Phil C's Raven build

[mrbombermillzy]

Good find @PhilC

Sometimes, having all the extras causes memory addresses to have to be moved about and whatnot, so Im glad its working on your Raven.

[PhilC]

Good find @PhilC

Sometimes, having all the extras causes memory addresses to have to be moved about and whatnot, so Im glad its working on your Raven.

Honestly I was surprised it did. It looks like it'll take an extra 1mb ram as well on the W32which looks the same ram as I've just bought for the Mach32,so that'll be happening sometime the future.

[mrbombermillzy]

Thats great news then.

So I take it you have a 1mb M32 with the empty sockets for 2mb?

[PhilC]

Thats great news then.

So I take it you have a 1mb M32 with the empty sockets for 2mb?

It's not sockets but solder pads but yes, it says 1mb, so I'll try adding the extra two chips at some point.

[agranlund]

So far, looking at the chips on board this card, it looks to have a 80186 CPU on the second board with ps/2 ports and an IDE interface, an ET4000 W32i GPU, a network card, video in via coax(just a guess) and has an Svideo input port as well.
SO I think this is likely an all in one PC on a couple of ISA boards with conferencing ability? Again, just a guess but it works great as a video card in the Raven, I know, a bit of an overkill just for a W32i

Wow, interesting stuff!
Nice that the w32i portion of that thing worked fine as a standalone videocard

[PhilC]

@agranlund you still need to put both Cards in for the W32 to work but then I did have a spare slot anyway. The network card is automatically detected by your PnP routine, so that should be a good one to get going too I hope.

[agranlund]

@agranlund you still need to put both Cards in for the W32 to work but then I did have a spare slot anyway. The network card is automatically detected by your PnP routine, so that should be a good one to get going too I hope.

Cool, do you know what network chip that is?

Perhaps the IDE port is accessible too at one of the pc standard I/O ports:

Code: Select all

0x0170-0x0177	The secondary ATA harddisk controller.
0x01F0-0x01F7	The primary ATA harddisk controller.

I received an ESS soundcard that I haven't had time to play with yet, but it too has an IDE port and it would be a shame not being able to use it.
But then one would also "just" need to make a driver so EmuTOS can actually use it too..

[PhilC]

Just having a bit of a mess around with the Raven today and thought what the heck, I've got some compatible video DRAM , so I've upgraded my ET4000 W32 to 2MB.

PXL_20250604_140236930.jpg (270.06 KiB) Viewed 313 times

PXL_20250604_140424194.jpg (294.81 KiB) Viewed 313 times

Of course now I've got to go and set up all the screen modes properly with the Nova app, whilst hoping not to break anything else

Next stop, seeing what else I can get working on this weird card that I've got.

[mrbombermillzy]

Good stuff Phil!

Next stop, seeing what else I can get working on this weird card that I've got.

You could try my MK Demo: viewtopic.php?p=123113#p123113 at least for feedback so I know my ET4000 code is ok, more than anything else!

Providing your card setup is:

ET Screen base: $a00000
ET Register base: $bc0000

and you run it 1024x768x8bpp it should work with a joystick in port 1.

If it does, let me know and I will try to 'blindly'* build you a full screen (320x200) version... thats providing the Raven does 320x200x256 output?



* blindly meaning my ET400AX/Nova v1 combo wont do it, so I cant fully test.

[agranlund]

so I've upgraded my ET4000 W32 to 2MB.

So this is a wild shot in the dark but the attached program might enable memory interleaving mode on your 2MB card.

The datasheet is massive, and confusing at times, so there is a very real possibility I missed or misunderstood some steps
And I can't test it properly here since my W32i only has 1MB and is not wired up to support interleaving.

If you against all odds do end up with a screen that looks ok then it would be super interesting to see the Gembench before/after.