redpixel - Raven 060 build thread

[redpixel]

This is a bit overdue, but better late than never I guess...

When I first saw Anders' post about Raven I thought it was immensely cool and VERY impressive, and I felt a bit tempted to try to build one myself. However it seemed like quite a daunting task so I hesitated a bit. Seeing all the successful builds as of late increased my desire to build one, but I felt that it would be a bit silly to build one completely by myself since there are usually minimum orders for PCB's etc. Then a few months ago I saw in the forum that @LarryL and a group of friends were embarking on an adventure to build 4 Ravens, so I cheekily asked if they'd have any PCB's left over and if it would be possible for me to join their group. @LarryL very kindly agreed and shared one of his ordered PCB's with me. Big thanks to you! Otherwise I wouldn't be building this And of course an even bigger thanks to @agranlund for coming up with this amazing project and then sharing everything freely with everyone.

So beginning of November I received a box of PCB's from Germany, luckily with most of the SMD components (all except for a few larger IC's) already mounted onto the main board. Since then I've been ordering all of the needed components and (lazily) soldering everything together. Luckily (?) my old PC also broke down, so the plan is to re-house the Raven in the case of the old PC, and re-use the power supply. Yesterday I had finally managed to finish all the soldering (my advice to anyone planning to build a Raven is to make sure you have good soldering equipment - a fine soldering tip and a decent microscope are 100% necessary I'd say) and to program all necessary IC's, so it was time for the first boot-up attempt. I did power up the board without any IC's plugged in first and voltage levels seemed good, so I proceeded to stuff all sockets with chips (including an untested by me 68060R6 that I recently bought from Amibay) and optimistically plugged in a monitor and expected everything to just work... The monitor however stayed blank I tested with some different oscillators etc. but still nothing. I tried to hook it up with a null modem cable to my STE. At first I didn't see any signs of life, but re-reading the manual I realised that I had plugged the null modem cable into the joystick port instead of COM1. When I moved the cable to COM1, I did see a whole lot of output, but since the UART was running at the obscenely high speed of 115200 bps the STE wasn't able to keep up This morning I bought a DB9F-DB9F null modem cable (previously I only had the DB25F-DB9F from Exxos' store) and hooked the Raven up to my Falcon instead.

Even the Falcon was not able to keep up 100% when running at 115200 bps, at least not with Connect95 and no NVDI and a lot of serial output, but it did allow me to see that the Raven was booting surprisingly far, all the way to starting EmuTOS. Two things didn't look so good: IKBD was not recognised and it reported not finding any VGA bios, despite the fact that I had a 2 MB Mach32 in ISA slot 1. I tried to replace the Eiffel with the CKBD and that looked better, so I guess it's possible I might have killed the Eiffel PIC by plugging the null modem cable attached to the ST into the joystick port (maximum rating on I/O pins seems to be VDD=5 V + 0.3 V and I guess the ST's RS-232 voltages are quite a bit higher than that). I've ordered another PIC to try to see if that improves things. As for the VGA bios issue, I also had a 1 MB Mach64 to test with. With the Mach64 it looks a bit better, and it reports finding a VGA bios, however it looks a bit strange (see pic), as it only reports seeing 8-bit video memory and doesn't print out any sort of "branding" or size of VGA memory etc. as I've seen in other screenshots. I can see that the monitor syncs after VGA bios is loaded, however the screen stays black. So my first question to you Raven aficionados is: Is the Mach64 "supposed" to work? I've bought both the Mach32 and Mach64 as untested boards from eBay and haven't had a chance to test them until now, so it's fully possible that both of them are duds...

20251213_203053601.JPG (355.4 KiB) Viewed 1768 times

I guess next step will be to try to buy another graphics card to see if that works better. So that would be my next question: Which graphics card is the most recommended? I guess I'd want best bang for the buck, not necessarily the absolutely highest performance... But of course nice to be able to run at decent speeds and decent bpp.

[Atarian Computing]

This is a bit overdue, but better late than never I guess...

