Raven 060 (sety's build)

[sety]

There is a NOVA driver for the TSENG ET4000/W32i but it support only 1MB Video Ram.

Oh thanks!

So I could still run 8 bit 1024x678? I'd be okay with that for now. It would just be fun to build the card :)

[agranlund]

Would the ET4000 remake by Alexandru Groza work in the Raven? I'm having a hard time finding an ISA ET4000 locally and it might make more sense for me spend the money building a new one rather than having to stomach dropping $300AUD on a 30 year old card from eBay.

I've been temped in building his Excelgraph card myself. If you do, let me know how it works out :)
This thread, as well as his website, seem to indicate it being quite picky about the ram?
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=80292


I've got a 1MB W32i card in my machine currently and that gives me a resolution of 1280x720x8bpp which I think works really well.

Though I wouldn't mind having a go with 2MB card..
The Nova driver for this chip won't support resolutions >1MB but I'm only interested in more for the purpose of experimenting with interleave mode -- which increases performance at the expense of halving the usable vram.

[frank.lukas]

... a 2MB Video Ram card need a 110Mhz or better 125/135Mhz RamDAC

[agranlund]

... a 2MB Video Ram card need a 110Mhz or better 125/135Mhz RamDAC

A 2MB resolution does but that’s not what I was after.

The W32i, if the card is built to support it, can enable increased gpu<->vram bandwidth but for that you sacrifice half the memory.
Ie; a 2MB card will only be able to work as a 1MB card, it does not benefit resolution at all but the card becomes a lot faster especially in acceleration work.

[Oldskool]

Not sure if this data is fully applicable for the ISA bus but for vlb some benchmarks between interleaved and non can be found here:

https://dependency-injection.com/vlb-vga-group-test/

So about 14% faster in 256 colour and up to 40% with true colour in vlb by interleaving.

[agranlund]

Not sure if this data is fully applicable for the ISA bus but for vlb some benchmarks between interleaved and non can be found here:
https://dependency-injection.com/vlb-vga-group-test/
So about 14% faster in 256 colour and up to 40% with true colour in vlb by interleaving.

Yeah it's probably not a huge boost in real-world general desktop use, like the above bench showed.
But would be interesting to play around with in some kind of bandwidth bottlenecked situations such as where you're doing large and frequent fills or vram<->vram blits.

This performance in Starcraft is quite impressive for an ISA card:



There's a Hercules card with all matching 45ns memories sitting on ebay for a while but the price is bonkers. I offered 200 for it but the seller didn't take. In hindsight, probably a good thing since even that's a bit much for what I'd want it for.. I'm really happy using the 1MB non-interleave w32i that I already have :)

[Oldskool]

That’s indeed very impressive.
The Windows driver is probably also more optimised for the w32 card.

[sety]

Hey all. I've managed so source most of what I need from Mouser, but there are a couple of items I can't buy. I got this rather cryptic email from Mouser after my order was placed on hold...

Hello Stuart,
Thank you for your inquiry.
The supplier have a restrictions to ship the below parts,

Line: 19, part: 700-MAZ16054AZTT
Line:20, part: 700-DS1818-10T&R
Line:24, part: 700-DS1307ZT&R

We are unable to ship these parts to Australia form USA.

Please let us know, how you would like to proceed.

I asked for clarification but they couldn't give me a straight answer. It has left me scratching my head. Is there really a restriction on certain parts being exported to Australia, or would this just be a poor translation of "Out of stock"?

In any case does anyone know where I can get these parts? It is the two supervisory circuits and the RTC.

Thanks so much! I'm looking forward to starting this build!

[kodak80]

Hey all. I've managed so source most of what I need from Mouser, but there are a couple of items I can't buy. I got this rather cryptic email from Mouser after my order was placed on hold...

Hello Stuart,
Thank you for your inquiry.
The supplier have a restrictions to ship the below parts,

Line: 19, part: 700-MAZ16054AZTT
Line:20, part: 700-DS1818-10T&R
Line:24, part: 700-DS1307ZT&R

We are unable to ship these parts to Australia form USA.

Please let us know, how you would like to proceed.

I asked for clarification but they couldn't give me a straight answer. It has left me scratching my head. Is there really a restriction on certain parts being exported to Australia, or would this just be a poor translation of "Out of stock"?

In any case does anyone know where I can get these parts? It is the two supervisory circuits and the RTC.

Thanks so much! I'm looking forward to starting this build!

These are the components I had delivered from Mouser AU:

https://au.mouser.com/ProductDetail/700-MAX16054AZTT
https://au.mouser.com/ProductDetail/700-DS1818-10TR
https://au.mouser.com/ProductDetail/700-DS1307ZTR

The above shows that the DS1307ZTR is out of stock. The other 2 have stock.

Did you order through Mouser Australia or USA?

[sety]

These are the components I had delivered from Mouser AU:

https://au.mouser.com/ProductDetail/700-MAX16054AZTT
https://au.mouser.com/ProductDetail/700-DS1818-10TR
https://au.mouser.com/ProductDetail/700-DS1307ZTR

The above shows that the DS1307ZTR is out of stock. The other 2 have stock.

Did you order through Mouser Australia or USA?

I used Mouser Australia.

I'm seeing the same thing. Everything except the RTC is in stock. I got lazy and used their rather impressive BOM tools, but their part numbers are identical, so I don't know what went wrong. Imma try ordering the two supervisory circuits again and see how I go.