LarryL - another Raven060 Adventure

[agranlund]

I am also working with MacOS (newest version, apple silicon M2), so I will give it a try during Christmas…

Let me know if there are any bits that are wrong or simply missing in terms of setting up the environment for building the things.
Would be pretty good if myself, or someone else, did a from-nothing test and documented required steps in a small readme

In theory, it should be enough to install the two different atari gcc cross compilers, make the PureC cross compiler environment, and after that, make should just work for the different softwares.
Perhaps something also wants some additional library from Thorstens site. Libgem or something like that.
Hard to tell when you already have all that kinds of stuff installed from before


I'm running the older MacOS Monterey on an even older x86 MacPro 2010.
I've been wanting to get myself an ARM based one for years, but thanks to the PCIe slots that old thing has all the modern stuff as well as being quite snappy with dual Xeon cpus. So it just keep on living for far longer than it has any rights to

[LarryL]

But: this broke Nova... Only get the message "STA_VDI not found" during boot - for any selected driver, except DEFAULT.
DEFAULT brings me to a b/w desktop - but this let me test Extendos
Edit: Going back to the original ROM brings back the working Nova setup

Where you already on release package 20251214 or later, or something earlier?
Some Nova driver compatibility related stuff was moved from rom and into rvnova.prg in 20251214 so I'm wondering if maybe you are on a version of rvnova.prg which is older than that?

(the rom I built should be identical to the one in 20251215 but with the addition of CONF_WITH_SCSI_DRIVER)

I thought I was already on the latest release - but I will double check this evening
Thanks for all your effort

[agranlund]

I thought I was already on the latest release - but I will double check this evening
Thanks for all your effort

No worries! It looks like maybe there is something not behaving as it should after all, perhaps after those mach64 related refactorings.

It appears that I am locking up when starting MagiC with Nova enabled. I suspect perhaps because of the latest rom+rvnova changes but I'd have to spend a bit of time to verify if that's the case.

Edit: no, that looks like it was related to my setup of MagiC+Nova+Nvdi5

[agranlund]

I saw that there was a couple of SCSIDRV related fixes in EmuTOS since the last version I integrated from.
So here's one with EmuTOS updated to latest, and with CONF_WITH_SCSI_DRIVER set to 1 for the Raven target.

rom_tos.bin.zip

(327.43 KiB) Downloaded 4 times

I'll test this a little bit here first before putting that into Ravens main repo.

[LarryL]

Great, thanks.
Unfortunately - due to trying keeping a happy wife - I will not be able to do any test today
But tomorrow I will do some detailed checks with my CD ROM setup

Cheers
Michael

[LarryL]

I saw that there was a couple of SCSIDRV related fixes in EmuTOS since the last version I integrated from.
So here's one with EmuTOS updated to latest, and with CONF_WITH_SCSI_DRIVER set to 1 for the Raven target.

rom_tos.bin.zip

I'll test this a little bit here first before putting that into Ravens main repo.

Managed to do some tests last night
Works flawlessly in my set-up

I think I still had a SW package from an older release running, so I updated to the newest and updated the ROM

Now Nova works again - and I can access a CD ROM via Extendos, as well as using HDDRUTIL for partitioning without prior loading of HDDRIVER
I used the newest 12.75 version, which worked well without showing the mirrored IDE devices

[LarryL]

Hi,
although I copied the lates release to the CF (which solved the issues I had before), now I have a problem with my new Cirrus VGA card
It is a GD5424 card which seems to work
But only in b/w 640x480x1
I could not select any resolutions inside the BIOS and remembered, that I need to copy some BIB files
So I copied BIB files from the Nova/DEFAULT/AUTO folder into the Nova/CIRRUS/AUTO folder (this folder was empty)
New I can select resolutions, but result is the same - only 640x480x1
And I realized, that during boot Nova complains that the "version is too old"

@agranlund
What exactly needs to be in the Nova/CIRRUS/AUTO folder to get color resolutions with a Cirrus card?
sorry, if this might have been answered elsewhere

cheers
Michael

[agranlund]

Managed to do some tests last night
Works flawlessly in my set-up

That's awesome! Teamwork

So I copied BIB files from the Nova/DEFAULT/AUTO folder into the Nova/CIRRUS/AUTO folder (this folder was empty)
...
What exactly needs to be in the Nova/CIRRUS/AUTO folder to get color resolutions with a Cirrus card?
sorry, if this might have been answered elsewhere

Oh, did the Cirrus folder sneak in there? Ignore that one.
The 'DEFAULT' driver supports Cirrus, WDC, and generic VGA.
It's a terrible name.. so in a separate branch I was toying with splitting the stuff up into separate and sensibly named drivers -- apparently the empty folder carried over.

If using the default driver is still not working, try removing emulator.bib, sta_vdi.bib and xmenu.inf from the c:\auto folder
The correct ones will be automatically copied over again if necessary, depending on which driver you have selected.

[LarryL]

Oh, did the Cirrus folder sneak in there? Ignore that one.
The 'DEFAULT' driver supports Cirrus, WDC, and generic VGA.

Ok, that seems to work - at least I have color

But I expected the card to be a bit faster…
It is a GD5422 (not 5424 as I have thought)
Only in b/w it is much faster, esp. the blitting, compared to the AX I had before
Once color comes in, performance goes down close to AX level

Interestingly, the Nova boot messages reports ET4000/T8 as loaded driver - and booting takes much longer now (sitting at a white screen for about 3-4 seconds before the boot messages start)

BTW: Merry Christmas to all of you out there

[agranlund]

Ah, the GD5422 does not have a hardware blitter so it’ll likely perform similar to an ET4000AX.
GD5426 was their first model that came with 2D acceleration.

Glad to hear the driver works with the ’22 though!
I have only tested here with 26, 28, 29 and 34.

I’m using the VDI part from the ET4000/T8 package so it’ll say that when it loads. It’s somewhere in a todo to patch that message when I load and run sta_vdi.prg because it bothers me too

Merry Christmas!