Phil C's Raven build

[PhilC]

Doing a bit of a tidy up with stuff on the Raven today, so took the motherboard out of its case, fitted a couple of heatsinks on a few bits and pieces, like ATF1508, MC68150 etc etc.

So whilst I was up to that, I fitted one of the new 68150s I'd obtained and then refitted the 48mhz oscillator. Lets just say I'm a happy boy now as its running pretty reliably at 96mhz. The bit that was definitely stopping it before was the 68150, which I think was a 33mhz part remarked to 40mhz.

I'm leaving it running Gembench for an hour or so as a test. It zips through all the tests, wish it was this quick on my other Ataris :lol:

[PhilC]

So just for a bit of fun, here's the 96mhz gembench scores at 800x600x256 colours compared to a standard 8mhz STFM.

PXL_20250618_133742997.jpg

[WDB]

I would love to build one of these if I were younger, my 65 year old eyes suck and my hands are too shaky for soldering tiny SMT parts. Those Gembench scores look awesome for playing around with old Atari CAD programs.

[PhilC]

I would love to build one of these if I were younger, my 65 year old eyes suck and my hands are too shaky for soldering tiny SMT parts. Those Gembench scores look awesome for playing around with old Atari CAD programs.

I certainly know the feeling. After being ill last year things like eye sight and shaking hands has gotten worse.

There are a few smt parts that are difficult to solder but the rest is fairly easy, just time consuming.

[luciodra]

I would love to build one of these if I were younger, my 65 year old eyes suck and my hands are too shaky for soldering tiny SMT parts. Those Gembench scores look awesome for playing around with old Atari CAD programs.

I certainly know the feeling. After being ill last year things like eye sight and shaking hands has gotten worse.

There are a few smt parts that are difficult to solder but the rest is fairly easy, just time consuming.

Is the system always unstable with just the video card?

[PhilC]

@luciodra it's actually quite reliable now with the following
1 x strange W32i card with 2mb ram
1 x picogus running as a sound blaster
1 x multi I/o card same type as @agranlund has
1 x SMC 10mbit network card.

The last two don't work with current driver setup but the Raven boots fine with them in and I will start working on working out how to program them.

BTW, I have an ATF1508 10ns, not a 7ns but it works great. I put a heat sink on it just in case.

The two 22V10s are actually Gals, not ATFs, both running at 7ns, not that they need to run that fast.

CPU has a Pentium heat sink and fan on it.

As mentioned before, I've gone round putting heat sinks on stuff whether they need it or not, including the main chips on the graphics cards

Is yours failing?one was doing some odd stuff like crashing when I had a network card in, or had the card set to PnP, changing the 68150 fixed that.

I think the Simms need to be made from thicker PCBs for better reliability.

[luciodra]

Ok, I seem to have understood that currently, with the cards, the system is unstable. If you leave only the video card and the Picogus, removing the network card and the other card, will the system still crash?

[PhilC]

Ok, I seem to have understood that currently, with the cards, the system is unstable. If you leave only the video card and the Picogus, removing the network card and the other card, will the system still crash?

It's all working fine now after changing the 68150.

Before I fixed it, having the network card installed would cause a crash after a couple of minutes. Now everything is working well so far, maybe better at 96mhz than it did at 80mhz.

[luciodra]

I need to find a 100% working MC68150FN40... :roll:

[dml]

On the subject of finding chips that work as specified... I tested a box of random 68882s today at 32, 40, 50MHz.

The Freescale chips marked FN40 were the worst. One worked at 40MHz but not at 50. Another kinda worked at 40 but not on stress tests. Another two didn't even work at 40 - just tons of bombs every time. Bushing, de-oxing the pins did not help. Marked them with paint, put them aside.

Two Motorola FN40 chips worked at 40, one worked at 50.

First 'old' FN33 I took from a strip worked at 50 with no issues, multiple passes. Got bored at that point and moved onto something else!

Best of luck finding a good 68150 -_- I'm just hoping I got lucky with that....