Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[agranlund]

This is a very nice ISA Card with 2MB of Video Ram ...
I think it is a S3 86C801

I actually ordered one of those! :)

I heard the 86C801 is supposed to have quite good raw framebuffer performance, and the blitter looks very easy to operate based on what I saw in FreeBE/AF sourcecode.

[agranlund]

Haha, you say that but, for example, I've been off-and-on working on your Hyper68k codebase trying to understand it and port it to the Falcon/DFB1 (nb. works now in Hatari, but not on the real Falcon). This isn't even inventing something, it's modding it. It's taken me months of half-hour here and 15 minutes there.

You have no idea how happy I am that source code is of use to someone! :)
I just wanted to scratch an itch to see if I could do it and when it finally did run something I lost interest in developing it further into some kind of application.

To be fair, it would for sure take me a very long time to understand the ins-and-outs of that code if I were to look at it again today..
I remember the MMU code and fault handler ended up particularly narly with bunch of stuff stored in pages userdata fields.

[Oldskool]

Hi Anders,

Would it be possible to make some binaries available of a game port(s) you did for the Raven?

[agranlund]

Hi Anders,

Would it be possible to make some binaries available of a game port(s) you did for the Raven?

Sure, I'll rebuild them. They're all probably in different states of half-baked experimentation.
I would very much like to add music proper to both Tyrian and Doom. And then sound effects at first as a generic Atari xbios layer but later it would be nice to make something so stuff can more easily take advantage of what the GUS has to offer.

[agranlund]

I'm planning to push this new rom onto Github but if someone wants to give it a go first then by all means :)

raven_rom_241210.zip

Best case, nothing should really change - if you're using Nova then hopefully Nova will still initialise properly on your card.

EmuTOS's mono driver is now disabled and the boot rom is now instead taking care of setting up an equivalent resolution.
That should, in theory, work with any card that claims to be VGA compatible so if you have something that is not ET4000 or Mach it'd be interesting to hear the result.

I've tested with the following cards.
(Interesting how the ET4000 bios's are saying less memory than what is certainly on the card.. both of them can do 1280x720x256 just fine)

Code: Select all

ATI Mach32
	GRAPHICS ULTRA PRO, BIOS P/N 112-18900-100
ET4000/W32i
	ET4000/W32I ISA BIOS 06/17/1995
	512KB display memory
ET4000AX
	TsengLab Int'l ET4000 BIOS Date : 01/10/92
	256KB display memory
CL-GD5426
	SpeedStar PRO  Vers. 2.04  (c) Diamond Computer Systems, Inc. 1 MB display memory installed
CL-GD5426
	REVEAL Bios Version 1.31 3/4/94 (c) 1994 VidTech Microsystems Inc.

The plan is to keep it so the rom only inits the card to the standard 640x480x2 colors.

SVGA modes and functionality differs between vendors and cards during these early VESA days so it makes sense these become loadable drivers from the auto folder + a common NVDI screen driver.. assuming motivation keeps up :)

But again, NOVA with a Mach or W32i is the optimal setup for sure.
This here is mostly for my own amusement.

[luciodra]

Great work, as always.
Just now that I found a stable 96MHz Emutos configuration, it's tempting to try the new Rom and I will definitely do it...
On Freemint I still have some problems. I download this version:

Screenshot 2024-12-10 alle 08.40.54.png

Is that correct?

[artik-wroc]

The plan is to keep it so the rom only inits the card to the standard 640x480x2 colors.

Would there be a chance of some VGA driver loaded from AUTO? I'm asking because I'd like to play around with Panther :)

[kodak80]

I'm planning to push this new rom onto Github but if someone wants to give it a go first then by all means :)
raven_rom_241210.zip

Best case, nothing should really change - if you're using Nova then hopefully Nova will still initialise properly on your card.

My Hercules ET4000/W32I still works with the new ROM. I also have 3 x ET4000AX cards, 1 shows info the other 2 don't show the card info. I am fairly sure they are all 1mb memory and all show a memory shortage in the console output. All cards still boot to a colour screen. I don't have any other ISA video cards to test.

Code: Select all

InitVga
 32Kb VGA Bios at 800C0000
Hercules ISA Bus Dynamite(tm) BIOS. Ver. 8.00N-A2b(04/29/94)
Copyright 1993, Hercules Computer Technology, Inc.
512KB display memory

InitVga
 32Kb VGA Bios at 800C0000
 TSENG LABS VGA BIOS    MODEL:8925CLK4B    09/14/90
256KB display memory


InitVga
 32Kb VGA Bios at 800C0000
256KB display memory

[kodak80]

Great work, as always.
Just now that I found a stable 96MHz Emutos configuration, it's tempting to try the new Rom and I will definitely do it...
On Freemint I still have some problems. I download this version:

Screenshot 2024-12-10 alle 08.40.54.png

Is that correct?

Yes, that is the version of FreeMint I am using here.

[agranlund]

My Hercules ET4000/W32I still works with the new ROM. I also have 3 x ET4000AX cards, 1 shows info the other 2 don't show the card info. I am fairly sure they are all 1mb memory and all show a memory shortage in the console output. All cards still boot to a colour screen. I don't have any other ISA video cards to test.

Thanks!
Interesting why those ET4K vgabios'es are saying what they say in terms of memory in their boot messages.
It made the w32i I bought quite cheap though. It was sold as a 512kb card since it was saying the same on a real x86 computer too, even though it has 1MB of memory which can all be used.