Hi,
Time for a pre-Christmas update
After identifying my stupid mistake, populating the wrong version of the CY2308 (the one NOT doubling the frequency), I have now successfully updated 3 of the 4 Raven Boards with the right Chip (-2 version). The 4th board is still traveling with a courier towards my place for some time now - have my fingers crossed that it did not got lost…)
Much better now
The x2 jumpers now really lead to a double base frequency - as expected and desired.
The three boards are working. Had some stability issues while testing different frequencies with x1 and x2 settings.
Using the 251029 Nessie Firmware.
Some combinations work better, others worse - 32MHz base clock is definitely not working at all. I don’t mind
Had to test with different 68150 (FN33 and FN40), but found enough chips working.
It was also important to have a good cleaning of the pins of these old chips - some were really looking a bid corroded…
During my testing I struggled a lot with intermediate freezes and locks of the system.
Mainly during VDI tests in Gembench. CPU tests in Gembench and running Coremark68k always went well.
Also sometimes the system would not start (black screen), although the serial output went through until „starting TOS“
And sometimes the serial log stopped at the line showing the VGA BIOS message, and even sometimes the log only showed „8 bit VGA memory“ instead of 16Bit (next boot it was OK again)
So I had a closer look on the ET4000AX used for testing (which seemed working OK for me)
This specific card with its SC11486CN-66 RAMDAC (checking the Nova website from Idek -
https://silicon-heaven.org/atari/nova/ ... gaST/STGA/) would usually require the T6 driver package
But the Raven only offers T0, T3, T4 and T8.
I used T4, since it seemed to work
But maybe this combination did cause the instability? Not sure at all
In the end, I changed to a different ET4000AX which requires the T0 driver and now my system is much more stable.
It now works pretty flawlessly with 25, 40, 48 AND 50MHz
@agranlund is there a special reason, why the T6 driver is missing? Not sure if the root cause of my problems with the other card is based on this - maybe the card simply has a defect - but, I am curious
Now it is time to assemble everything back into the case and get network and sound card running - and MINT installed
Cheers
Michael
