Dude, thank you. I’m 66 years old and have been involved in tech going back to the mid 70s. I started out as a PCB designer on a ComputerVision CADDS1 system. I’m not an engineer but a tinkerer. Your reaction when the CD worked nearly made me cry as I’ve been there. I have reversed engineer (legally) PCBs in the early 80s and I know how it feels to spend an inordinate amount of time on what seems to be an impossible project with little to no documentation. I was part of a “clean room” design group to prove a company had stolen intellectual property. We succeeded in proving it could be done and, yes, a more than a few tears appeared. Since then I have designed many many circuit boards including some in IBM PS/2 computers. I retired now and that was a long time ago but as you told your story it brought back memories and the emotion at the end washed over me. I’m there man. I know how you feel. Subbed and soon Patreon.
I too am a retired EE that just tinkers. When i seen the level of complexity and TIME that had to go into Back Reverse Engineering just this board,was just painful watching as i have done just SMALL,and i mean SMALL compared to this! I reversed some electronic car chargers controllers.Had to make some Daughter Boards for them cause the DAM parts they're making on them are so DAM SMALL & CLOSE !! Did that also to "BEEF UP" the switching FET witch got all the strain. NO room for it where it was. I Got a TS 100 NOW!! WHAT a SOLDERING PEN !! If you don't have 1,BUY 1 ! It will change your life,it's that good ! Wish i had that 40 years ago. You can find them on Ebay or the OTHER GUY. I bought a variable KJS-1509,that is a little HOT for that pen. Do "NOT" turn it all the way up!! It's a 24v 2.5A supply,more than needed. Pen MAX is 19V !! 😎
Damm.... you make me cry. I'm 52 now, I use computer like this start from 1990. That year was the 1st time I learn to use computer. An 8088 Mugen Turbo with 2 360kb drive and EGA card. I was upgrade it several times, the most excellent upgrade I was did is install and 1.44MB drive and it using special controller card made by factory named Great Wall, not sure it was Chineese or Taiwan factory. And I dont have it anymore.
"We can’t bust heads like we used to-but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So, I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.”
We found some technical manuals for the CM153 and CM100 drive. It's very hard to reach, but we're going to make a full scan of the documentation and share it. I assume you're interested to read this ;). Good job on the clone! We actually own an earlier version of the CM153 card, which is massive (full length of an IBM 5150/5160).
Not too relevant here, but I had a Philips audio cd-player, model CD-160. Remember it was a CD-150 also. I bought mine 1986 or 7, but that were before cdroms. I remember the CD-160 had a robust data-reading said to be 1-beam laser, that handled lots of scratches on cd surface. My (later) wife had a Sony 3-beam laser cdplayer making clearly audible dropouts or track-skipping, where my Philips played without any problem.
Your reaction to getting the cm100 working put a huge smile on my face, and a huge amount of admiration goes towards everyone who helped you on this, you're all awesome.
Yo...Robinthefox88....Why is UA-cams algo sending us to the same videos?? I'm going out on a limb here....but I am gonna assume that you and I both do not own or even know anyone that owns a CM100 CD-ROM drive. I have seen Men of Culture. A group of individuals usually found in women's sports and yoga videos. But I am starting to think that the real Men of Culture are the ones watching videos like these. I'm not gonna hold you though. I can sometimes be found in those Yoga videos. I'm not proud of this...though...I'm not Not proud of this. Its a battle I fight
Man oh man, literally cloning your own board trace-for-trace and having it work perfectly, would be one of the crowning achievements in anyone's life. Bravo dude. Hell yes.
These past few weeks have been the wildest ride I've had in a long time. I've really enjoyed working with you on this project and I'm so glad we got it working first time. It gives you the warm fuzzies all over....
How you helped him, red book by Philips is my only source. How to find a PC that support ISA etc, or build USB controller for it? Can we do update, make it run on USB, i can help you! It's kinda easy!
