Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[peters]

What clock speed are you using ?

My Milan060 runs at 30/60MHz with just a heatsink.

[agranlund]

What clock speed are you using ?

My Milan060 runs at 30/60MHz with just a heatsink.

I've been running it at 48/96mhz so far with just heatsink but I figure it can't hurt blowing some air on it too.
Going to throw in some more oscillators next time I order from Mouser. Should be interesting to see if it wants to go faster.

[viking272]

Having just built a modern PC with my son (well plugging in components to a motherboard and dropping it in a case), I wonder if on the Raven motherboard there are pinouts/headers for RGB and additional power for fans? I believe fans can be DC (full power) or PWM (controllable/slow/fast)

RGB (separate or on a fan) adds a real aesthetic which I appreciate is not for everyone.

OpenRGB has source for various devices and a few controllable glowing 120mm fans would be pretty cool IMO.
https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB

Note the fans are fixed to the case unless its a CPU heatsink/fan combo. (Which also has a separate pinout too)

[agranlund]

Having just built a modern PC with my son (well plugging in components to a motherboard and dropping it in a case), I wonder if on the Raven motherboard there are pinouts/headers for RGB and additional power for fans? I believe fans can be DC (full power) or PWM (controllable/slow/fast)

RGB (separate or on a fan) adds a real aesthetic which I appreciate is not for everyone.

OpenRGB has source for various devices and a few controllable glowing 120mm fans would be pretty cool IMO.
https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB

Note the fans are fixed to the case unless its a CPU heatsink/fan combo. (Which also has a separate pinout too)

That's so nice building a PC together!


I have added a couple of fan connectors to the new version but they are just the basics without PWM control or RPM readout, so mostly for neater cable management compared to running cables from the ATX supply.
Since Eiffel already support hooking up a temp sensor and toggling case fans on/off based on thresholds I did add that.

For anything more fancy you could always get one of those standalone (RGB) fan controller hubs. One with a physical remote since you wouldn't be able to control the RGB from software. Or a fan with built-in sensor and auto rpm such as the Arctic TC.

There are a couple of unused GPOs exposed on the motherboard that you can drive from software and maybe do something fun with.
I'm a bit allergic to all the RGB stuff but being able to toggle some kind of dim light inside the case might be nice.

[Steve]

Agranlund, one of the biggest drawbacks we have in Atari ISA graphics is how we are stuck with rare et4000/Mach cards. I wonder if you might be able to extend your seemlessly never ending skills to solving this problem. I think either 1. Work on getting a much more 'available' VGA ISA card to work or 2. Create a new open source hardware solution, perhaps utilising a pi Pico as a dumb frame buffer. I don't think source of current drivers is publicly available but if you spoke to Idek he might work with you. I apologise if this is a very silly or presumptuous question.

[agranlund]

Agranlund, one of the biggest drawbacks we have in Atari ISA graphics is how we are stuck with rare et4000/Mach cards. I wonder if you might be able to extend your seemlessly never ending skills to solving this problem. I think either 1. Work on getting a much more 'available' VGA ISA card to work or 2. Create a new open source hardware solution, perhaps utilising a pi Pico as a dumb frame buffer. I don't think source of current drivers is publicly available but if you spoke to Idek he might work with you. I apologise if this is a very silly or presumptuous question.

You know, the thought has struck my mind a couple of times. Those Cirrus Logic cards are still relatively inexpensive and easier to come by.
While I do enjoy the hardware and driver side of things, the fun immediately stops the moment I realise the majority(?) of time would probably be spent doing the hardware-agnostic(*) and very much non-fun VDI reimplementation for the N'th time in Atari history.
(*) hardware agnostic if we're talking drawing to frame buffer without acceleration features.

I think it's the same roadblock for some kind of new fpga/pico framebuffer solution. You'd still need that VDI which can do VDI things in chunky 8/16/32bpp - and unless you are the kind of person that enjoys writing that kind of stuff as well as driver code then it's a bit of a problem.

Too bad both Nvdi-vga and Nova combines driver+vdi in the same closed source binary. If only the VDI drawer part was separate and reusable by different hardware drivers.

And now that I ranted about all this I just realised there is fVDI which I assume was invented to solve this issue
Ok then.. Good old "svgalib" can drive almost every old ISA card there is. So if it was me(*) I would look at trying to marry that with fVDI or any other VDI you can get hold of that understands modern pixel formats.

(*) it is not going to be me, I can most certainly, maybe, probably, say.
the motivation for something like that is not super high since I already have ET4k and M32 and they work great with Ideks driver

[Cyprian]

Just for the record, NVDI 16bit driver was disassembled and adopted for V4SA. Therefore it is not closed source anymore.

[mikro]

Too bad both Nvdi-vga and Nova combines driver+vdi in the same closed source binary. If only the VDI drawer part was separate and reusable by different hardware drivers.

As @Cyprian said, this is not the case anymore: https://bitbucket.org/pep-entral/v4nvdi (this is source code based on SuperVidel NVDI, btw).

But I totally hear you; I'd love to see this NVDI adapted to CTPCI but I hate the idea that it should be me who does the work. As you say, a really boring job which is supposed to replace a solution which is already here and works.

[Oldskool]

Was wondering if the picogus worked on the Raven.

On the videocards. It’s ofcourse somewhat inherent due to legacy interface and that we always want the best. If it was a PCI interface we would probably end up with the Amiga issue at the end. An 060 ok let’s get Quake going. Ok we have pci a voodoo would cool with glide… Also 300 euro….

[Steve]

Was wondering if the picogus worked on the Raven.

On the videocards. It’s ofcourse somewhat inherent due to legacy interface and that we always want the best. If it was a PCI interface we would probably end up with the Amiga issue at the end. An 060 ok let’s get Quake going. Ok we have pci a voodoo would cool with glide… Also 300 euro….

At the moment though it's the opposite, we only have super rare 300 euro crappy ancient cards that work. Getting a driver for more 'available' low-end ISA card would allow cheap ISA graphics for Ataris.