Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[agranlund]

I'm (very) slowly but surely trying to organise a binary release zip rather than having binaries scattered all over the place.
(and removing binaries from the source tree as they move into release package)

https://github.com/agranlund/raven/rele ... .A1.latest

At the moment it's mostly just firmware files and roms.
It will soon(tm) also contain a minimal software setup with drivers and tools but that part is not ready yet.

Documentation is lacking too of course but at some point it would be nice to have some sort of quick-start guide;
- firmware programming
- rom programming
- bring-up procedure
- software setup

[agranlund]

Perhaps not the most interesting from a user perspective but the monitor has just learned how to disassemble.
This will for sure come in handy when investigating crashes and such!

Some simple breakpoint and step functionality could be interesting to have too. later.

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[agranlund]

Binary releases now includes a small software distribution.
It's all work in progress and there's a small textfile with some info included.

https://github.com/agranlund/raven/rele ... .A1.latest

Ravens xbios extensions lives in the auto folder out of convenience for now but will move into ROM at some point.
If you had 060sp.prg in the auto folder since before then you can remove it since Raven has the same functionality built in.
Press delete at the boot logo to enter setup.
A bunch of settings are placeholder and not yet implemented but you should be able to modify time/date/language as well as all of the NOVA graphics settings.

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[Oldskool]

That software package makes it indeed much easier and nicer.
Works great (on my ET4K).
With my W32 at startup it sometimes crashes at the Atari logo (freeze) especially at cold boot and still the garbled screens when moving stuff.

Would it be possible to add the 320 resolution as standard in the distro for Castaway and so?

[agranlund]

Would it be possible to add the 320 resolution as standard in the distro for Castaway and so?

Oh, that's a great idea!
And also the 720p resolution since most monitors are widescreen nowadays.

[Oldskool]

Awesome!

[agranlund]

@Oldskool , I've added some useful resolutions to the cards that supports them but I've only been able to test on Mach32 and ET4000-T8 myself.

Code: Select all

1280x720 : All cards except ET4000-T0 and ET4000-T4
 320x200 : All cards except Mach32/64

https://github.com/agranlund/raven/rele ... 41121.zip

[Oldskool]

Thanks. Great. 720 looks really sharp indeed.

Standard mint in 720.. Kind of ugly but still nice to see it in 720

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Buggy Boy the first game I ever played on the ST or was it Robocop…

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[mikro]

320x200 : All cards except Mach32/64

Oh, so Mach64 really can't support 320x200? I have been wondering why there is no such resolution in the basic package (it makes it very hard for stuff like emulators as they have to use double pixels then...)

[agranlund]

Oh, so Mach64 really can't support 320x200? I have been wondering why there is no such resolution in the basic package (it makes it very hard for stuff like emulators as they have to use double pixels then...)

The hardware can but the driver cannot.
These cards are more or less two different cards in one.
A standard VGA compatible part which can do all the normal modes including 320x200, this one is completely unaccelerated.
Plus the more interesting one which is the register compatible clone of IBM 8514/a. This one has all the fancy accelerator stuff but cannot go below 640x480. Nova initialises it into the latter which makes perfect sense but unfortunately it has no provision to toggle back to VGA mode.

Since it defaults to VGA mode on startup I can make it go 320x200x8bpp when using no driver or EmuTOS's driver but haven't been able to switch it out of 8514/a successfully yet.
It was a while since I played around with that and once I got hold of the w32i which ticks all the boxes I kind of lost motivation.
Would be nice to find time to give it another go at some point though, these Mach cards are really nice and they come with some pretty interesting and fast acceleration besides just a blitter.
Then the second problem would become to restore everything back the way it was so Nova doesn't go bonkers when it regains control of things