BeagleBoard-X15

In stock since probably a few months.
Can be seen as a Titanium Lite.

Pro:
- A bit more affordable than the Titanium.
- HDMI (so 3-4k screens?)

Con:
- 1 eSata + 1 mSata only
- 1 screen only

Seems to be closed to IGEPv5/Titanium. But with the HDMI
Enough for a RISC OS port?

Nota: the HDMI port of the IGEPv5 seems to be limited to 2048×1440 points. Really? No 2560×1440?

Everything with OMAP5 is limited to comparatively low resolutions, this is not an HDMI problem or a board problem but a TI/SoC problem. Just the continuation of the disappointments video-wise starting with OMAP3 (remember the BeagleBoard resolution disaster?).

remember the BeagleBoard resolution disaster?

At the time of RO appearing on the Beagleboard, exactly how many in production alternatives were there?

At the time of RO appearing on the Beagleboard, exactly how many in production alternatives were there?

Some. Your point being?

remember the BeagleBoard resolution disaster?

Which resolution disaster? Or the fact that my xM can’t run my 1280×1024 monitor at full resolution?

FWIW, I tend to regard Ti products as being a bit <insert preferred euphemism for excrement>. To drag up the ghost of my old PVR, the TMS320DM320 is quoted as being capable of encoding/decoding D1 video. That means 720×576 at 50Hz, or 720×480 at 60Hz (both of which equal 20,736,000 pixels per second). Maybe it can on the carefully crafted testbed setup?
But in real life, you are going to need to use the hardware rescale engine to drop the vertical resolution to 288 lines (for PAL) and then encode at a maximum of 640×480 at 50Hz or the device just ain’t gonna cut it.
720×576 is radically different in result to 720×288 → 640×480. Okay, it is pretty impressive for a ~200MHz ARM9 and a ~100MHz DSP, but still, it is quite underpowered for what the datasheet promised.

Likewise the OMAP3. You’re good to go if you want to drive an 800×600 monitor (which was the resolution I was originally using on my RiscPC a long time prior) but getting HD out of a device with a technically better processor than the original Pi? Ain’t gonna happen.

To a degree, this is all determined by the intention of the hardware and its time of manufacture. The OMAP is used in several mobile phones (such as my first Android, the Motorola DEFY) and it does a reasonable job. Display technology wasn’t up to so much back then, so in 2010 a phone released with a 3.7" 854×480 screen wasn’t seen as comically bad. Not great, not awful, just normal. Of course, the DEFY is my only phone that isn’t capable of HD video so you can see some limitations in the processor, but again, HD video was a sort of fledgling thing. Credit to Motorola for not doing something nasty like HD MJPEG.
The Pi, on the other hand, is built around a chip that was so clearly designed to be used on portable media player applications. So much so that the traditional master processor / slave GPU is entirely turned on its head and the ARM core was the true slave. After all, the ARM doesn’t really have a lot to do, a small custom operating system to generate UIs and shunt data on and off media. The GPU barely expends any heat change in playing 720P video. I would imagine 1080 is no problem either (I just don’t have a screen capable of it) plus the GPU is quite capable of the same little trick that allows me to watch NHK World off satellite – namely converting FullHD to a lesser resolution on the fly – as many of us probably noticed when first booting RISC OS and watching the tiny text on the screen as RISC OS incomprehensibly boots to 1920×1080 by default, instead of a sensible resolution the user can then change…

The BCM2xxx’s video capabilities are impressive. They had to be, it was it’s raison d’être.
The OMAP’s video capabilities are lacklustre. They didn’t really need to be any better.

But, as Steve points out – in the Beagle days there were no viable alternatives. There was an Octa-something board with a spec so silly I wonder if it ever actually made production.
It wasn’t until the Pi became a reality that the ARM board market exploded with a proliferation of (mostly) Chinese boards – the Cubieboard, various clone Pis and lookalikes (but not workalikes, due to many being Allwinner SoCs).
We have a lot of choice now in terms of board capabilities. Back around 2008-2010? Much less so.

in the Beagle days there were no viable alternatives.

Correct wavelength.

It wasn’t until the Pi became a reality that the ARM board market exploded

Some people seem to have forgotten the famine years, before Beagleboard there was… ?

Which resolution disaster? Or the fact that my xM can’t run my 1280×1024 monitor at full resolution?

The completely inadequate capability of providing a state-of-the-art video output. Like FullHD@60Hz. Instead, it could not even do 1280×1024@60Hz (apart from a few hand-picked Beagles)!

Of course you might say that OMAP3 and BeagleBoard were not developed as a desktop CPU – that was never my point. But there were SoCs available at that time with a lot better video support. Freescale’s stuff, and there were various Marvell XScale CPUs (mostly Kirkwood-based) with PCIex support which were put on boards with more powerful GPU stuff, e.g. various Globalscale Plug variants, and a nice board named OpenRD Client (and later OpenRD Ultimate). And NVidias Tegra of course. Remember the Toshiba AC100?

Me saying that the OMAPs provide weak video support does not imply anything else. Like “oh we should have/could have ported RISC OS to something much better” or “TI were braindead”. On the other hand, TI didn’t achieve enough market success to continue the OMAP line of SoCs, so maybe the were braindead after all.

Everything with OMAP5 is limited to comparatively low resolutions

Omap5’s PHY supports 4×4K, but each framebuffer is limited to 2×4K.
The trick is to use two framebuffers to get a width of more than 2048 dots.
https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/9542

Which resolution disaster? Or the fact that my xM can’t run my 1280×1024 monitor at full resolution?

My BBxM is driving a Xerox LCD monitor at 1280 × 1024, 52 Hz, beautifully.

52Hz. Evidently the chip didn’t have the grunt to manage that at the usual 60Hz, so you require a monitor that can handle less common frame rates…

BTW – could you post your MDF? Worth a second try, even though the sync rate claimed is 60-75Hz.

My BBxM is driving a Xerox LCD monitor at 1280 × 1024, 52 Hz, beautifully.

You could sell that screen for a lot of money to frustrated MIST users.

could you post your MDF?

Here’s the relevant section:

startmode
mode_name:1280 x 1024
x_res:1280
y_res:1024
pixel_rate:83000
h_timings:32,108,14,1280,0,98
#    VESA:136,160,0,1024,0,24
v_timings:5,16,0,1024,0,0
sync_pol:0
endmode

HTH. It’s a Xerox XA7-17i, if the information is of any use to you.

frustrated MIST users.

Who?

Here’s the relevant section:

Thanks.