[GUIDE] Atari VCS (2020) Console

[CompuZone]

Have you followed my guide to set the BIOS settings? Because they are quite crucial.

If you are experiencing slow USB ports you may need to use something like USBMap or SSDTTime by corpnewt to recreate your ports.
> https://github.com/corpnewt/USBMap (for Mac)
> https://github.com/corpnewt/SSDTTime (for Windows/Linux)

All you have to do is run your VCS system with USBInjectAll and USBPortLimit enabled in the EFI (disable any current USBPort or USBMap/USBMapLegacy.kext), boot with it, and all the ports will be enabled. You then run say USBMap by downloading the file, running the .command script by right-clicking it and running it in Terminal. You then press D to discover your ports; plug USB 2 or USB 3 devices or drives into the rest of the VCS ports for them to detected and create the end USBMap.kext and USBMapLegacy.kext files. Those files will be saved in the USBMap/Results folder and you then transfer them to your EFI/OC/Kexts folder, add and enable one of them in your config.plist (mostly USBMap.kext for Catalina) and disable your USBInjectAll and XHCIPortLimit quirk. That should make a difference if anything.

I appreciate the quick reply. I was curious if there was something related to the USB port speed that I missed. I've been scratching my head on this one for a few days. I'll let you know. Thanks again.

 

[CompuZone]

Again, I appreciate your time, I enjoy troubleshooting and working through issues, but this, I feel, is quite out of my league at the moment, just trying to wrap my head around it. I can feel my brain stretching lol.

I wasn't sure what I screwed up during the remmaping process so I decided to just start fresh, and I followed your instructions to a T (reset Atari to factory settings, and reset the BIOS to defaults). This time I installed Mojave and it was still super slow, and I mean it takes several hours to finally get to the welcome/initial setup. I think there may just be an incompatibility somewhere with the 2 USBs I am using, one is a sandisk 32GB and the other is the aforementioned 64GB PNY. It's strange because I can install Windows to those USBs and it runs as well as can be expected. I've tried swapping them back and forth even with the same effects.
I'm pretty green when it comes to kexts, this being the first time I've ever messed with them.
The USBInjectAll and the USBPortLimit are in the Plist.conf right? I wasn't sure whether to use clover or OpenCore to edit it. In clover I could find the XHCIPortLimit and the USBPortLimit options, but I could not find the USBInjectAll. In OpenCore I could find the USBInjectAll, but not the other two.
I wound up having to reinstall again, and I did macOS Catalina, after restarting fresh again and it still takes almost an hour to boot. DiskUtil does not detect a USB to Sata adapter, which is something I kind of expected having worked with Raspberry Pi's. It also does not detect the M.2 nor the eMMC storage options, only the pen drives that I have tried so far.


I am going to attempt it on a new set of Pen drives, just to rule bad pen drives out and I am going to go with Big Sur, it is downloading right now.

Update: I tried it with the new Sandisk USB and it's working! I guess the PNY 64GB I had was bad or just had something weird about it. System is running super smooth now!

 

[Middleman]

Again, I appreciate your time, I enjoy troubleshooting and working through issues, but this, I feel, is quite out of my league at the moment, just trying to wrap my head around it. I can feel my brain stretching lol.

I wasn't sure what I screwed up during the remmaping process so I decided to just start fresh, and I followed your instructions to a T (reset Atari to factory settings, and reset the BIOS to defaults). This time I installed Mojave and it was still super slow, and I mean it takes several hours to finally get to the welcome/initial setup. I think there may just be an incompatibility somewhere with the 2 USBs I am using, one is a sandisk 32GB and the other is the aforementioned 64GB PNY. It's strange because I can install Windows to those USBs and it runs as well as can be expected. I've tried swapping them back and forth even with the same effects.
I'm pretty green when it comes to kexts, this being the first time I've ever messed with them.
The USBInjectAll and the USBPortLimit are in the Plist.conf right? I wasn't sure whether to use clover or OpenCore to edit it. In clover I could find the XHCIPortLimit and the USBPortLimit options, but I could not find the USBInjectAll. In OpenCore I could find the USBInjectAll, but not the other two.
I wound up having to reinstall again, and I did macOS Catalina, after restarting fresh again and it still takes almost an hour to boot. DiskUtil does not detect a USB to Sata adapter, which is something I kind of expected having worked with Raspberry Pi's. It also does not detect the M.2 nor the eMMC storage options, only the pen drives that I have tried so far.


I am going to attempt it on a new set of Pen drives, just to rule bad pen drives out and I am going to go with Big Sur, it is downloading right now.

Update: I tried it with the new Sandisk USB and it's working! I guess the PNY 64GB I had was bad or just had something weird about it. System is running super smooth now!

That's great to hear you finally sorted your system out. Yes there can be a few issues.

As for the SATA issue that was covered with my latest EFI build. Please check the latest EFI for the fix.
If the NVME is playing up you could try adding NVMEFix into your OC/Kexts folder.