@@lucasrem through my knowledge of digital logic circuits and an understanding of how the circuit could work and how the different components fit together, along with decompilation of the driver. I have an old 1994 486 computer I use for old ISA stuff. I have considered making a USB LMSI adapter, and yes the hardware would be simpler enough. The hard part is getting the LMSI protocol right.
I started my computer hobby around 1979. At that time, among us computer freaks, the following rule applied: Information must be free for all. This is the only way that great projects can develop quickly. And everyone benefits from it. I'm glad there are still people who share this idea. :)
Many years ago I bought a Philips CM100 drive for $20 at a computer show, although I think it may have been a later SCSI version of the drive. Either way, I was never able to get it working.
Just an FYI in case it ever becomes necessary in the future: You can import a DXF file onto a layer in KiCAD and draw your traces over it. I do something similar at work when adapting some old designs into our new PCB layout software and it frequently shaves days off the process. I just turn off or delete those layers afterwards.
Wow! This is seriously impressive dedication to your hobby. Reverse engineering hardware cards and circuits based on photos is one jaw drop, but for it to work first time after the correct drivers were found makes my jaw hit the ground. I am in awe...
Right, this is what impressed me so much! Not just the dedication but the attention to detail that ultimately lead to the card working. Such a great content creator and seems to have an even greater community surrounding.
Your expression when it all started to work is priceless! Congratulations! About 30 years ago, my father and I developed a dual sided S-100 bus PC board for the Signetics 2650 8-bit microprocessor. It was one of the first Processor/Coprocessor configurations with the main processor on one card and the coprocessor on another. We laid out the dual sided board using self-adhesive black pads and tracing tape on an opaque piece of glass and then took it to a photography studio to produce negatives. Unlike current multi-level tracing on PC boards, we had to have a number of hardwired jumpers. We took the negatives to a company called Conductive Circuits in Houston and had 100 boards made and sold them under the Slavemaster 2650 name through Byte Magazine. Our company, Victoria Micro Digital sold them as kits or fully assembled, less chip insertion into sockets. Unfortunately, the 8080 microprocessor won out over other 8-bit processors. Good times. The Wild West of early PC development.
Absolutely frigging fantastic job, Shelby. As a collector of vintage CD players, I love the way the CM100 upper case is recycled from a CD101, but finished in a suitable Beige rather than the standard hi-fi silver. It was great to see it working. Should you ever need to replace it, that laser mechanism appears to be a standard CDM1, just repurposed for data instead of audio.
It is just unfortunate that all CDM pick-ups are super rare and overpriced these days. Specially the swing-arm ones. I've had a hard time finding a CDM12 and big CD jukeboxes are being tossed just because their CDM3 and CDM4 kicked the bucket.
The best part about this video for me was watching your face light up when it finally worked. I can only imagine the joy you felt and how accomplished you felt in that moment. Awesome video, thanks for sharing! I can only imagine how ecstatic those who helped you were too.
Hands down one of the most amazing computer / electrical videos ive ever seen in my life, could not imagine how satisfying it was to sit there and look at that self-made fully functioning card, truly awesome
It's people like you and Roland who keep the scene alive. I look back on many times I threw stuff out and later regretting it. Unless we keep the old days and legacy computing alive, we will lose our access to the best tech we ever got our hands on. The future is proprietary unless we can stop it. So thank you for all the effort you put in to share it with the world. 💯点。PS awesome shirt!
Lol, the shot at "Prototype game collector", i just imagine the owner of the rare "Marble Madness 2" arcade board getting very strong whistles in his hears
A technique I have used is to shine a bright flashlight at an angle under big chips, thus providing illumination through the board and revealing traces as shadows.
Well yes , but if you have the physical PCB, you can always "beep through" the traces to see where they are going to. Working from just pictures is much harder. You have to guess where the trace is going to, then use logical reasoning to see if your guess makes sense. and use any information you can gather from what you can see from pictures. for example without a (visible) via you know two traces cannot cross each other. But yes, with a dual sided board (just two layers used) its often possible to see the trace on the other side of the board, even when the trace is going under an IC. This was a really impressive, and important feat, to document a historically technical device. Well done!
