Where I attempt to build two Raven060!

[agranlund]

How are you going to know if your 32MB Simms work... if you don't build the PSRAM ones??

Good point sir!

Why buy your way out of all this ... when the fun is making it work

Yeah I totally get that and I agree!
In the end the whole machine is "pointless" and I'm having really fun with doing a ton of work to making random stuff work.

I think I meant to say that in general I went the route of buying my way out of things I don't find fun in order to get to spend time on all the parts I do find fun

I'm pretty confident that this approach, combined with being really mindful about not ending up in feature-creep-hell, is the only reason the project could work (for me) and that a computer could appear rather than ending up an abandoned project.

[Mikerochip]

Good approach, though, overall!

What else do you want to achieve with it??

A.2, with integrated NIC and usb...
Oh

I'd forgotten. I meant to ask, if you'd integrate a pin header for the Atari ST keyboard.
And, if you'd break out the pins for the eiffel display, and ISP pins, too. Just ... because.
The display ... just because it'd be cool. Another feature!

The Atari keyboard pins, for the same reason. With maybe a jumper to disable the Eiffel?
I think I'd like to use my TT keyboard on it. Or even design a replacement mechanical TT/mega style keyboard.

[agranlund]

@Mikerochip the latest (unofficial) Eiffel firmware, the one with some joystick fixes, doesn't have LCD support.
I think the author had to disable that to fit his fixes as the PIC was completely full.
So there was no headers for that put onto the motherboard.

But!
Ravens i2c bus is exposed on the J402 expansion header and you could plug in an LCD or some different i2c device there and control it from software.
I've had an i2c LCD around here for ages which I've been meaning to test but never gotten around to

Of course, an LCD on the i2c bus wont be compatible with existing software using Eiffel-LCD.
But apart from Aniplayer, is there any such software?
If one really wanted to I'm sure it would be possible to make some kind of tiny driver that translated Eiffel-LCD commands and does the equivalent on an i2c connected LCD.

And then with the CKBD plugin board I decided against adding Eiffel-LCD for the reasons above.

[agranlund]

What else do you want to achieve with it??

Yeah that list of things is quite large and ranges from somewhat sane to probably never going to happen.

But essentially, A2 is meant to be incremental updates only with few new features.
The final rev.A board if you will, like I thought A1 was the final one.

Some kind of future B series is allowed to have any changes or redesigns.
But the overall goal of that, and ultimately what goes on it is very much up in the air.
VLB bus is one of those candidates which feels very reasonable now that I am able to make my own Nova drivers.
Right now I'm very content with all the different things Raven.A1 let's me work on in terms of software so I don't feel much need or hurry for another board, except for A2 because I do want a second Raven board myself.


It's one of the hardest part I think, making reasonable decisions about what to actually include.
Was really easy to get caught up tossing everything on there while in schematics view but at some point you'll have to make all that work too

And also the fussy decisions on what feels appropriate for whatever the overall goal of the machine is.
For Raven it was always about something that could feel somewhat appropriate and balanced for the late-486 / early-Pentium1 era.

(which helps explain why for me 48MB was more than enough. It's still _way_ more than anyone would have had when 100mhz was considered fast but not to the point of becoming a comedy.
Saying that, I've come around a bit as I do realise the Atari and Amiga timeline was very different, with huge amount of ram being normal for what would have been a very slow cpu by then on the PC/Mac timeline)


And also if everything is put on the motherboard then it essentially becomes a single-board computer and that's not quite what I wanted to make. So yeah, everything on Raven is mostly based on "feels" rather than most practical, economical, or best. For that, I think the V4SA is very hard to beat.

[Mikerochip]

I think, then, reading that, you might consider a few Raven060 branded accessories.

I know you're thinking about onboard NIC, but, why not design an 8 or 16 bit Raven0560 ISA NIC?

Are the relevant signals on the ISA bus, to add the DMA/Floppy controller? I really miss seeing the floppy on the machine.
Not that it's terribly useful, but. Well. All Atari's up to now have had one

Same with, maybe, the TT video shifter. Or, better, the Falcon Videl or Super Videl

And, the same with the cartridge port ISA card. I know you mentioned ROM3 and ROM4. Nice to have.
I'll probably add them in as a patch lead, and put in the ISA cartridge port from the microATX ST

Maybe even a PicoGUS branded Raven060
Absolutely makes zero difference to the usage of it. But. How cool would that be...

And, given Ian Scott is now working on the PicoIDE, I'd love to add that, as the actual HDD/CDRom device(s).
How cool would that be!!

Actually. Would you need a DMA controller, to add the Falcon's DSP chip?
I wonder how much Falcon software you could get working, just having the DSP on the bus...


Anyhow!
I've two boards just about ready to be programmed.
I flip flopped on adding some of the parts to the board as dual wipe sockets, and then, the TCXOs, too.
(Decided on sockets now, and if I run into problems, I can remove the sockets and solder directly)

On programming, does the jtag port have a 5v diode? can I flash the ATF1508 while the machine is powered off?

Now, I have to figure out how to actually flash it (cheaply!) I've got OpenOCD on the PC, and an ST Link V2, and, let's see what happens...


If there's no rework document yet...
Can we start a thread?
I've swapped C310 for 0.1uF,
I need to run two patch wires for ROM3 and ROM4,
I need to run patch wires for 32MB ram access,

what else...