 

[CompuZone]

I have an issue now getting the audio and WiFi up and running, I spent a lot of time on Big Sur 11.4 (updated straight from Catalina) and realized I might need to go back to 11.3.1 as your instructions state you got it working on. Do you have it working through HDMI or am I just misunderstanding? In settings there are no listed output sound options. I reinstalled 11.3.1, the audio and WiFi is still not working. WiFi is not so important to me since I am using Ethernet, but I figured there may be some overlap with this.

Am I correct in assuming that you have updated the plist and the other files in your latest EFI? I noticed all of the changes you recommended have already been done. The only thing different was the in the downloaded EFI folder there may have been a misspelling in NVRAM "agpdmod=pikera" is what you said it should be on the forum post, but from the downloaded EFI it is written "agdpmod=pikera".

I managed to get macOS and Windows running from the same 1TB drive, ~300GB for macOS and ~700GB for Windows, that wouldn't cause any issues with the drivers in macOS would it? Windows is working fine.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

[Middleman]

I have an issue now getting the audio and WiFi up and running, I spent a lot of time on Big Sur 11.4 (updated straight from Catalina) and realized I might need to go back to 11.3.1 as your instructions state you got it working on. Do you have it working through HDMI or am I just misunderstanding? In settings there are no listed output sound options. I reinstalled 11.3.1, the audio and WiFi is still not working. WiFi is not so important to me since I am using Ethernet, but I figured there may be some overlap with this.

Am I correct in assuming that you have updated the plist and the other files in your latest EFI? I noticed all of the changes you recommended have already been done. The only thing different was the in the downloaded EFI folder there may have been a misspelling in NVRAM "agpdmod=pikera" is what you said it should be on the forum post, but from the downloaded EFI it is written "agdpmod=pikera".

I managed to get macOS and Windows running from the same 1TB drive, ~300GB for macOS and ~700GB for Windows, that wouldn't cause any issues with the drivers in macOS would it? Windows is working fine.

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

I did have the HDMI and audio work, but it is not using the onboard AMD audio chip (because it has no drivers for macOS). Rather it is achieved using an external USB DAC. I used a Cyberdrive Clarity Aura DAC on one of the front ports but technically speaking any USB DAC should do. As you plug it in it will come up as a sound device. The HDMI output should work as is since macOS is confirmed now to be supporting the Raven2 APU chipset at native level since Catalina 10.15.4.

The WiFi does work on my setup. Check out my latest EFI upload for the correct kexts. You need to have Airportbrcm and itlwm.kexts enabled and use the included Heliport app.

As for the boot-arg setting, it should be agdpmod=pikera. Agpdmod is a spelling mistake.

 

[Middleman]

Thought to inform you all there's a new firmware update for the VCS that supposedly enables better 4K performance.

 

[Middleman]

So I did an update of Big Sur this last weekend on the VCS to the latest 11.6 after its recent BIOS upgrade, and the OS updated without any issues. However I did discover one thing. Despite displaying in 4K mode and increasing the GPU's VRAM size in the BIOS to 4GB and also finally getting the graphics driver to appear as enabled on PCI by adding the two rename GFX>IGPU and PEGP>GFX0 ACPI patches, the system didn't register any VRAM nor had any hardware acceleration. I think it is down to two possibilities. The first is that it could be macOS is having trouble recognising the VRAM address beyond 31MB due to some setting in the BIOS. The second is that the AMD GPU is not be able use DDR4 RAM (which sounds absurd because the spec says it can use DDR4 as shared video memory).

In any case it's a bit of an enigma at present. So I am planning to test also to see if the framebuffer-stolenmem and framebuffer-fbmem values help (or at least have them removed and see what comes up).

 

[Middleman]

So it seems I've made another discovery regarding the APU used in the Atari VCS.

Back in 2019, it was revealed on Twitter that the PCI IDs for AMD's Vega 8 & Vega 10 series is 15D8 which also happens to be the PCI ID for the VCS Picasso.

Now I've already tried this device id and it only allows 4K but no 3D acceleration.

So I decided to do a bit more digging, and came across this...

macOS 10.15.3 Catalina GPU kext

macOS 10.15.3 Catalina GPU kext. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

This is the list of PCI IDs and AMD cards that are used in Catalina 10.15.3.
It so happens that Catalina has several PCI device values reserved for Vega 10 cards.
These values could potentially work for the VCS! So I will be testing them soon.

 

[Middleman]

So I’ve been trying to get the VCS EFI updated to OC 0.7.4 for Monterey and it seems to be stalling just before the login screen appears.

Anyways I made another discovery and found this piece of code appearing on my screen for the CPUID:



This could be the missing CPUID info the Opencore team has been trying to find all this time! Having the full code means the full functions of the CPU is enabled. As my VCS CPUID for the Ryzen 1606G is 81F80100 (which was entered into my config.plist).

 

[craighazan]

Is macOS ok with integrated Ryzen graphics?.