@@martindejong3974 They were probably mentioning the flashlight bit since he was in contact with the person who provided the pictures. They could shine a light and take a picture for them.
One of those videos where the host may be specialized and interested in completely different things, but their passion makes you excited and cheer for them. Really was fun and inspirational
I'm so glad I disc-overed this channel. It's had it's pits and not every video lands. Videos like this are impressive and sheer witchcraft to us laser mortals.
The executive function you have to tackle this all-encompassing project while still taking on other projects AND producing videos on them is astonishing. Congratulations
Watching this was a bit of nostalgia for me. I worked for one of the first CD-ROM drive sellers in Canada, and traveled all across Ontario demonstrating the NEC CDR-35 with a number of applications like hazardous materials handling guides and the like...all heavily targeted towards industrial uses. It needed an expensive SCSI interface card on a PC, or a SCSI PCMICA card. When sound cards started coming out with the CD-ROM interfaces on the is when the price of drives really started to drop, and become part of the standard load-out for PC systems.
We got our first 2X CD-ROM drive at the same time as a Sound Blaster Pro, it had an IDE interface on the card, I think. We might have used the hard drive interface for IDE, however.
This vid showed up in my recommended. So glad I tapped on it. Your tenacity was compelling but the sheer raw reaction when it started working was worth every minute of viewing! Congrats and now you have the experience and clones to potentially help someone else!
You're lucky that the card you cloned had all its traces visible on the front and back surfaces. As a PCB engineer in the disk drive industry, I regularly dealt with 4-, 6- and 8-layer boards where many traces were on inner layers. We normally designed boards with power and ground planes on the inner layers, but some traces still needed to go on inner layers when dealing with high-density, LSI custom ICs.
What an incredible story! I preserve old film so I share your frustration with collectors who don’t also preserve. And as a fellow KiCAD user I’m super impressed with what you did to reverse-engineer the board. Congratulations!
I think KiCAD really needs a "trace-over background" mode. I know that I'd use it. Trying to keep up with whatever zoom level it wants to be at must have been a pain in the rear.
I hate stingy collectors. The rareness of the actual content doesn’t matter so much as the rareness of the actual thing. E.g. sharing a ROM dump of a beta copy of a game isn’t going to decrease the value of their physical copy because there’s only so many physical copies. It could even increase the value if more people are made aware of it. You wouldn’t see a digital photo of the Mona Lisa and not want to visit the Louvre because “I’ve already seen it” or hear a digital recording of a band and not want to see them live because “I’ve already heard it”.
What I have just watched is nothing short of heroic! Yes, a bunch of people did help which I want to appreciate, and yes in the end there was luck with that oddball driver but you worked so hard and so well. The fact that your card worked from the start once a proper driver was available, no later rework/bodges, is mindblowing. Props to you, Sir.
I'm a retired EE, but back in the late '80s we had a bunch of equipment running Seagate ST-506 5 Mb Winchester hard drives. Our controller cards were failing from a proprietary chip which would get hot and die. We didn't want to rewrite any of the software on the main system. The original vendor of the controller card no longer has documentation. We bought a new controller card that was highly configurable. But we could not make it work until I was cleaning up a cabinet, and noticed some greenbar printer paper on the floor. It had, deus ex machina, the scrap of info we needed. I felt exactly like you did when yours finally worked. Engineers live for such moments!
This was one of the most amazing videos I've ever seen. Sensational to carry out a cloning project of this size. Congratulations to you and everyone who helped you.
As a senior mechanical engineering student who works at Geek Squad, loves tinkering with modding consoles, RP and building PCs, I really enjoyed following along this process and you are really quite a unique individual for perusing such a niche and rare project! Very impressive that you persisted and how much information you were able to get on literally the first CD drive from the 80s. Really inspires me to keep learning more about electrical engineering and to stay patient while trouble shooting and investigating rare tech issues I am trying to better understand and solve myself!
