Ok that explains a lot, although i thought the mach64 was 3d enhanced.
I am not sure about that particular model, but my old 600MHz laptop also has a rage mobility adapter, and when I was looking into it slowness at the time I found that there were several different rage mobility implementations, some of which were lacking some of the 3D acceleration functionality... so certain operations fell back to the horridly slow software rendering.
Not much you can do about it, unfortunately -- BlitzMax really does need half-way decent 3D acceleration.
Odd choice though (considering there is no 3d command set :/)
there's 3D and 3D -- it uses the same 3D acceleration chips to handle all the the realtime scaling, blending, rotating, etc., even though it looks all flat 2D to you.