Possible (long term) solution for ST/TT ISA GFX card?

[exxos]

@Badwolf was doing something with the ROM port and video not long back IIRC ?

[Badwolf]

Yep, sounds very similar to my little board here:





I'd love to spend more time on these kinds of projects. I sunk a lot of time into trying to develop a 332-bit fixed palette 256 colour VDI driver to work, but too many things simply assume a palette below 16 bit.

I already have a design to add a palette and double the bandwidth, but you know how these things are. Too many projects. Basically no time any more! :lol:

BW

[DoG]

If anyone haven't seen this yet: ultraBooST by cream and the hardware supporting the demo.

[mrbombermillzy]

@DoG I did see that, but 1040STE specific and HW modding needed sort of locks out many Atarians, unfortunately.

Im hoping to see a practical solution for 'the masses' type thing. :) (I think the ET4000 emulation in PiSTorm is looking like a good example of that).

There are a few projects floating around at the moment, so Im excited to see them reach fruition.

[mrbombermillzy]

@Badwolf are you going to be bringing your framebuffer project to the show?

Would be good to have a look and discuss possibilities. :)

[exxos]

Not seen that. Though as others said, special hardware needs drivers. I guess the "simple" way is to emulate the ET4000 so NVDI etc can use it out of the box.

I mean really, a graphics card is just outputting video from its own RAM. That ram can get written to by the CPU. The graphics card becomes "more RAM" really. Though you need the video drivers for other resolutions etc. If you don't care about GEM, you could just write your own code to talk to "video RAM". I guess that is what that board does.

[mrbombermillzy]

I guess the "simple" way is to emulate the ET4000 so NVDI etc can use it out of the box.

Thats exactly what Im thinking. Easiest possible solution, with driver support already there, or a close variation of this (i.e. FPGA ET4000).

The easier it is to implement, the more people will invest in (building/buying/coding for) to create the same good standard GFX system for all.

(Well, thats the Utopian theory anyway! :lol: )

[exxos]

Thats exactly what Im thinking. Easiest possible solution, with driver support already there, or a close variation of this (i.e. FPGA ET4000).
The easier it is to implement, the more people will invest in (building/buying/coding for) to create the same good standard GFX system for all.
(Well, thats the Utopian theory anyway! :lol: )

Yeah, when it gets into custom stuff.. it's the age old problem of whos going to code for it. Best to try and work with existing software IMO.

[Badwolf]

Yeah, my board was literally a RAM framebuffer that timesliced between outputting to VGA and allowing the ST bus access.

It basically does a subset of the Falcon's 16-bit mode so that you can just use Falcon drivers (it's 12 bit honouring the top four bits of each colour in the 16 bit mode).

Because it was an experiement and I was aiming for 256 mode, it's only 8 bit, so it's not quick enough to drive 640x480 at 12 bit. Can do 320x240 or 320x480.

If I bring anything it'll be the STE, so I could throw the card in and see if we can get it running. Not touched it since before the last Cyberlegends show! I was hoping to get Basilisk II working on it but PiStorm distracted me at the time :)

BW

[mrbombermillzy]

@Badwolf Putting this in a ST536 based machine would be very interesting I think.