Building a TT/MSTe ET4K card

[alexh]

Has to be an ISA card to use a Nova adapter and existing drivers.

[frank.lukas]

even cooler idea would be to do it for Mach 64 cards: the ISA versions are hard to find and very expensive, but the PCI versions are plentiful and cheap on eBay and elsewhere.

MACH64 ISA Chips and PCI MACH64 Chips are not equal I think and there are no Datasheets out there ...

[mikro]

MACH64 ISA Chips and PCI MACH64 Chips are not equal I think

Not true at all. In an unfortunate incident I destroyed the main chip on my Mach64 (don't ask) so I purchased a cheap PCI one and @jookie resoldered the chip back to the ISA one. Worked on the first try.

[b_squared]

Not true at all. In an unfortunate incident I destroyed the main chip on my Mach64 (don't ask) so I purchased a cheap PCI one and @jookie resoldered the chip back to the ISA one. Worked on the first try.

I did a little bit of digging for images on the internet and found this nice resource with pictures of both ISA and PCI cards. The ATI Graphics Xpression ISA uses the 210888GX00 and so do many other PCI cards. Although we don't have the schematic, it should be possible to recreate one from tracing an ISA card's PCB.

[agranlund]

Some of the later versions of the Mach64 family did drop ISA support.
The Rage 3D accelerator is technically a Mach64GT although I think most people just call them Rage rather than Mach.
The CT and VT where probably PCI only too?

But the ’standard’ Mach64CX and Mach64GX came on ISA, VLB and PCI cards and I’d be surprised if they had different versions of these for different busses?

[DoG]

Some of the later versions of the Mach64 family did drop ISA support.
The Rage 3D accelerator is technically a Mach64GT although I think most people just call them Rage rather than Mach.
The CT and VT where probably PCI only too?

But the ’standard’ Mach64CX and Mach64GX came on ISA, VLB and PCI cards and I’d be surprised if they had different versions of these for different busses?

Yes, exactly. There is a list on Vogons wiki where you can see port, bus and so on different version of the card. Here is another list of the different chip used in which card.

[Steve]

Finished building :) I just need to program the GAL.

GAL files: https://www.newtosworld.de/viewtopic.ph ... 1dabf0414b

PXL_20250209_110205514.jpg

[Steve]

I just wanted to report, this project was a fail.

At first it was not working at all, I would just get bus errors when loading the driver. I then spoke to Artic-wroc who agreed to look at the card. I posted the card over to him (internationally) in the mean time, Frank Lucas found a fix for this old ET4000 IC (mine was the older variant) which required lifting 3 pins and soldering them to ground. Artic linked me to this fix and proceeded to just post the card back to me almost immediately - I asked him "Since I've sent it to you, could you not lift these pins and test it for me before sending it back?" He ignored me and just sent it back.

I get it back and after de-cyphering what pins to lift (I say de-cyphering because Frank only gave address lines, not pins.) So I read the data-sheet and (hopefully) lifted the correct pins and soldered them to ground. (I say hopefully because the datasheet was quite confusing, I think it only specifically listed two of the pins that I needed and the other had to be an educated guess) Nobody on the forum (Atari forum) would/could confirm if I'd chosen the right pins (41, 42, 43 and GND to 45)
(The Atari forum thread is here: https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.p ... 98#p478598 )

Anyway - I went through testing various different PAL files, I found the Super_4K seemed to work and produce a mono image upon loading the driver. When choosing colour (any colour, any res) it would be a garbled display. Idek tells me that since the card displays mono OK then it isn't a vRAM issue, since et4000 uses the same memory for mono and colour.
(I did try different drivers, mainly V3 and V8 based on Franks recommendation)

I very frustrating experience overall. I haven't given up but I'm planning on swapping this old et4000 IC with the later varient when I get my hands on one.

It can't be too far off working... here's the screenshots:

Compress_20250520_182533_3734.jpg

Compress_20250520_182533_3951.jpg

[frank.lukas]

You must be the right Clockgenerator chip ...! Have you a right one?

ICS2494_Typ.jpg

[frank.lukas]

https://forum.atari-home.de/index.php/t ... #msg269774