I am *really* impressed! I worked on contract at Philips in Eindhoven in 1987, using a CM100 with it's controller card in a Philips XT clone machine (the PMS 3100). I'm not sure this was the card I used as I remember it being a full-length 8-bit ISA - don't quote me, though. The project was to assess the stamper wear on a CD production line. I have a vague memory that the same control interface was used on early LaserDisc players, which later went over to SCSI interfaces. Well done - I admire your persistence.
you're always great about providing shout outs and sources. your effort isn't to be discounted but the interconnectedness of the internet makes things like this work and you honestly never know where this sort of information is going to lead other people, i've taken some weird things from people for projects haha
Seriously, well done! Not only for taking on the challenge to recreate the card but also document the entire process. Really sets a precedent and inspiration for the feasibility of reverse engineering lost tech in the community. Also really jealous now of all the fun I missed out on in the streams, I should have stayed awake for at least one.
I have to congratulate you on some top tier technical archaeology! Seeing the emotion when it was working on the (replayed) live stream in this video put a genuine smile on my face, I'm really happy for you bud.
It was truly awesome to see your reaction and payoff to all that hard work. There's few of us that make it through the gauntlet when it comes to challenges like this. This is an experience to cherish. I am a proud supporter of all your retro adventures!
Fantastic story telling. I've never seen your channel and had no context for the project, but I was hooked. Your excitement when it worked was worthy of an Oscar. Congrats!!
The amount of commitment this guy has is immesurable. Seeing your reaction when it worked was priceless. You sir, definitely deserve a medal. You and all those people who helped make it happen are legends in my book.
These days we dont even use CD drives anymore. It was however very interesting following your huge work back-engineering this very rare ISA CD i/o card. I still have some multi i/o (and other type) ISA cards laying around simply because I've been too lazy over the years to clear out my workshop. It's been more than 20y's I last fooled around with my old IBM 286's. Thanks for the video - you almost got me hooked on retro computing 😉
This has been one of the most inspirational videos (about persistence and resolution) I've seen in a long while! The amount of effort put into this project is just unreal!!
I am more than impressed, both by your engineering and your stamina! Your helpers deservedly were generously thanked by you, yet it was you that carried the load.
Congratulations on all of your hard work paying off. During the early 80’s to 1992 I worked at an early PC / clone shop that was also an electronic engineering shop. Seeing this video makes me wish I’d have kept all of the I/O boards we had for misc scanners, plotters, cd roms, external HD’s etc. we had boxes full along with manuals, dongles and such. Who knew just how valuable some would be someday. On the engineering side I got to lay out pcb, and program EPROMs too. Those were interesting days.
Bloody hell! I used to work in PCB production and can say this is one hell of an achievement. My boss used to do something similar except he reverse engineered an old CNC controller from 1973 and made it work in an XT PC running DOS 2.X something. Absolutely amazing and congratulations on your achievement.
As an EE who has done competitive analysis I'm pretty blown away you cloned this card from pictures. I would not be confident that were possible. I've had a difficult time just deconstructing products, let alone clone them.
My first CD ROM drive was a Mitsumi 1.5x speed that IIRC came with its own card and drivers. It had a plastic caddy that you would place the CD in so it became a square disk and then you inserted it into the drive. It was in a home brew 386DX50 PC. No affordable internet (I did have a 1200bps modem and ludicrous British Telecom per minute charges for BBS). So getting magazine cover disks packed with shareware and game demos was great.
This drive is 10 years earlier ! Mitsumi 1994 model you bought, You needed the ISA I/F card, flat cable to the drive, same issues as here! later models used the IDE interface
This was an insanely wild ride. Congrats on everything and as many hats as I could possibly muster off to you for documenting everything and open sourcing this. *looking at you prototype game collectors*
Very very well done sir! I had one of the original 19-inch rack-mountable re-writeable SCSI Philips drives. it would only work successfully with adapted SCSI DOS drivers, and it was only a single-speed drive! The CDROM blanks were the old-style gold sputtered polycarbonate discs, that cost around $50 dollars apiece... Sadly I made a few very expensive coffee coasters several times... The drive was very expensive and cost around $5000 dollars back in the early 90s!
