Eivind wrote on 2023-10-16, 22:34:

@doogie: I compiled iPXE for the RDC 6040 and built a new BIOS with the romfile included, got this: IMG_0881.jpeg ...so I guess […]
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@doogie: I compiled iPXE for the RDC 6040 and built a new BIOS with the romfile included, got this:
IMG_0881.jpeg
...so I guess that's promising? 😀
I'm a total noob when it comes to PXE though, haven't touched that stuff in like 20 years. If you've got a (simple) way to test some more using a raspberry pi as a pxe server, I'd be happy to give it a spin!

That is promising!

..and I guess what I would try (instead of setting up tftp and all that, potentially wasting time) is seeing if I can get _anything_ out of netboot.xyz: https://netboot.xyz/docs/booting/ipxe/

Now the limitations of the Vortex86 CPU may prevent it from getting very far, but being able to initialize the network, DHCP, and make a request over http is a very good test.

Separately: the benchmarks you posted @Eivind are very interesting. I was just thinking about what graphics card I would pair with this board.
It's a very interesting set of constraints..

-CPU performance on par with Pentium 233 MMX
-AGP 1x (without the AGP-specific features)

So - speaking in very broad generalities of course - that limits us to, what, games up to around 1997 with excellent performance?
The easiest answer then has to be AGP Voodoo, right? Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo3..
Riva/GF256, Matrox G400 also come to mind. But I reckon this thing will be quite the Glide monster!

Congrats for finishing this awesome project!
Is it possible to use the wavetable header and the MT32-pi at the same time and mute them independently?

doogie wrote on 2023-10-17, 01:34:

..and I guess what I would try (instead of setting up tftp and all that, potentially wasting time) is seeing if I can get _anything_ out of netboot.xyz: https://netboot.xyz/docs/booting/ipxe/

Hmm, when I press ctrl+B and get the pxe command prompt, I can't type anything. Either the pxe rom messes with something making the PS/2 drop out or the system hangs, hard to tell which.
Would have to dive down a bit deeper here...

doogie wrote on 2023-10-17, 01:34:

Separately: the benchmarks you posted @Eivind are very interesting. I was just thinking about what graphics card I would pair wi […]
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Separately: the benchmarks you posted @Eivind are very interesting. I was just thinking about what graphics card I would pair with this board.
It's a very interesting set of constraints..

-CPU performance on par with Pentium 233 MMX
-AGP 1x (without the AGP-specific features)

So - speaking in very broad generalities of course - that limits us to, what, games up to around 1997 with excellent performance?
The easiest answer then has to be AGP Voodoo, right? Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo3..
Riva/GF256, Matrox G400 also come to mind. But I reckon this thing will be quite the Glide monster!

I didn't remember exactly how my previous PCI-equipped prototypes fared, so I dug one of them out and put in a PCI-based Voodoo3 2000.
Interestingly, here's a few scores:

GLQuake 640x480: 68.3 fps, 800x600: 68.1 fps
Quake3 640x480: 22.5 fps, 800x600: 23 fps

...so Quake 3 at least seemed to benefit from the much newer Radeon 9250. Don't remember if I should have done anything with the drivers, though. Wasn't there something about copying the opengl32.dll ...?

Unreal with Glide, on the other hand: 640x480 castle timedemo: 36 fps (compared to 28 on the 9250).
Playing was also much smoother with virtually no stuttering. Same with Unreal Tournament, noticeably better performance.

Starting to suspect I might be able to get better results with the Radeon 9250 with other drivers? I have a GeForce4 Ti4400 I'll try later as well.

Anyways, to sort of sum up: this system seems to top out at about year-1999 games, at least first-person shooters. Less graphically demanding games probably a couple more years 😀
And a Voodoo3 3000 AGP is most likely a very nice fit. I'll try to get my hands on other cards soon.

florian3 wrote on 2023-10-17, 01:51:

Congrats for finishing this awesome project!

Thanks! 😀

florian3 wrote on 2023-10-17, 01:51:

Is it possible to use the wavetable header and the MT32-pi at the same time and mute them independently?

No, unfortunately not. The CS4237 doesn't have unlimited inputs, so analog signals from both the wavetable and pi go to the same line input on the crystal chip. You select between them using jumpers on the board.

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-17, 08:44:

The CS4237 doesn't have unlimited inputs, so analog signals from both the wavetable and pi go to the same line input on the crystal chip. You select between them using jumpers on the board.

Which means you could probably run a switch to the jumpers and mount it on your case somewhere if you wanted to be able to swap between both.

Sunoo wrote on 2023-10-17, 12:47:

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-17, 08:44:

The CS4237 doesn't have unlimited inputs, so analog signals from both the wavetable and pi go to the same line input on the crystal chip. You select between them using jumpers on the board.

