Raven. A homemade Atari-like computer

[agranlund]

I've used two different cards successfully but they were both based on the RTL8019AS chipset.
Do we know if anyone has had success with a different brand NE2000 clone?

I just stumbled upon this in a (very old) messageboard discussing Ethernec (from which we are borrowing the driver)

I've had varying mileage with other NE2K compatible cards, most of that mileage being of the "it doesn't work" kind,
and I have tried 10 different kinds of cards before giving up and getting the card the board was developed with, an RTL8019 based NE2k card.

If you happen to have an RTL8019 based card lying around, or can find one for cheap, it might be worth a shot.

[luciodra]

I think this is the solution to the problem... I kept my linksys new in the box for this occasion

[agranlund]

These are the cards I've tried successfully, but then again they are almost identical.

IMG_3277.jpg (196.26 KiB) Viewed 857 times

[agranlund]

Finally tried Tyrian, Doom and Scumm.
My Yamaha based card seems to have developed some issues (very bad sound output probably bad caps).
So tried the Picogus with the new firmware.

The games works great and I really enjoy the sound/music/speech support.
Picogus is a great card now with easy mode switching and the mpu mode available in all configs.
(fixed yamaha board and removed picogus. real opl is )

Thanks Anders!

Yeah it makes a big difference with music for sure!
Should be great when sound effects are in place too

[luciodra]

These are the cards I've tried successfully, but then again they are almost identical.

Ok, purchased network card. Then I'll focus on a graphics card...

[luciodra]

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)


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

So, I found among my wreckage a CL-GD5420 that is seen by the bios 640x480x2 colors, but then I can't get any color desktop, trying with different nova drivers...

[agranlund]

So, I found among my wreckage a CL-GD5420 that is seen by the bios 640x480x2 colors, but then I can't get any color desktop, trying with different nova drivers...

Yeah Nova supports these cards only: ET4000AX, ET4000/W32i, Mach32 (it should also support Mach64 but I don't have one to test so no guarantees)

Without Nova you should get a 640x480x2 color desktop with just about any graphics cards.
(Your mileage may vary, I'm sure there are some cards which wont work correctly)
But there are no VDI drivers available yet to provide you with anything other than that resolution when running without Nova.

For an end-user I'm sure this is not very interesting but it's great stuff if one is interested in making drivers.

While I was playing around with a bunch of different cards and both NVDI and fVDI that stuff is all prototype code and very very far from anything releasable.
(The only short-term thing I'm thinking I'd like to put together is the ability for "driverless" cards to go 320x200x8bpp when requested by games)

The best pick at the moment, in my opinion, is ET4000/W32i and using Nova driver, that way you get accelerated VDI as well as being able to do 320x200x8bpp for games.
Mach32 has even faster VDI acceleration but will not do 320x200x8bpp resolutions.
The plain old ET4000AX does 320x200x8bpp but VDI is completely unaccelerated and slow.

[agranlund]

Music + SoundFX through the Soundblaster card:



https://github.com/agranlund/opentyrian/releases
(use tyrian00.prg if you have an LC cpu)

[Cyprian]

it looks and sounds great

[agranlund]

it looks and sounds great

Yeah I'm pleasantly surprised and happy to have been proven wrong about Soundblaster on Raven!
I had initially dismissed Soundblaster for PCM output due to lack of ISA-DMA but it turns out letting the CPU push samples from a high-frequency interrupt works just fine.

It's simple and far from optimal and it makes me feel a bit like a caveman, but if it works it works

More demanding games would very much benefit from getting GUS support, that'll make both mixing and playback practically free. Looking forward to start to experiment with that.