I understood almost nothing, but the fact that it was a wild ride and I'm left excited and happy for you man, great work, keep doing that which you enjoy
That's fricken amazing, How did you not cry?? I would have. So much hard work, so many hours, so much research, so many disappointments and heart ache and the mental stress of it all. Wow..YOU DID IT MAN!!!!..Well done. Philips need to flick you some sign of appreciation for your dedication to one of their rare legacy items.. Lets make this thing viral and get some acknowledgment for your dedication.
My family had a Magnavox CDD 461 back in the day. We were the coolest kids in the trailer park (for real). Very few people in our poor Louisiana town even had a CD audio drive, and here we were playing games off of a CD. This video brought back some fantastic memories. Thanks man. And great work.
I got excited for you watching this. Wow, what a great accomplishment after a long and arduous journey. The more difficult the journey, just makes the satisfaction of completion that much more rewarding. Great story. This is the first video I've seen of yours. Kudos to you for giving props out to the people who helped you along the way and... kudos to them as well for lending their knowledge.
Absolutely awesome! Great job sticking with the original design. I've had to replicate existing in-house designs in Kicad at an old job and it was definitely a frustrating process over designing something from scratch, but amazing seeing your success with it and reducing risk by sticking with something that's already a tried and true design. Great work, so awesome to see it live!
The whole "I have something cool and I'm not gonna share! Neener neener!" attitude really grinds my gears. I was watching another channel recently (Necroware) where they wanted to clone the custom IC that is needed to add Creative Music System (CMS) support to SoundBlaster 2.0 cards. Someone in the community reverse engineered the logic and came up with a set of equations that could be programmed into a GAL chip which takes the place of the Creative Labs chip that switches between OPL and CMS. Unfortunately the reverse engineered logic turned out to have some bugs, and only worked on a subset of Sound Blaster cards. The project stalled for a while until one guy claimed that they solved the problem.... but wouldn't release it to the public, except by way of selling their own chips that they made. Anyways, Necroware said "screw you!" and reverse engineered it themselves, releasing it as Open Source. This stuff is getting harder to find by the day, and is threatening to disappear into history, and absolutely should be preserved. People who get in the way of that have their own special circle in Hell as far as I'm concerned. They are the equivalent of those rich old farts who own priceless paintings or manuscripts or whatever and refuse to let them out of their private collections.
Necroware did not say screw you, he asked and OP either didn't reply nor give him the info. Maybe NW complained but I think another forum user said OP did the work if he wants to profit so be it and if Necroware wanted to share his own work he could. So NW learned and did it better than OP
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 No, that's not capitalism; he's not investing capital in an enterprise for the purpose of getting a return on the investment. Common mistake for a prol, but as a Baron you should know this.
Awesome stuff! A labour of love indeed. That joy was contagious. I didn't know about the CM100, but I DO have a working CD100, and found this fascinating. Well done!
This is really awesome, putting in so much effort to make it not just work for you, but to preserve the knowledge and share it with everyone. Really the internet at its best.
Holy cow, congratulations! I don't know anything about that drive, but I can definitely sympathize with your excitement - I can remember all the times I've tried getting a project to work, and actually jumping up and down when it suddenly powers up. 😂 It's great when everyone helps each other like this and now another piece of computer history is being documented and preserved. Amazing work!
What an amazing project! It makes me wonder how much collectable gear I've helped recycled over the years. I used to work in the old DEC / Compaq office in Schaumburg Illinois, and I helped them clean out literal tons of old gear.
