Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[medmed]

Hi,

I think just adding a dsp563xx chip's pins on the motherboard as an optional upgrade will be a lot more easier than adding vme.

[PhilC]

Just done the latest update and Tyrian is all working again. Been messing around with the CL-GD5429 and its now positively zipping along, with gem bench speeds faster than previously, especially with MCLK at 85mhz with the 83mhz ram :)

[mrbombermillzy]

Just done the latest update and Tyrian is all working again. Been messing around with the CL-GD5429 and its now positively zipping along, with gem bench speeds faster than previously, especially with MCLK at 85mhz with the 83mhz ram :)

Im fairly surprised you guys havent started clocking that ISA bus yet. Apparently 12Mhz is fairly attainable, with maybe more if the relevant GPU chip is a VLB or PCI variant. :)

[agranlund]

@luciodra , I missed your post with the log. Looks like it identifies the correct card model but I see it does the vdi injection which it's not meant to do for unaccelerated cards (as there is no point). This leads me to believe there is/was a bug in that general area that I'll have to check. Thank for giving it a go with that GD5420!

[luciodra]

@luciodra , I missed your post with the log. Looks like it identifies the correct card model but I see it does the vdi injection which it's not meant to do for unaccelerated cards (as there is no point). This leads me to believe there is/was a bug in that general area that I'll have to check. Thank for giving it a go with that GD5420!

So do I have any hope of being able to use it on Raven? 8-)

[Atarian Computing]

So I'm finally trying to get into building my Raven. I just had a couple of questions to @agranlund:

About the Mach64, which I've had on my TT forever. Earlier, it was assumed to work, but apparently, it doesn't? Should I look for something else besides my ET4000AX? If given a choice between W32i and GD5429, which would you recommend? I don't think I plan to use more than 256 colors ever at any resolution.

MagiC compatibility. Was it so that it boots, but there's no keyboard/mouse functionality? I love MiNT, but I equally love MagiC. Is this something that could get fixed at some point?

Thanks for all your fantastic work. Remember, should you ever have time, the quite sizeable 68K Macintosh community would worship you if you brought a 060 to work on a 040 machine. Just the soft-overclocking of LC575/LC475 (https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads ... ock.47946/) to speeds past 50MHz has created a buzz. I can provide a machine for you if you would seriously get on it someday.

[agranlund]

@Atarian Computing Regarding the Mach64, the Nova driver is included and I thought I had wired up the necessary memory-map code to satisfy the official driver but looking at Github now I see that I hadn't. There's not terribly much missing but it's probably better that someone who owns such a card implements the missing bits.
So the short answer would be nope, Mach64 is not supported right now.


Between the cards I think my safe recommendation has to be ET4000/W32i.
The card is really quite fast and the closed source Nova driver is old and mature.


The GD54xx driver on the other hand is open source and new/immature, for better or worse.
You do get hardware acceleration on '26/'28/'29/'34 cards so the desktop is nice and snappy.
You may or may not also get new and exciting bugs due to shoddy code ;)

Hardware acceleration on WD90C31 cards is also supported with the same open source driver so that's an option too.
That card appears to have similar accelerated performance as GD5426. I do prefer my Cirrus over it though.

MagiC compatibility. Was it so that it boots, but there's no keyboard/mouse functionality?

I'm really quite fond of MagiC too.
I'm sure there must be issues I haven't seen or noticed but it boots and there is keyboard + mouse. Nova VDI works too so there are proper resolutions. Last time I tried at least, which I'll admit was a while ago now -- I haven't bothered reinstalling my card properly as I've been content with only EmuTOS and some small apps for testing graphics-card stuff.

You do need a byteswap adapter between the IDE port and the CF card though. And the card partitioned in regular Atari ways as required for MagiC (I used HD-Driver and made a bog standard Atari TOS partition as my boot partition).

[Atarian Computing]

Thanks for the info.

I think what I will do in terms of video cards is look and see. My current ET4000AX should work, and if I get the Mach64 to work, that should be a pretty end-game card. If that doesn't work, I'll look into spending money on a W32i.

Glad to hear MagiC is actually usable. I have no probs with byteswap as it's very familiar from the TF536.

I'm pretty committed now with all the parts ordered so far that I have created my build thread here: viewtopic.php?t=7962

[Atarian Computing]

Is my logic sound?

I want to run a resolution of 1280x720 in 8-bit (256 colors). 1MB of VRAM should be enough, right? To display that optimally on a relatively modern display, I was thinking of a QHD (2560x1440) display, which quadruples the resolution or doubles the resolution of each axis. As long as the monitor has VGA, it should scale quite nicely, right?

[agranlund]

Is my logic sound?

I want to run a resolution of 1280x720 in 8-bit (256 colors). 1MB of VRAM should be enough, right? To display that optimally on a relatively modern display, I was thinking of a QHD (2560x1440) display, which quadruples the resolution or doubles the resolution of each axis. As long as the monitor has VGA, it should scale quite nicely, right?

Yep, that resolution fits inside 1MB vram.
I'm quite happy with how sharp 720p from the ET4000/W32i is being displayed on my 1080p monitor but I think you're right that a 1440p monitor would be even better to get that 2x scale instead of 1.5x

ET4000AX cards come in several different configurations and you'll need a hardware variation that fits the T8 or possibly T3 category for the pixel clock required by that resolution. I'm not entirely sure what models are what but there is some info here:
https://silicon-heaven.org/atari/nova/TT030/ET4000/


The open source driver is at the moment limited to the usual SVGA resolutions which pre-dates the widescreen stuff. Ie; 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 etc. For sure something to look at later on, at least for getting a custom resolution of 1280x720 working.