kryoflux so you can reinstall it ? I can, I still have my friend’s Kryoflux here so. My manual is in Dutch so there I can not help.

[retromax]

Originally Posted by SimonV

I am sure someone can write you an English disk with his Kryoflux so you can reinstall it ? I can, I still have my friend’s Kryoflux here so. My manual is in Dutch so there I can not help.

Yeah that would be great, I read into the kryoflux but I t just wouldn’t be worth it for me to get my own, it took some convincing for the wife to let me pay £180 (including postage) for the Casablanca but she let me get it❤️. I’m currently building a raspberry pi based arcade controller, I’ve done a few things similar in the past as I said I’m into retro gaming and stuff (not very good at actually playing games lol) but I love doing stuff like that.

[davideo]

Originally Posted by retromax

...it took some convincing for the wife to let me pay £180 (including postage) for the Casablanca but she let me get it❤️.

You could have had mine for that amount

There's a Casablanca manual on Joshs Website under Applications.

[retromax]

Ah you live and learn I guess!,
These have just a standard pc floppy drive right? I was thinking of swapping the beige one over for a black one that’s all as it would look better, got plenty of them.

[retromax]

Originally Posted by davideo

There's a Casablanca manual on Joshs Website under Applications.

Thanks

[Toni Wilen]

Casablanca arrived but examination has to wait, too much other winuae related updates to do. And I also expect to get enough donations to cover the postage

Question: if Amiga programs (even shell programs) can't be used (if you want to see the output), does serial remote shell work normally? I need some easy way to run shell programs.

I also need to image the HD and replace it with SCSI to IDE + CF combination. I don't want to use ancient hard disks..

[Jope]

We never ended up trying the serial port, our results were achieved by redirecting output to a file on the boot disk, then reading the disk back in.

[Toni Wilen]

Status:

ROMs dumped ("74095 00 717 02 01 U4" and "74095 00 717 02 02 U5"). Does anyone know if there are different ROM versions? CRC32: 1bdcd18c and 6ccb0431.

ROMs mapped to address space (address zero) in emulation. Boot code (non-encrypted part at the beginning of ROM image) runs, decrypts the ROM (I thought PIC was part of decryption but decryption code is in plain text in boot code), sets up MMU tables, enables MMU, does something, then gets stuck in infinite loop.

MMU is required, MMU is used to remap ROM (at usual $f8xxxx space), also oddly enough used to map RAM at address zero for exception vectors (instead of moving VBR).

RAM is hardwired at $40000000.

That was the simple part. Next comes lots of unknowns. How does interrupts work? (No Paula), addresses of all weird Casablanca-only hardware. And much more..

EDIT: Board contains too many FPGAs and CPLDs..

Originally Posted by Jope

We never ended up trying the serial port, our results were achieved by redirecting output to a file on the boot disk, then reading the disk back in.

Thats not very real-time

[gulliver]

@Toni Wilen

You have to be creative, but you can use this command to get visual interaction with a Casablanca.

This is the preliminary documentation I have made:

crequest
Casablanca Requester 
Version: 1.4 (30.3.98)

requires a Casablanca with libs:ovlgfx.library.

TEXT/A,GADTXT/A, RESET

Displays a requestchoice window with a small border around it. 
Text is automatically centered.
If a line of text exceeds the available line space, wordwrap and newline are automatically applied.

The "^" character (without quotes) instructs a newline.
The "|" character (without quotes) is a separator for button choices.
RESET should be put at the very end of crequest lines to apply a screen clear operation (cls). If not, crequest windows will stack on top of each other.

Example:

Set Version                "V2.9.4 Beta"
crequest "CASABLANCA Installation^============================^This disk contains ${Version}.^Please select language." "Deutsch|English" RESET
set temp0 "$rc"
if $temp0 eq 2
   skip English
endif
if $temp0 eq 1
  skip Deutsch
endif

[Toni Wilen]

I don't see how it helps. As I said I need to run shell commands, in real time. Anything else is unacceptable.

[Toni Wilen]

It "boots" a bit in emulation now, enough for exec to get memory added.

>Tm
400a3000 10 10 draco memory
Attributes 0507 First 40115400 Lower 400a3020 Upper 44000000 Free 65959448

>Tl
40115260 9 0 40.1 0 utility.library (utility 40.1 (10.2.93))
40115724 9 -20 40.2 0 expansion.library (expansion 40.2 (9.3.93))
40116260 9 -100 40.10 1 exec.library (exec 40.10 (15.7.93)

>Tr
40115398 8 0 draco.resource

It also uses MMU to trap custom register writes and uses it to emulate some custom registers, for example INTENA.

Currently it get stuck in routine that continuously writes "bug 1" to some IO addresses (perhaps front panel display?).

Following unknown IO addresses are read or written multiple times during boot:

02000003
02000043
02000083
020007c3 (this must return >=4 or boot code enters in infinite loop)
024009e3 (boot code writes different status codes to this register while booting)
024009eb
02400bf3
02400fc3
02400fc7
02400ff3

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I don't see how it helps. As I said I need to run shell commands, in real time. Anything else is unacceptable.

As attachment you will find a tool for serial line command console execution on the Casablanca.

For details on its usage read the following thread from post #89 onwards:

http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=45960&page=5

Hope this helps now

[musashi5150]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Does anyone know if there are different ROM versions? CRC32: 1bdcd18c and 6ccb0431.

I dumped mine and the CRC matches with yours Labelled as 08.97-1.6 from an 060 (no DV card) machine.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

I dumped mine and the CRC matches with yours Labelled as 08.97-1.6 from an 060 (no DV card) machine.

Strange that they have different labels but same contents.

Originally Posted by gulliver

As attachment you will find a tool for serial line command console execution on the Casablanca.

For details on its usage read the following thread from post #89 onwards:

http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=45960&page=5

Hope this helps now

Looks far too complex and it does not do what I want to do.

newshell aux: does not work? (with aux-handler patched to use correct serial device name). I only want confirmation. I am not interested in experimenting with boring stuff.

Again: I want to run shell commands, not some built-in minimal commands that don't do exactly what I want. No workarounds accepted!

[gulliver]

This one seems to have another CRC32.

It is a rom 1.6 (08.97) with a CRC32 F4BF7FCD


It was sent to me 8 years ago. :O

[Toni Wilen]

It is quite useless without matching U4 dump (even words).

[gulliver]

This is U4 of the same machine.

[Toni Wilen]

They are exact same as mine. Only difference is that your dumps are byteswapped for some reason.

[gulliver]

All other roms I have match those other two CRC32.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by davideo

@Jope

and of course anybody else that wants to grab them.

Sixteen images of Casablanca software.

Some are Multilanguage but all include English.

So finally some results..

The old link has been updated:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...kp?usp=sharing

- Video Spicerack was the same as the previous one
- Effekt Diskette was the same as the previous Effekt Diskette 1
- The image for Monument titler 1.6 has a different checksum than the previous one, but the payload inside (md1.lzx) is the same. Seems the previous one we had was a clean install disk, not an update. The ones you provided are actual update disks.
- Schriften Diskette 2 and Monument titler 1.5 need to be redumped, lots of bad sectors.
- Bluebox 2 was reconstructed even though there was a bad sector. It was on an empty track, so it didn't matter. I just filled it in with the appropriate fill pattern.

If you have the energy, could you try redumping the bad ones please? It's a good idea to clean the drive heads first and potentially the disks need cleaning too.