20251119_0909291.jpg (541.21 KiB) Viewed 141 times

[agranlund]

I know you're thinking about onboard NIC, but, why not design an 8 or 16 bit Raven0560 ISA NIC?

Yeah that thought did cross my mind, to make some kind of NIC + maybe other stuff ISA card.
But then, as I was looking for USB jacks to use for the built-in ckbd I saw that 2xUSB+Ethernet connector and figure it would be neat to have something onboard.
Tbh, I'm not totally married to the idea. Freeing up one ISA slot was the main reason at first but the second good thing would be that even _very_ early boot code could rely on ethernet existing, always the same chip, and always at the same location.

Are the relevant signals on the ISA bus, to add the DMA/Floppy controller? I really miss seeing the floppy on the machine.

The relevant signals should be there for just about any ISA card from the PC world.
With the caveat that only a certain selection of eight ISA interrupt numbers are supported, and ISA-DMA is not supported at all.
But then again, ISA-DMA is rather pointless even on PC unless you're on an old XT class machine, so a lot of cards you'd want to use don't even support it. And the ones that do, well they're usually faster in PIO mode anyway. Soundblaster being the one exception to that rule.

In terms of floppy and disk, I really share your opinion there. Not sure how useful it is but it would be cool
I experimented with one of those super-io ISA cards (floppy + ide + serial + parallel).
The grand idea was to make a TOS driver for floppy + ide through such cards, and as I remember the code is at a point of being able to read raw sectors from the IDE but the whole thing is far from a finished driver.

[agranlund]

can I flash the ATF1508 while the machine is powered off?

nope it needs to be powered on.

If there's no rework document yet... Can we start a thread?
I've swapped C310 for 0.1uF, I need to run two patch wires for ROM3 and ROM4,
I need to run patch wires for 32MB ram access,

There's nothing really _required_ to rework I think.

With the CKBD you can do a couple of optional bodge wires if you are interested in one of those particular features:
Note that there is hardly any software taking advantage of 2 and 3. And point 1 is a bit of a novelty when there is USB available

1. Support for right mouse button on Legacy mice (not needed for USB or PS2)
J606:A9 <-> J606:B6 (mouse right button - joystick1 fire button)

2. Support for CPU temperature readout
U107:M15 <-> U107:M16 (CPU Therm1 - GND)
U107:L15 <-> U301:26 (CPU Therm0 - Eiffel:Temp2)

3. Support for software controlled shutdown
SW201:2 <-> U301:25 (PWR switch - Eiffel:PwrOff)


Support for 32MB per simm slot would require bodge wires yes.
But not documented, nor tested yet.
There's also no support in firmware + bootrom yet, I've been meaning to add that but haven't been in a hurry since no-one has made such a simm yet. I'll have to do the software side any one of these days otherwise I'll forget


ROM3 and ROM4 are not exposed anywhere.
They could possibly be exposed on some of the free header pins next to the ATF1508 but I'm hesitant to do so since they'll be going away on rev.A2 (pins are needed for other stuff)

But regardless, it'll need some bios+firmware effort to make it work.
ISA cycles needs to be initiated on cartridge access else you're going to be reading off the wrong databus.
In terms of bios it needs to PMMU-map the cartridge space as seen by the cpu to some ISA-RAM range.

I think the more elegant solution is to create a real ISA card that decodes and reacts to that isa-ram range.
I've always just assumed this is what the Hades cartridge-port ISA card does, and now that I looked around and found the schematic I see that yes, that is exactly what it does. It has a gal16v8 on the card that is responsible for "talking ISA" and generating the rom3/4 signals.

[Mikerochip]

Interesting

Oh, I meant, relevant signals for an ST/TT DMA controller. How exactly that'd tie in, with 'Nessi' is another thing, though.

OH!
I meant to ask.
Since you call everything by it's Raven name... maybe we should have name identifiers on the PCB?
Big letters over the ATF1508 'NESSI' etc.
Bit more exciting to look at, than U402 etc

No harm in naming stuff. Give people something to look at, too, if they have a case with a window...

I've made some slight progress too
2x boards just itching to have something fitted to the processor socket...

20251120_1611201.jpg (512.79 KiB) Viewed 78 times

both small CPLD flashed, and fitted.
Fitted the other parts that I have, too.
Flashed the rom "simm". No problems there!

Looking at programming the ATF1508AS. Should be very doable, with openocd.
Plugged in my ST Link v2, and discovered while it does have a JTAG & swd, with openocd, it only supports single wire debug. FUN!

On to my next in the list, the USB Blaster.
I discovered, under windows 11, my knock off Usb Blaster won't work! Wonderful.

Strike two
I said I'd give the openocd under linux, on a raspberry pi a go! It supports using the gpio as the jtag with x3prog and jtag/cwd with openocd.
It's giving me a funny error though. I'm not sure the packaged openocd is buit for the gpio. I'll give that a go, later!

Worst case, I'll dig out a windows 10 laptop, and use the usb blaster on that. I'm sure I've signed drivers for it, somewhere.

[Mikerochip]

There's nothing really _required_ to rework I think.

Isn't the ROM / RAM0/RAM1/RAM2 now reversed in the socket order?
I'll need a label, for that! (Just in case)

[agranlund]

There's nothing really _required_ to rework I think.

Isn't the ROM / RAM0/RAM1/RAM2 now reversed in the socket order?
I'll need a label, for that! (Just in case)

Yep! Good catch
ROM is in the same spot as before but RAM0/1/2 are now in reverse order compared to what it says on the board.