I'm honestly very glad that you managed to get this working, some computer museum might be able to get a CM100 they have in their archives working now (or at least be able to display a replica of the correct card for it next to the drive), thanks to you reverse-engineering it. But the thing that really surprised me was the outro with the dot-matrix printer. I remember when I was a kindergartner, I'd walk past the school's office or computer lab and more often than not you'd hear the tell-tale buzz of the dot matrix printer (that may or may not have been connected to some form of network connecting all those computers, or maybe terminals at the time, I guess it depends). In any case, that's not what surprised me, because you putting your credits on the dot-matrix printer is very much in agreement with the rest of this video. The thing that surprised me was how FAST the dot-matrix printer was going. Either I never saw one going that fast, or I forgot that they COULD go that fast. It surprised me that it is keeping up quite nicely with modern commercially available inkjet printers, such as the mechanism at the core of the print/scan/copy/fax multipurpose machine I have at my house (I don't need the fax machine part, and the scanner part doesn't get used often, but these kind of machines are all you can get these days at the big box stores). And that's with the modern printer set up to "speed and ink savings over print quality" mode, a setting that I don't think exists for the dot matrix printers. Is there some way to modify how fast a dot matrix printer prints other than things that the manufacturer of the printer could have done during the design phase? I guess another way of putting my question is this: Is there a link between the rate of data being transferred to the dot-matrix printer and the speed at which the dot-matrix printer outputs text? Or is it like modern printers where they have a relatively large data buffer that allows them to accept print jobs of some number of pages as fast as the computer can send the data, and then the printer will output that data on paper at a speed that can potentially be configured (but is likely to be fixed at a set speed)? Because I can see that if someone wanted to save money on print supplies, or just preferred an overall darker print, they might somehow tell the printer to strike each dot multiple times, therefore transferring more ink overall (or transferring the same amount of ink but using a print ribbon that has been used one or more times already). I'm totally spit-balling that, I have no idea if any commercially available dot matrix printers were ever made that had such features as either part of the printer or printer driver.
Many dot matrix printers offered several quality settings. The fastest setting made a single pass of the print head for each line. Higher quality settings made multiple, slower, slightly offset passes. I had an 8 pin dot matrix that could produce documents with the same quality as a fancy 24 pin printer, but it took my printer almost 5 minutes per page at maximum quality.
What a ride. I'm 4 months late to the party, but this was an incredibly inspiring journey to watch. I WISH I had been here since the beginning, watching the streams on Twitch. You're an absolute wizard, and your patience and persistence is UNMATCHED from anything else I've seen before. Hope to be as cool as you someday!
Impressive work and dedication. I don't know anything about electronics but I really enjoyed the video and your happy face to discover that after so much work you achieved your goal. Congratulations!
That's an amazing video! Really impressed by the commitment of yourself and everyone who helped. I would never have thought it was possible to do that!
I think I might have missed something. Where did you source the AMD 8251A? Was it NOS or did you find a work-alike? Was the programming for it in the driver code or did it need to be flashed? Pardon my lack of knowledge, just a n00b trying to follow along.
Thank you for documenting your journey. I'm glad you chose to mention that you're a Linux user, and that you chose to use KiCad and make your work available. This project, with its surprising reach, is going into my file of stuff to share to show why, e.g. using KiCad instead of Eagle or Altium is important (not throwing shade at those who need those, just that KiCad's existence is important), just as the first x86/ISA clones and everything in between to Linux are important. Thanks again for sharing.
Fellow nerd here, and though this is not of any particular interest to me, I really loved going down the rabbit hole and seeing the passion and enthusiasm you have for it.
I have no idea why the algorithm brought me here. But the pure joy on your face when you pulled up the Wolf3d Directory was worth it. Fantastic video and congratulations on all your hard work paying off
Just found your channel, and this is the first clip I've seen. I'm impressed by your technical skill, but more so by many other aspects of this project. Your tenacity in sticking with it being one of the key virtues you’ve demonstrated. The main one for me, however, is the altruism. After all this painful development, the frustration you’ve endured, the time and effort you’ve expended, you've not only cracked the task you set yourself, but you're giving away all this hard-earned knowledge to the world for free. You da man! Subscribed? Oh yes.
You are an amazing young man. I am impressed as about 23 years ago I was dabbling in MS DOS, 95 and mostly 98. However never this deep. You are blazing trails with reverse engineering and software operations. You are articulate, slightly comical (very pleasantly welcomed) and very watchable with your detailed explanations You are a nice, intelligent guy with a great demeanor. Keep up the great work! From a 71 year old who still dabbles in tech (just wiped and reloaded one of my office dells the other day with new HDD and win 7) I'd say you are in way deeper than that. Stay with it!