Which means you could probably run a switch to the jumpers and mount it on your case somewhere if you wanted to be able to swap between both.

Yep, that would work! 👍

Im happy that i have saved some old slim cdrom drives as new once dont seem to have audio output.

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-17, 08:41:

Hmm, when I press ctrl+B and get the pxe command prompt, I can't type anything. Either the pxe rom messes with something making the PS/2 drop out or the system hangs, hard to tell which.
Would have to dive down a bit deeper here...

Shoot. Don't spend a ton of time on it. I wager PXE will be a rather low-use feature, and even in my case I have to think with the capabilities of this board, I should be able to boot iPXE from USB, then use it as a jumping-off point to get an OS installed onto local storage (DOS + Windows 3, or maybe Windows 95?). If it were a compile-and-done sort of integration that'd be a different story but I don't think it's worth complicating other parts of the firmware in the name of iPXE.

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-17, 08:41:

I didn't remember exactly how my previous PCI-equipped prototypes fared, so I dug one of them out and put in a PCI-based Voodoo3 […]
Show full quote

I didn't remember exactly how my previous PCI-equipped prototypes fared, so I dug one of them out and put in a PCI-based Voodoo3 2000.
..
Anyways, to sort of sum up: this system seems to top out at about year-1999 games, at least first-person shooters. Less graphically demanding games probably a couple more years 😀
And a Voodoo3 3000 AGP is most likely a very nice fit. I'll try to get my hands on other cards soon.

Yep, this was kind of as I suspected, so it's awesome to confirm. Thank you. This machine just felt like it would really sing with an AGP Voodoo card, and then we've brought on reasonably good DOS compatibility along with great Glide performance. Maybe not the greatest image quality, but depending on what games you're after, a Matrox card instead could give you the crispness you seek. I'm not as familiar with the DOS compatibility of the Radeon 9250, but I would think that, say, if you wanted digital video out, an earlier GeForce or Radeon card with DVI would do really well too.

doogie wrote on 2023-10-17, 15:06:

Yep, this was kind of as I suspected, so it's awesome to confirm. Thank you. This machine just felt like it would really sing with an AGP Voodoo card, and then we've brought on reasonably good DOS compatibility along with great Glide performance. Maybe not the greatest image quality, but depending on what games you're after, a Matrox card instead could give you the crispness you seek. I'm not as familiar with the DOS compatibility of the Radeon 9250, but I would think that, say, if you wanted digital video out, an earlier GeForce or Radeon card with DVI would do really well too.

I managed to snag a Voodoo3 3500 AGP today and ran a few tests. Unfortunately, it looks like all results I got with the PCI Voodoo3 2000 were CPU-limited - I got more or less identical results, within the margin of error I'd say.
That's not to say the 3000 or 3500 aren't awesome cards, just that for this particular system they don't seem to be worth the premium over the 2000 model.

I'd still like to explore other (older) drivers for the 9250 though, as this and the slightly slower 9200 card are dirt-cheap, readily available and seem to provide higher fps than the Voodoos in certain games.

Interested to see how Half-Life from 1998 runs as well as Grand Theft Auto 2 on the board.
Just put my order in. Super excited for this. Going to pair the board with the very first GPU I ever purchased: An "ELSA Gladiac MX AGP 32MB ATX". Do you have a STEP file exported from kicad available of the board? Would help with making an i/o shield. Considering using this case as it has PSU and room for a full size CD-Rom. https://silentpcreview.com/apex-mi-008-a-chea … -mini-itx-case/ Would look pretty nice painted beige. You could use one of the 3.5" bays to house the OLED screen for the MT-32 and some external buttons.

Aaron707 wrote on 2023-10-18, 00:45:

Interested to see how Half-Life from 1998 runs as well as Grand Theft Auto 2 on the board.

I tried running Half-Life with the Voodoo3 3500 AGP, the performance seemed pretty good - but I was haunted by periodic slow-downs of everything (graphics, audio). That might have been due to how I was running the game with an emulated cd-rom from a USB drive though... I'll test again later tonight, and throw in GTA 1 and 2.

Aaron707 wrote on 2023-10-18, 00:45:

Just put my order in. Super excited for this. Going to pair the board with the very first GPU I ever purchased: An "ELSA Gladiac MX AGP 32MB ATX".

Nice!

Aaron707 wrote on 2023-10-18, 00:45:

Do you have a STEP file exported from kicad available of the board? Would help with making an i/o shield. Considering using this case as it has PSU and room for a full size CD-Rom. https://silentpcreview.com/apex-mi-008-a-chea … -mini-itx-case/ Would look pretty nice painted beige. You could use one of the 3.5" bays to house the OLED screen for the MT-32 and some external buttons.

Don't have that on hand right now, but I'll soon start making a github page with specs, mechanical measurements, software, firmware and documentation.

