Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[agranlund]

test ym

It says: ping!
And no crash

Next try the full emutos again?

Hurray again!

Yeah try with EmuTOS. Leave the IDE port empty to rule that out as some kind of problem.
I guess that's about the only thing you can disconnect.
I'd leave the VGA card in since you need some kind of verification that it runs I suppose.

Wait for a while, since it takes a while to start with no HDD.
If you don't have anything on the screen or any kind of sign from your monitor that a signal is being outputted, try pressing keys on the keyboard to check if EmuTOS desktop is giving you keyclick sounds.
If not, get rid of VGA card and try again if you get keyclick sounds from the invisible EmuTOS desktop (I'm unsure if it even starts without VGA card, it was ages since I tested that and who knows if I have broken something since then, but test anyway)

In the meanwhile, I'll build a rom that spits out debug info on the (other) serial port. I believe EmuTOS will use 9600 baud to do so.

[agranlund]

This one has EmuTOS outputting absolutely everything it does to the second serial port @ 9600 baud.

rom_tos_dbg.bin.zip

[agranlund]

Not sure if it helps, but I dug up two other ET4K cards and quickly verified that they too worked with EmuTOS's built in ET4K driver.
So these are the three cards I have tested to work in my machine with EmuTOS driver.
For NOVA, I've only tested the UltimateVGA one and I have no idea if NOVA supports those other two.

IMG_2807.jpg

IMG_2808.jpg

IMG_2809.jpg

[Oldskool]

With the standard rom same results as yesterday. So no video out.
Pressing keyboard does make sound. But it is strange. It’s not a ping it’s more a tone wich continous as long as you press the button. Pressing sw101 brings up the monitor indeed.

Next will try the “new” rom with output over rs232.

[agranlund]

With the standard rom same results as yesterday. So no video out.
Pressing keyboard does make sound. But it is strange. It’s not a ping it’s more a tone wich continous as long as you press the button. Pressing sw101 brings up the monitor indeed.

Next will try the “new” rom with output over rs232.

The keyclick sound is different from that bell sound so that sounds like normal. Holding a key will repeats that keyclick sound continously.

Seeing as it's likely VGA related the interesting debug output will come quite early.
There will be a lot of debug output but you are looking for this output, especially if it outputs something else or some kind of related error message around there:

Code: Select all

init_nova()
detect_mach32() did not detect ATI Mach32
init_et4000()
init_nova_resolution()

[Oldskool]

Hereby the full output file

[agranlund]

Hereby the full output file

That looks completely fine to me at a glance.
I would have expected either "No Nova or no VGA card found" or "Nova memory inaccessible" directly after init_nova() if it failed to communicate with the card. Not seeing those indicates that it was able to read/write ET4K I/O registers + memory and get expected results.

That said, that may not necessarily mean the total combination of stuff on the card including clockgen and ramdac are supported by EmuTOS - there are so many variations of ET4K based cards. Neither NVDI-VGA nor NOVA supports all the cards on the market.
I am unsure for EmuTOS but I am under the impression it should have pretty good support, especially since it only set up a basic mono display.


Do you have a picture of your card where the markings on the chips are visible? Not that I expect it to help me much but who knows..
The ideal situation would be to test the card in a real Atari that has a known working ET4K adapter, somehow ruling out if the card is simply unsupported by EmuTOS or if it's a Raven problem either generally or with your board in particular.
Or perhaps try one of my known working cards on your board.

A quicker thing to test could also be to blindly set up the NOVA driver on the CF card.
I'd first verify that the CF card is working by plugging it in and checking the emutos debug output.


Then basically..
https://silicon-heaven.org/atari/nova/

If you can identify your card by picture then great. If not you're in for trial and error.
My procedure was basically to download pretty much all the different driver variations and test which one gave me picture.
Both TT and MegaSTE ones are viable options, Raven should communicate with either.

You are supposed to put the three driver executables in the AUTO folder and this order is extremely important:
EMULATOR.PRG
MENU.PRG
STA_VDI.PRG

The .BIB files should be in the AUTO folder too.

Though if putting them in order is an issue, seeing as you cannot operate the desktop and use an AUTOSORT tool, you can put only EMULATOR.PRG (and BIB) in the AUTO folder and see if you can get the mono display courtesy of NOVA driver instead of EmuTOS.

And only after put in the other ones.. you're going to need the mono display from EMULATOR working anyway otherwise you're not going to be able to operate MENU.PRG :)


There's more too it as well, NOVA has some screensaver stuff that has never worked on any of my Atari (real or not) and basically just causes system lockup. Perhaps I was doing something wrong but using applications to force that stuff off has worked well for me. But let's see if you can get a picture with it first.
I never had that problem with the NVDI-VGA drivers but I don't think you want to set those up in the blind. Besides, NOVA is still being developed and supported so it feels like the better choice as long as your card is supported.

[danboid]

This is super exiting stuff watching oldskools board getting brought up!

I realise it's going to be notably cheaper to use real SVGA cards whilst they're still available but what happens when the supply drys up? Has anyone started looking into creating an FPGA et4k or mach32 yet?

It could be based upon one of many existing open source FPGA VGA projects such as:

http://wacco.mveas.com/ - Project VGA, which is PCI based but maybe it can be adjusted for ISA without too much pain?

https://github.com/asicguy/gplgpu

https://opencores.org/websvn/listing/verilog_vga

Are 060 CPUs still being manufactured? We'll probably need some FPGA 060s soon too.

[Oldskool]

Thanks for the help.
Tried two different monitors. These do show that something is going on however out of range.

IMG_1767.jpeg

IMG_1766.jpeg

The videocards I have are:

IMG_1769.jpeg

IMG_1768.jpeg

Both videocards act the same.
The last one should work with the T8 driver at leat thats what I was told by Frank.

Blind adding the nova driver does not change anything.
Output file from serial:

Driver + cf.txt

I don’t see the light blink on the cf adapter soi’m not sure it’s actually doing something. It’s a cf 4gb with a 512mb partition fat.

Edit:
Found another et4k.

Same result. Out of range.

IMG_1770.jpeg

Another edit:

All videocards work in a 486dx2. Just tried them to be sure.

[agranlund]

I realise it's going to be notably cheaper to use real SVGA cards whilst they're still available but what happens when the supply drys up? Has anyone started looking into creating an FPGA et4k or mach32 yet?

Yeah this is a bit of a problem..
It's a shame those ET4K's are so popular in the PC retro scene and the ISA version of Mach32 is even more expensive.
There is an opensource ET4K card and reference schematic for a full card freely available in the official datasheet, but loose chips no longer seem plentiful and cheap like they used to be.

I think Cirrus Logic support would have been great. There are a bunch of them and they come in models with or without hardware accelerated goodies.

Tridents were always cheap but I understand they may not be super fast? Plus, no driver :)
The cool thing about something like the TVGA9000 is that it's almost a complete card-on-a-chip. Connect up the DRAM and that's basically it.
Perfect for any kind of homemade-something and I assume the driver would be nicer since you don't have to deal with a whole bunch of different support chips like on et4k?

But probably as you say, FPGA is the way to go depending on what you are looking for in your retro computing hobby, and they could be something better than emulating and old et4k too. There is SuperVidel, but for something not 060 you'd probably need something else.


To me, Raven is somehow an attempt to re-live primarily my 486 days with old (and new) PC expansion cards, but mixed up in some kind of alternate-reality-what-if combination of my Atari days before it :)