I’ve never heard of or seen your channel, but this is an awesome video. I can only image how you felt after all that work and time spent building the card and having it actually work. The fact that it “just worked” when you least expected it is how this kinda shit works for me, too. Congrats, man!
Nice work! This reminds me of the day I had a summer job and wrote a DOS device driver for an Intel Bubble Memory device. I also had to write a format program to write the critical sectors to let DOS know the true capacity of the unit.
What a great effort! Well done! Your skill and perseverance made this possible! I'm so delighted that it worked, and I would also like to add my thanks to all those that helped! I've never been more excited to see a dir of E:
Wow. Love tech stuff, didn't expect to watch all of this, but man that was a Rollercoaster of emotion. So glad you got it working and great job at portraying your story.
This is an amazing project! Thank you for pushing through and making the design open source. I've been watching almost all of the stream VODs here on UA-cam in the background while working and seeing this video to conclude it all was just pure fun! Well done to everyone involved in this!
The kicker here was the generic error 17 code. You had no way of knowing where to start debugging! But you followed your instincts and in due time ... Once the correct driver was drop kicked into the puzzle... You prevailed! Man my hat if off to you, no matter what anyone says to you riding that high must have been a blast!
Congrats! Your journey was amazing and inspiring. You have also accomplished what was until now, thought to be an art mastered only by select Chinese clone manufactures. By the power invested in me by.... well, lets say watching more than one million technology and computing videos, I bestow upon you the honorary title of Tech Jesus.
Man, I accidentally ran across your video and got addicted to seeing how you would solve this seemingly impossible problem. You've earned yourself a subscriber. Well done!!!
Dude, thank you. I’m 66 years old and have been involved in tech going back to the mid 70s. I started out as a PCB designer on a ComputerVision CADDS1 system. I’m not an engineer but a tinkerer. Your reaction when the CD worked nearly made me cry as I’ve been there. I have reversed engineer (legally) PCBs in the early 80s and I know how it feels to spend an inordinate amount of time on what seems to be an impossible project with little to no documentation. I was part of a “clean room” design group to prove a company had stolen intellectual property. We succeeded in proving it could be done and, yes, a more than a few tears appeared. Since then I have designed many many circuit boards including some in IBM PS/2 computers. I retired now and that was a long time ago but as you told your story it brought back memories and the emotion at the end washed over me. I’m there man. I know how you feel. Subbed and soon Patreon.
I too am a retired EE that just tinkers. When i seen the level of complexity and TIME that had to go into Back Reverse Engineering just this board,was just painful watching as i have done just SMALL,and i mean SMALL compared to this!
I reversed some electronic car chargers controllers.Had to make some Daughter Boards for them cause the DAM parts they're making on them are so DAM SMALL & CLOSE !! Did that also to "BEEF UP" the switching FET witch got all the strain. NO room for it where it was.
I Got a TS 100 NOW!! WHAT a SOLDERING PEN !! If you don't have 1,BUY 1 ! It will change your life,it's that good ! Wish i had that 40 years ago. You can find them on Ebay or the OTHER GUY. I bought a variable KJS-1509,that is a little HOT for that pen. Do "NOT" turn it all the way up!! It's a 24v 2.5A supply,more than needed. Pen MAX is 19V !! 😎
Damm.... you make me cry. I'm 52 now, I use computer like this start from 1990. That year was the 1st time I learn to use computer. An 8088 Mugen Turbo with 2 360kb drive and EGA card. I was upgrade it several times, the most excellent upgrade I was did is install and 1.44MB drive and it using special controller card made by factory named Great Wall, not sure it was Chineese or Taiwan factory. And I dont have it anymore.
"We can’t bust heads like we used to-but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So, I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.”
I hate IP, just make it all open source!