When I first saw Anders' post about Raven I thought it was immensely cool and VERY impressive, and I felt a bit tempted to try to build one myself. However it seemed like quite a daunting task so I hesitated a bit. Seeing all the successful builds as of late increased my desire to build one, but I felt that it would be a bit silly to build one completely by myself since there are usually minimum orders for PCB's etc. Then a few months ago I saw in the forum that @LarryL and a group of friends were embarking on an adventure to build 4 Ravens, so I cheekily asked if they'd have any PCB's left over and if it would be possible for me to join their group. @LarryL very kindly agreed and shared one of his ordered PCB's with me. Big thanks to you! Otherwise I wouldn't be building this And of course an even bigger thanks to @agranlund for coming up with this amazing project and then sharing everything freely with everyone.

So beginning of November I received a box of PCB's from Germany, luckily with most of the SMD components (all except for a few larger IC's) already mounted onto the main board. Since then I've been ordering all of the needed components and (lazily) soldering everything together. Luckily (?) my old PC also broke down, so the plan is to re-house the Raven in the case of the old PC, and re-use the power supply. Yesterday I had finally managed to finish all the soldering (my advice to anyone planning to build a Raven is to make sure you have good soldering equipment - a fine soldering tip and a decent microscope are 100% necessary I'd say) and to program all necessary IC's, so it was time for the first boot-up attempt. I did power up the board without any IC's plugged in first and voltage levels seemed good, so I proceeded to stuff all sockets with chips (including an untested by me 68060R6 that I recently bought from Amibay) and optimistically plugged in a monitor and expected everything to just work... The monitor however stayed blank I tested with some different oscillators etc. but still nothing. I tried to hook it up with a null modem cable to my STE. At first I didn't see any signs of life, but re-reading the manual I realised that I had plugged the null modem cable into the joystick port instead of COM1. When I moved the cable to COM1, I did see a whole lot of output, but since the UART was running at the obscenely high speed of 115200 bps the STE wasn't able to keep up This morning I bought a DB9F-DB9F null modem cable (previously I only had the DB25F-DB9F from Exxos' store) and hooked the Raven up to my Falcon instead.

Even the Falcon was not able to keep up 100% when running at 115200 bps, at least not with Connect95 and no NVDI and a lot of serial output, but it did allow me to see that the Raven was booting surprisingly far, all the way to starting EmuTOS. Two things didn't look so good: IKBD was not recognised and it reported not finding any VGA bios, despite the fact that I had a 2 MB Mach32 in ISA slot 1. I tried to replace the Eiffel with the CKBD and that looked better, so I guess it's possible I might have killed the Eiffel PIC by plugging the null modem cable attached to the ST into the joystick port (maximum rating on I/O pins seems to be VDD=5 V + 0.3 V and I guess the ST's RS-232 voltages are quite a bit higher than that). I've ordered another PIC to try to see if that improves things. As for the VGA bios issue, I also had a 1 MB Mach64 to test with. With the Mach64 it looks a bit better, and it reports finding a VGA bios, however it looks a bit strange (see pic), as it only reports seeing 8-bit video memory and doesn't print out any sort of "branding" or size of VGA memory etc. as I've seen in other screenshots. I can see that the monitor syncs after VGA bios is loaded, however the screen stays black. So my first question to you Raven aficionados is: Is the Mach64 "supposed" to work? I've bought both the Mach32 and Mach64 as untested boards from eBay and haven't had a chance to test them until now, so it's fully possible that both of them are duds...

20251213_203053601.JPG

I guess next step will be to try to buy another graphics card to see if that works better. So that would be my next question: Which graphics card is the most recommended? I guess I'd want best bang for the buck, not necessarily the absolutely highest performance... But of course nice to be able to run at decent speeds and decent bpp.

You are almost there.

What you see with the Mach64 is not going to get any better. It will never output anything until the drivers are sorted. This is what my Mach64 shows in the monitor as well. So at this time the Mach64 is not supported.

Since your Mach64 is displaying the VGA bios in the monitor and I assume the Mach32 isn't, it seems to point towards the Mach32 not working. So you might just be unlucky with the VGA cards.

If you want great compatibility and performance, go for the ET4000 w32i. I would stay clear of w32. Plain ET4000AX has no acceleration and is dog slow.

The best potential for the future in my opinion is the Cirrus Logic GD5434, which is what I have but like mine, there might be weird issues that might need testing various bioses/drivers. Currently only the modes in the bios are supported so no 16:9 resolutions or other custom ones like the ET4000.

