Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[peters]

One thing that Ataris lacked was a big expansion port that would allow later additions. Everything has to be bodged onto the cpu and other chips.

My electronics skill is limited to fitting ram and rom boards in my STfm.

Would it be worth adding a bus expansion slot ? Probably a lot of work.

[agranlund]

Managed to get the bios midi-out working from interrupts under MiNT so I got rid of clone-specific codepaths and let them all go through that. It's now each clone machines responsibility to implement midi-out, as it should be (real Ataris still go through the ACIA directly).

https://github.com/agranlund/atarisound ... jamplugins

There's also some alternative icons for the Jam UI:

jam2.jpg

[agranlund]

Hi, Just saw that Picogus is available from this guy if you need one for your experiments:

https://jcm-1.com/product/picogus-v2/

Thanks for the heads up!
I ordered one immediately as I got the waiting list email :)

[agranlund]

Received this guy in the post:

eth.jpg

To make my life a bit easier I added memory mapping from Hades ISA i/o range --> Ravens physical ISA bus.
Why re-invent drivers if you don't have to :)


Annoyingly, it's almost but not quite working..

The driver appears to initialise the card correctly, and the Mac address gotten from rom and placed in ET2000 registers looks valid (at least according to some random online mac-address validator :) )

The card is receiving packets and the data inside those looks correct as far as I can tell.
Talking to it from another computer gives it ARP packets, and the driver (as well as uip-tools) forms and sends the response - but that's where the fun ends. I log a few more incoming ARPs before the sender gives up.

Somehow I think the ARP response is either not reaching the destination or the sent packet data is invalid.
Likewise, trying a ping from the Raven to something else on the network gives me nothing.
Since I am able to read/write the cards registers I am assuming, for now, that Cpu<->Isa<->Card communication is working correctly.

I think next step will be to set up a packet sniffer on the Mac to see if anything at all comes out of that card.
Might be a good idea to get a crossover cable and hook it up directly to my computer to avoid any potential variables caused by the router too?
But that'll be a project for some other day..

[agranlund]

But that'll be a project for some other day..

And that day was today :)

ethernet.jpg

This is using the stock netusbee/ethernec drivers for Hades.
Since the drivers are open source it would probably make sense for me to make a custom one for my machine, to take advantage of ISA interrupts.
The original one is polling from TimerC.

And maybe also put the card in 16bit mode instead of 8bit to halve the amount of cpu<->card transfers.

[agranlund]

Test fitting. I like it!
And now it'll come out again for easier access when working on it :)
That huge sticker on the Corsair PSU will have to go, perhaps replaced with something more subtly Raven branded or just left black.

case2.jpg

case1.jpg

case3.jpg

[Cyprian]

beauty

[Steve]

No joke, this is the most beautiful thing lol. You're a very talented man agranlund!

[chronicthehedgehog]

:dizzy:

[nokturnal]

@agranlund Really nice case, where did you get this motorola badge?