Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[mikro]

Yep, mxPlay MIDI running in the background under FreeMint works.

:-O

PMDoom keyboard controls seem a bit laggy for me under FreeMint

Keyboard handling in general is not very optimal: it always compares the whole 256-byte long array of possible key presses/releases instead of just telling the SDL which keys were pressed. I have it in my SDL TODO.

[agranlund]

The Adlib version is the most nostalgic for me since that's how I used to play it back in the days, but there's no doubt it sounds better with Midi


(please excuse my crappy attempt at playing with one hand only)

[Oldskool]

Yes
Da da da dada. Better.

IMG_2998.gif (295.44 KiB) Viewed 335 times

[agranlund]

Added "raven/drivers/mpu401" to release package.
https://github.com/agranlund/raven/rele ... .A1.latest


This is an ISA card MPU401 midi driver for Atari bios.
Meaning any application using the standard Atari bios interface for midi can automatically route to your ISA card.

The driver hooks midi-out and to ISA port 330 as default, leaving midi-in mapped to motherboard.
That behavior, as well as port number, can be changed and is explained in the readme file.

With this in place I'm going to retire those temporary "midi-isa" plugins for Jam + mxPlay as they're no longer needed.
The normal "midi.mxp" and "midi.jam" works with both motherboard and ISA midi depending on if you're using the MPU401 driver or not.


(Doom will use the standard bios interface for midi, hence the reason I finally got around to making this driver )

[artik-wroc]

With this in place I'm going to retire those temporary "midi-isa" plugins for Jam + mxPlay as they're no longer needed.

Think about other users Keep plugins accessible.

[agranlund]

Think about other users Keep plugins accessible.

MPU401.PRG should work on all(*) other ISA equipped computers too so it makes sense to no longer care about maintaining a specialised "midi-isa" plugin and just keep "midi" plugin.
(*) any current or future machine that has isa_bios. without isa_bios it may still work on Hades, Milan, Panther, Raven.

With the driver, other programs using the standard Atari API for midi will automatically work on soundcards too. Similar to what the MilanBlaster driver does for Milan soundcard.
(But in practice I found most midi applications ignore the API and just bang hardware directly.. the only clean application I found was "The Piano Player")



In terms of making things more accessible maybe it makes sense in the Raven repo to publish an additional release zip with just the interesting bits that should work on other computers too - I'm thinking ISA_BIOS, drivers and such?
I don't think it's super obvious at the moment that you can cherry pick stuff from the raven release zip and use on Hades too etc.
Maybe also move the audio plugins in there too.

[luciodra]

It would take a nice back panel for our Raven060...

[agranlund]

Doom with music support:
https://github.com/agranlund/pmdoom/releases/tag/latest

It plays Midi by default, but if you prefer Adlib and have a compatible soundcard then you can start with -adlib for the nostalgia

I hope I didn't break SoundFX playback now that I rearranged the sound-system to decouple Sfx and music drivers. I have no way of telling on the Raven yet, but it would be neat to make sound work next.

Some kind of "dumb" Atari sound DMA driver to get at least some existing applications working in an unoptimised way.
And then later invent something to make it easy to take advantage of all the neat stuff a GUS can do.
Doom could easy preload _all_ of its SoundFX into GUS-RAM making sound playback practically free.

[agranlund]

It would take a nice back panel for our Raven060...

Yeah that would be nice..
I ended up getting one of those universal plastic ones with a grid that you can easily cut out the openings.
Not ideal but better than nothing.

[luciodra]

Interesting, I didn't know that.