[LarryL]

Very cool - great to see progress

To be on the safe side with VGA you could always start with a plain ET4000AX - can be purchased for around EUR 100,- on eBay
Compatibility is great, bit acceleration is poor…

Regarding the PIC - did you use the A version of the PIC? I remember, that the version without the A will not work in Eiffel…

These 8bit vgamem issue I also experienced, when poking around with different OSCs and 68150 - I have the feeling, that this might be a sign of a flaky 68150

Will keep my fingers crossed for you build

[agranlund]

Hey @redpixel , really cool to hear about your build.

but since the UART was running at the obscenely high speed of 115200 bps the STE wasn't able to keep up

I kept the default to 115200 as some kind of compromise in compatibility and speed, but perhaps the default would be better as 19200 or even 9600 once there is an option in place for changing the default baudrate without recompiling the rom.
I'm always building my own rom with closer to 1Mbps as default because I end up flashing quite often so I would also preffer this as an option to set in the monitor rather than at compile time

Is the Mach64 "supposed" to work?

At the moment, it's not really.
Those official Nova drivers use slightly different VME addresses for ET4k, Mach32 and Mach64 so in order to support these drivers I need to map those to ISA address space specifically for each. I see Mach64 has gone unloved in that regard with only a "todo" note about it.

as it only reports seeing 8-bit video memory

Yeah that could be a bit concerning.
Perhaps I wouldn't read to much into it with the Mach64 considering the unsupported nature of the card right now, but for other cards I would be concerned.

Actual 8bit cards, and even some old-and-cheap 16bit vga cards (*) will only do 8bit vram access and there the message would be expected. But for anything decent I would take that as a sign something is not quite right.

(*) it's possible those really-old 16bit cards actually do 16bit in old 286/386's but can't keep up with the speed Raven does 16bit isa-ram access -- and thus is only ok with the slower 8bit cycles.


I have an old 16bit Trident card that only works with 8bit vram access. Fair enough, they always had a reputation of being cheapest and slowest on the block anyway
Used to have one in a 386 back then so there was absolutely a bit of nostalgia and enjoyment seeing Raven boot up with one.

Which graphics card is the most recommended? I guess I'd want best bang for the buck, not necessarily the absolutely highest performance... But of course nice to be able to run at decent speeds and decent bpp.

I'm not sure there's a good objective answer to this but I'll give my subjective view

When disregarding price, because I'm not sure how much they go for these days, then perhaps ET4000/W32i is the most balanced choice at the moment?

If you don't mind home-made and not as mature drivers then any of the GD5426+ or the WD90C31 cards will be fast and the hardware blitter is supported.
It's worth noting that while these drivers has potential for interesting future developments, they are behind in terms of features right now.

GD5434 is the fastest of the bunch but can be rare and expensive to find as ISA card.
GD5429 or GD5426 are probably more sensible choices

WD90C31 was the cheapest of the bunch when I got mine and is roughly on par with GD5426 in terms of performance.
So possibly that card is most bang for the buck depending on prices of the other cards?

Code: Select all

Mach32:
+ mature driver
+ fast, hardware accelerated
+ custom resolutions (eg; 1280x720)
+ 16bpp capable
- does not support 320x200x8bpp

ET4000/w32i:
+ mature driver
+ fast, hardware accelerated
+ custom resolutions (eg: 1280x720)
+ 16bpp capable

ET4000AX:
+ mature driver
+ support custom resolutions
  (not all cards will support 1280 width)
+ support 16bpp (not all cards)
- slow, not hardware accelerated


With unofficial drivers:

GD5434, GD5429, GD5428, GD5426, WD90C31:
+ fast, hardware accelerated
+ opensource driver
- immature driver
- only 2 / 16 / 256 color modes
- only standard 4:3 aspect Super-VGA modes
Last two points are limitiation of the current driver rather than the hardware.
  
Any random old vga card:
+ opensource driver
- immature driver
- slow, not hardware accelerated
- only standard 4:3 aspect VGA modes
  (16 colors: max 640x480)
  (256 colors: max 320x200)
In this category, some cards will be slower than others.
Perhaps only interesting if you already have an old card laying around, or if you get one for really cheap.