Right now it's mostly getting all the components for the group-buy in stock, had to order quite a few to JLC's warehouse.

It's been several times I see you reporting random slowdowns in windows.

Are you connected to the ethernet ? If not you should give a static IP address or disable the NIC entirely, it's a known win9x bug that has the tendency to cause hiccups and slow boot times like this.

Iirc that's due to how the dhcp works in win98

Deksor wrote on 2023-10-18, 17:36:

It's been several times I see you reporting random slowdowns in windows.

Only in games IIRC...

Deksor wrote on 2023-10-18, 17:36:

Are you connected to the ethernet ? If not you should give a static IP address or disable the NIC entirely, it's a known win9x bug that has the tendency to cause hiccups and slow boot times like this.
Iirc that's due to how the dhcp works in win98

Yep, I know. I always configure a static IP whenever I enable the network card, can't deal with the boot time otherwise! 😁

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-18, 12:32:

Aaron707 wrote on 2023-10-18, 00:45:

Interested to see how Half-Life from 1998 runs as well as Grand Theft Auto 2 on the board.

I tried running Half-Life with the Voodoo3 3500 AGP, the performance seemed pretty good - but I was haunted by periodic slow-downs of everything (graphics, audio). That might have been due to how I was running the game with an emulated cd-rom from a USB drive though... I'll test again later tonight, and throw in GTA 1 and 2.

I usually just use a no-cd patched exe for half life. The cd is really only for music sometimes during gameplay. For GTA2 you can run the demo that’s available.
Thank you for testing more games.

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-17, 12:50:

Sunoo wrote on 2023-10-17, 12:47:

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-17, 08:44:

The CS4237 doesn't have unlimited inputs, so analog signals from both the wavetable and pi go to the same line input on the crystal chip. You select between them using jumpers on the board.

Which means you could probably run a switch to the jumpers and mount it on your case somewhere if you wanted to be able to swap between both.

Yep, that would work! 👍

It would probably also work to connect the jumper pins to the CD audio header and use that input instead?

Aaron707 wrote on 2023-10-19, 04:29:

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-18, 12:32:

Aaron707 wrote on 2023-10-18, 00:45:

Interested to see how Half-Life from 1998 runs as well as Grand Theft Auto 2 on the board.

I tried running Half-Life with the Voodoo3 3500 AGP, the performance seemed pretty good - but I was haunted by periodic slow-downs of everything (graphics, audio). That might have been due to how I was running the game with an emulated cd-rom from a USB drive though... I'll test again later tonight, and throw in GTA 1 and 2.

I usually just use a no-cd patched exe for half life. The cd is really only for music sometimes during gameplay. For GTA2 you can run the demo that’s available.
Thank you for testing more games.

The HL slowdowns were due to reading from the emulated cd on the usb drive. I no-cd-patched the game, and it ran fine after that. 640x480 is ok, the system struggles a bit some places but it's mostly pretty decent. Definitely playable.
GTA 1 and 2 both ran fine at 640x480, no issues.
The Radeon 9250 had noticeably better performance in all three, compared to the V3 3500. Seems like only UnrealEngine games (of the ones I've tried so far, at least) is better with the Voodoo.

Question about Raspberry pi headers. Here is a picture of RPi Zero 2 with headers soldered. But it seems seems that the headers should be soldered to other side of Pi's pcb for it to fit correctly here?

janih wrote on 2023-10-20, 08:17:

Question about Raspberry pi headers. Here is a picture of RPi Zero 2 with headers soldered. But it seems seems that the headers should be soldered to other side of Pi's pcb for it to fit correctly here?

Correct. And the reason is that it's better to have the Pi's heatsink (which is always a good thing to use) facing up for better airflow and cooling.
I know this can be a bit of a pain in the butt if you're starting with Pi with pre-soldered header pins, but there we are. Thankfully they're readily available again and still quite cheap.

Eivind wrote on 2023-10-20, 08:24:

janih wrote on 2023-10-20, 08:17:

Question about Raspberry pi headers. Here is a picture of RPi Zero 2 with headers soldered. But it seems seems that the headers should be soldered to other side of Pi's pcb for it to fit correctly here?

Correct. And the reason is that it's better to have the Pi's heatsink (which is always a good thing to use) facing up for better airflow and cooling.
I know this can be a bit of a pain in the butt if you're starting with Pi with pre-soldered header pins, but there we are. Thankfully they're readily available again and still quite cheap.

Good to know. I'm just ordering some parts for my future ITX-Llama build and I'll just get the Pi without headers pre-soldered 😀

The Pi Zero W is widely available, but not the Zero 2 W. Per the project page "Pi Zero (original) and Pi 1 are unfortunately too slow (even with an overclock) and unsupported."