Author: Johan Klockars (as28-3-8.va.g.bonet.se)
Date: 11-23-2002 20:41
> I have no doubts that I will get some incompatibility issues though! - I often find that its best to assume the worst, and things will only get better if they work ok.
;-)
Anything in particular that you intend to run?
> How does the card work?
The Eclipse is a PCI bridge. That is, it allows the Falcon to access any PCI card that is connected to it, using the normal PCI bus protocol. Unfortunately, due to the design of the Falcon (and to some degree the Eclipse board itself), there is no way for the PCI card to access the Falcon. That is, there is no way for a PCI card to do DMA (which is how PCI is really supposed to work) via the Eclipse. Graphics cards generally don't need DMA (though it can speed up data transfers to and from the card very significantly), however, so that is not a problem in this case.
To be compatible with 14 Mbyte RAM expansions, the Eclipse is designed so that its PCI BIOS maps a (256 kbyte, IIRC) window into the PCI memory space using the MMU and a bus error handler.
> Do I just simply plug the Monitor into this, and have no monitor connected to the Falcon or what?
The ATI card you connect to the Eclipse is a normal PC graphics card and will behave as such. fVDI/RageII will make sure all VDI drawing is done by the RageII card.
Whether you have a monitor connected to the ordinary Falcon VGA output is up to you. Personally, I have my old SM124 connected there, and let the normal GEMDOS/BIOS text output display on that one. It is perfect when debugging things, since for example the DevPac debugger, Mon, can happily display its output on the SM124 without disturbing the VDI output from the RageII.
> Funnily enough, I am bidding on an ATI right now on ebay ( No one jump into the bidding...
As I said before, there are only two specific ATI RageII cards that are currently supported. I've been planning to make it possible to bypass the check, though, which might possibly make things work on a few more.
The PCI vendor/device IDs of the two currently working cards are 0x47551002 and 0x47561002 (the latter is a 4 Mbyte RageIIC and the former some kind of 2 Mbyte RageII (I have a vague recollection that it might have been a RageII+DVD or something like that). Not that there's any way to find out what you are bidding on...
It's only the setup that differs between these two cards, and it might be possible to dump the appropriate values from a PC if the card you get happens to be different.
> sending off for the eclipse tomorrow morning, so it will be sorted out early next week I recon.
Please, feel free to email if you have any trouble or questions.
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