Retina Z2 - POS!!!

I have officially found the most worthless excuse of Amiga hardware.

For your amusement, I present the Retina Z2.

After weeks of searching I have come to the conclusion that this card has literally NO drivers what so ever. It seems to have two purposes. When not installed it makes a handy paperweight. When installed it keeps a zorro slot occupied therefore stopping dust from collecting inside the connector.

There were apparently 3 different drivers available at some time for it. 1- RetinaEmu which is completely and utterly unusable on OS 3.9 - it garbles screens, the mouse pointer is invisible (which turns using wb into some sort of weird "stab in the dark" game) and when you even open a prefs program the screen simply goes black and its reboot time - fun for the whole family.

Then you have the EGS software which is supposedly much better, but after weeks of searching I still cannot find anything with a Retina driver, so I believe it never existed and is some sort of weird myth.

Lastly you have Cybergraphx 4.2 beta which had a working Retina Z2 driver.... but no one knows where it went etc - no longer available anywhere.

This is all a shame since the card itself has 4mb ram and (from the specs) reasonably fast performance.

If anyone has any advice, drivers, voodoo spells, gypsie curses etc to make this card work at all I would be very grateful to hear from you.

If I cannot find a way of using this card in ANY sort of fashion within 48 hours I will do the world, and amiga users in general, a favour by snapping it in half, jumping on it, burning it and then ****ing on the ashes.

@abraXXious

The retina Z2 is a tricky beast to setup, it is very much like a musical instrument - you only get out what you put in.

After installing the primary device driver, you must then setup the available screen mods (dimensions and frequencies) using using EGS.

it sounds a lot easier than it is, But I was able to get 800x600x24bit on my 42"plasma - you need to know the Hz and Vz frequencies of your display pannel.

I then had to have a finikle about to get this to work with ClassicWorkbench Advanced so I could have have Workbench open iteslf on an EGS screen, but I got there in the end... it truly is a pain to configure, but once there, its pretty neat...

1. being segmented memory it saves the Z2 ram space for other things.
2. pretty damn cheap
3. even 2MB is good enought for a 1024x768x16bit Workbench =)

I will say the RetinaEmu.... Bin it.... throw it agaisnt somthing hard and watch it smash to smithers! it the WORST mode promotion program I have ever had the unfortune to execute - and from your post it seems this has had you in a trap for some time.

You are 100 times better off with NewMode

Now I do wish I had written a guide, if only I had more time =(

Hi Zetr0,

yes, Ive heard EGS is much better.... but where the hell do I get it?!? I have found EGS 6.2 disks, EGS 7.1 on Aminet and EGS 7.4 update (also on Aminet).... problem is, none of these has the driver for Retina Z2.

By the sounds of things you have it, any chance of emailing it to me? Your settings files would be nice too. Let me know if you are able to do this and I shall message you my email address.

Thanks for your help.

unfortunately my friend, I sold the card on a while back to a fellow AmiBay'er here

I included all the software I had - including the EGS disks I believe...

I knew I should of ADF'd them, but I thought the ones on amiga.resource.cx were the same..

<--- face palm moment....

Lol, np, well I guess Im up shits creek then. :)

hmm any reason for my post 3 minutes after Zetr0's (first answer) is deleted ?

I have a Retina Z2 that I set up using the software on amiga.resource.cx -- I've not done a lot with it, but it did work, I got my Workbench screen from my A2000 displaying on a VGA monitor.

I guess it's not the world's most impressive RTG, but it should at least give you a higher-resolution Workbench on a VGA output, which has got to be worth something. :-)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tomse

hmm any reason for my post 3 minutes after Zetr0's (first answer) is deleted ?

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Hiyas Tomse,

your post was kinda inviting a trade in a non-trade area of AmiBay, as such TC unapproved the post, its not deleted -

@Zetr0
thanks for clearing that up ;-)

I would have prefered a trade rather than him destroying his card, hence my post ;-)

@tomse

I am sure TC knows that - or he would come along and tickle you (lol)