[redpixel]

And on the seventh day, Granlund said: "Let there be light", and there was light!

20251214_172119595.JPG (349.92 KiB) Viewed 1682 times

Woohoo I thought maybe something was wrong with the BIOS EPROM's on the Mach32, so I took them out and read them back using the T48 programmer. Everything looked alright, sensible data. Then while googling I also found a document that showed different settings of the DIP switches on the side of the board for different VGA bios addresses (https://theretroweb.com/expansioncard/d ... /50040.pdf). I tried all of them and nothing changed. Then I tried to set all DIP switches to OFF (up position) and it worked!

Thanks for all the helpful replies. I guess I can hold off on the graphics card shopping for a little while I don't have anything connected on IDE yet, unfortunately the IDE-CF adapter which I ordered from Amazon turned out to be complete crap (awful soldering quality) and didn't work in the Falcon. So I decided to order a slightly more expensive version (https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/35baycf2ide), which hopefully should work and also be possible to mount in a 3.5" slot in the chassis but it hasn't been delivered yet.

I kept the default to 115200 as some kind of compromise in compatibility and speed, but perhaps the default would be better as 19200 or even 9600 once there is an option in place for changing the default baudrate without recompiling the rom.
I'm always building my own rom with closer to 1Mbps as default because I end up flashing quite often so I would also preffer this as an option to set in the monitor rather than at compile time

Yes, I completely understand. I was just kidding of course I guess 99% of people hook the serial port up to something modern and then 115200 bps is probably on the slow side of things. I just thought it would be fun to try to connect it to the STE since I already had that cable

I saw that you made some changes related to Mach64, thanks a lot for that. I will try them immediately and see if it changes anything. However I guess if it doesn't work I won't really be able to say if it's due to my card being crap or if it's due to your guesses being incorrect

Regarding the PIC - did you use the A version of the PIC? I remember, that the version without the A will not work in Eiffel…

These 8bit vgamem issue I also experienced, when poking around with different OSCs and 68150 - I have the feeling, that this might be a sign of a flaky 68150

Yep, I did use the A version (PIC16F876A). Hope my 68150 is not flaky, but I do have one more to try with. Currently I run a 40 MHz version which I got from a German seller on eBay. Also have a 33 MHz version which I ordered from China, haven't tried that one yet.

What you see with the Mach64 is not going to get any better. It will never output anything until the drivers are sorted. This is what my Mach64 shows in the monitor as well. So at this time the Mach64 is not supported.

Thanks a lot for the confirmation!

[redpixel]

After having temporarily stolen the working IDE-CF adapter from the Falcon and copied over all the Raven files to the CF card, I was able to enter the BIOS and set up the MACH32 Nova driver So I now have a glorious 1024x768x16 desktop!! Fantastic

At the risk of sounding like a dummy, how does it work with IDE cables? With the shrouded mobo connector (87831-4420) my IDE cable is not able to fit. I had to massacre the male connector on the byteswap adapter a bit (removing the walls on the edges) using a knife in order to be able to connect it. How have you guys solved it?

Edit: I just found an older post (viewtopic.php?p=121715#p121715) with some discussion about this. I guess using that type of adapter it should be fine, but perhaps another mobo connector would be more appropriate for IDC cables? I think Samtec STMM-122-01-G-D-20 looks like a good choice, and it has pin 20 blocked to be completely compliant Unfortunately it's not stocked at Mouser or Digikey... I might try to order one the next time I'm ordering parts but for now the modified byteswap adapter should do the job.

[agranlund]

Awesome! So computer number 18 then
Such a great picture, hooked up and talking to big brother Falcon!

Ah, the mysterious dipswitches!
Now that you mention it I had some moment of 'fun' with those too when I got my Mach32.

[redpixel]

Awesome! So computer number 18 then
Such a great picture, hooked up and talking to big brother Falcon!

Yay!! So happy to have an official serial number. I will mark it on the board with pride So is Raven the little brother on steroids?

[agranlund]

Yay!! So happy to have an official serial number. I will mark it on the board with pride So is Raven the little brother on steroids?

That bulky little brother with inferiority complex
Making up for lacking those fancy Falcon chips.