Phil C's Raven build

[kodak80]

MIght be genuine. Cirrus never advertised the dates that they stopped manufacturing but likely late 1990's.

[PhilC]

I do have a GD5434 coming in the next couple of days but in the meantime I've started building up the first one of these

PXL_20250930_145455067.jpg (379.45 KiB) Viewed 844 times

My GD5429 and ES1869 chips arrived too, so I'll fix my soundcard and will then try swapping the 5422 that I have for a 5429 chip and see if it's as simple an upgrade as that.

[agranlund]

I do have a GD5434 coming in the next couple of days but in the meantime I've started building up the first one of these

Oooh nice! Exciting to find out if the Pine card works
The latest release zip that was uploaded just now should contain the required GD5434 fixes to the Cirrus driver.

[PhilC]

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Just the ram and a couple more bits that arrive tomorrow all being well.

[PhilC]

Still working on the Pine VGA card but it's not working just yet. Likely a bios issue as the soldering appears good.

In the meantime my Diamond CL-GD5434 arrived and is now fitted to the Raven.

There's some interesting speed results using Gembench when comparing it to my Overclocked GD5429, with the 5429 being slightly faster compared to the standard setup of the 5434. See below

Standard 5434

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93Mhz overclocked 5429

PXL_20250906_155143602.jpg (473.41 KiB) Viewed 694 times

The Diamond 5434 comes with 60ns ram as standard but I'll try putting the 28ns ram in it at some point but for now, I'll just test it as it is and get it set up for CL4.

[agranlund]

Still working on the Pine VGA card but it's not working just yet. Likely a bios issue as the soldering appears good.

I have a 32kb "SpeedStar 64 ISA version 2.02" bios on my GD5434, should I dump it for you or do you already have the same or later version?
(if you have a later version I wouldn't mind getting a copy )

[PhilC]

Still working on the Pine VGA card but it's not working just yet. Likely a bios issue as the soldering appears good.

I have a 32kb "SpeedStar 64 ISA version 2.02" bios on my GD5434, should I dump it for you or do you already have the same or later version?
(if you have a later version I wouldn't mind getting a copy )

I've got the same version. I do have a zip file with a whole load of bioses, I'll dig through that and let you know if there's anything newer in it.

[PhilC]

So of course the Raven is being unreliable with its new graphics card, the bay one, not the one I;m building (that still doesn't work in the Raven).

So I've done some maintenance on the new card, I've socketed the two logic chips (a 74F04 and a 74LS245) and replaced them with new and have the Raven on test once more. I didn't have a 74F04 so have changed it with a new 74LS04 and it's currently running Doom in attract mode.

Fingers crossed it now works, or the GD5429 will be going in it for CL4.

And right on queue as I type this, its crashed

Time fit the 5429.

[PhilC]

Well, back to the overclocked 5429 and the Yamaha OPL3 audio card and things are looking good so far.

Even better, I've just managed to get the MU500 also to play nicely with the Raven,so I now have cool Yamaha midi music as well.

[PhilC]

So I've built another of the Pine VGA boards and this one does boot to TOS on the Raven but also locks up. I do tend to get different results with different bios versions, so just trying a few of those now to see if it fixes things.