An ET4000 ISA graphics card, adapted to the Atari MegaBus, promises higher resolutions and more colors than the native Shifter chip can dream of. In practice, bolting one onto a heavily upgraded Mega ST turned into a lesson in power supply physics.
+An ET4000 ISA graphics card, adapted to the Atari MegaBus, promises higher resolutions and more colors than the native Shifter chip can dream of. Getting one running in a heavily upgraded Mega ST turned out to be a genuine hardware battle, but the ET4000 now works in my Mega ST 4 "High" machine.
-FPGA cores on MiSTer and MiST only emulate the native ST Shifter, there's no ET4000 emulation on the horizon given the FPGA resources it would require. The real answer for higher resolutions turned out to be software: Hatari running in VDI mode on a Raspberry Pi 400, which comfortably delivers 1280×768 with far more colors and zero PSU drama.
+Solving it came down to giving the supply the headroom it needed. With a properly beefed-up power supply to cover the 5V and 12V rails, plus a cooling solution for the card, the stability problems went away. The ET4000 now drives higher resolutions and more colors than the Shifter chip can natively produce, turning the "High" machine into a genuine workstation.
-Lesson learned: "just add a graphics card" on 40-year-old hardware is never "just" anything. The ET4000 project isn't dead, but it's shelved until there's a properly beefed-up power supply and cooling solution to go with it.
+FPGA cores on MiSTer and MiST still only emulate the native ST Shifter, with no ET4000 emulation on the horizon given the FPGA resources it would require. So the real hardware approach remains the only way to get those higher resolutions, and now it works in the Mega ST 4 "High" machine with its dedicated monitor.
+ +Lesson learned: "just add a graphics card" on 40-year-old hardware is never "just" anything. But with the power supply and cooling sorted, the ET4000 now runs where I always hoped it would.