Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[agranlund]

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

It's a front nameplate on some Motorola radios :)
Spare part number: 33012026001 or 33012037001

[agranlund]

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

Thanks Steve, I'm really happy with how it is turning out so far!
It really needs a custom i/o shield too but that has to wait until the next board revision - those connectors are going to move a bit.

[Oldskool]

The “look” is really NeXT level :D

[mikro]

Incredible. Imagine - a couple of decades ago you had to have tens of thousands dollars/euros to even think of something like that. Now all it takes is one talented fellow and voila, we have not *an* Atari clone produced but *the* Atari clone, IMHO the best one ever created.

Would be fun to show this to guys behind the Milan II project, to demonstrate how much the technology has progressed so this can be purely an one man project.

[peters]

It's astonishing that one man can do this. I struggle to get simple arduino stuff working.

It would make an amazing laptop.

[agranlund]

Incredible. Imagine - a couple of decades ago you had to have tens of thousands dollars/euros to even think of something like that. Now all it takes is one talented fellow and voila, we have not *an* Atari clone produced but *the* Atari clone, IMHO the best one ever created.

I agree, it is amazing how accessible and affordable it has become to tinker with hardware. Good times indeed!

[agranlund]

ISA bios and the beginnings of plug-and-pray(tm)
Next up is autoconf based on available resources, with the ability to supply manual overrides in the isa_bios config file (similar to "device.hints" on FreeBSD)

One GUS PnP (replica) and my Ethernet card jumpered for PnP mode:

isa0.jpg

I'm obviously doing this with my computer in mind but it doesn't hurt to think generic. It should be easy to get going on those other ISA enabled Ataris with little (and in some cases no) specific code additions.
It's all very very similar to pci_bios and I'm still struggling to decide if maybe it should just have been a pci_bios implementation that is either extended to hold isa devices, or exposes them as "fake" pci devices. But for now, this is what I'm going with.. :)

[Oldskool]

:o GUS PNP clone with PNP bios :D
On the PC this card it’s a b… to get going….

16 mb of sound power. Now I’m really excited to for the next updates….
What are you planning next 🤔

[agranlund]

:o GUS PNP clone with PNP bios :D
On the PC this card it’s a b… to get going….

16 mb of sound power. Now I’m really excited to for the next updates….
What are you planning next 🤔

Atari has the advantage that none of the ISA resources are in used by PC cra.. stuff :)
It feels like it's getting closer and closer until I can finally start doing a GUS mod-player plugin for Jam. Can't wait!

Maybe not super exciting for anyone but me, but this progress made me happy:

pnp1.jpg

pnp0.jpg

(It's just reading the Ethernet cards CR register but it's verification that PnP configuration + activation works as expected)


Stuff left todo:

** Better ISA resource allocator / collision avoidance.
It's incredibly dumb at the moment.

** Allow resource allocator hints/overrides in the config file
Eg; you may want to manually specify port to satisfy hardcoded driver or software.
Or just to help avoid resource conflicts.

** Support manually added non-pnp devices in the config file
Mainly to help the pnp resource allocator avoid colliding with them.
It's also very nice to have the non-pnp cards in the device registry too, so software can query for them and their settings by ID just like with pnp ones.

[sporniket]

great progress :)