Wish I had money like that
We found some technical manuals for the CM153 and CM100 drive. It's very hard to reach, but we're going to make a full scan of the documentation and share it. I assume you're interested to read this ;). Good job on the clone! We actually own an earlier version of the CM153 card, which is massive (full length of an IBM 5150/5160).
Not too relevant here, but I had a Philips audio cd-player, model CD-160. Remember it was a CD-150 also. I bought mine 1986 or 7, but that were before cdroms. I remember the CD-160 had a robust data-reading said to be 1-beam laser, that handled lots of scratches on cd surface. My (later) wife had a Sony 3-beam laser cdplayer making clearly audible dropouts or track-skipping, where my Philips played without any problem.
Great work!
Cool to see you watch this content too!
TBH the whole time I was thinking "what would the 8-Bit Guy think of this achievement?". It really is phenomenal!
@@magreger He would've stuck a paperclip in the *rare* CD-ROM drive to make it work.
@@Okurka. True...
@@Okurka. Or accidentally snapped the neck off it...
The fact that you literally cloned the ISA Card and actually made it work is... wow. Hats off to you, Sir! We need more people like you, seriously!
Couldn't have said it better myself! Impressive effort!
human triumph
Your reaction to getting the cm100 working put a huge smile on my face, and a huge amount of admiration goes towards everyone who helped you on this, you're all awesome.
Yo...Robinthefox88....Why is UA-cams algo sending us to the same videos?? I'm going out on a limb here....but I am gonna assume that you and I both do not own or even know anyone that owns a CM100 CD-ROM drive. I have seen Men of Culture. A group of individuals usually found in women's sports and yoga videos. But I am starting to think that the real Men of Culture are the ones watching videos like these. I'm not gonna hold you though. I can sometimes be found in those Yoga videos. I'm not proud of this...though...I'm not Not proud of this. Its a battle I fight
Man oh man, literally cloning your own board trace-for-trace and having it work perfectly, would be one of the crowning achievements in anyone's life. Bravo dude. Hell yes.
These past few weeks have been the wildest ride I've had in a long time. I've really enjoyed working with you on this project and I'm so glad we got it working first time. It gives you the warm fuzzies all over....
How you helped him, red book by Philips is my only source.
How to find a PC that support ISA etc, or build USB controller for it?
Can we do update, make it run on USB, i can help you! It's kinda easy!
@@lucasrem through my knowledge of digital logic circuits and an understanding of how the circuit could work and how the different components fit together, along with decompilation of the driver. I have an old 1994 486 computer I use for old ISA stuff. I have considered making a USB LMSI adapter, and yes the hardware would be simpler enough. The hard part is getting the LMSI protocol right.
LOL pathetic
thanks for helping keep old tech alive.
also... I just gotta "the wildest ride I've had in a long time" that's what she said
I started my computer hobby around 1979. At that time, among us computer freaks, the following rule applied: Information must be free for all. This is the only way that great projects can develop quickly. And everyone benefits from it. I'm glad there are still people who share this idea. :)
Many years ago I bought a Philips CM100 drive for $20 at a computer show, although I think it may have been a later SCSI version of the drive. Either way, I was never able to get it working.
it was supported by some I/O isa cards in the days.
We lost all parallel and SCSI on any I/O on PC's
Just an FYI in case it ever becomes necessary in the future: You can import a DXF file onto a layer in KiCAD and draw your traces over it. I do something similar at work when adapting some old designs into our new PCB layout software and it frequently shaves days off the process. I just turn off or delete those layers afterwards.
Wow! This is seriously impressive dedication to your hobby. Reverse engineering hardware cards and circuits based on photos is one jaw drop, but for it to work first time after the correct drivers were found makes my jaw hit the ground. I am in awe...
Well, he has quite some background and help. But on 1000+ wire connections alone, it's a long journey to stay focused. So yes, wow!
Right, this is what impressed me so much! Not just the dedication but the attention to detail that ultimately lead to the card working. Such a great content creator and seems to have an even greater community surrounding.
Clive Shaw
Reverse engineering would be emulating the ISA card on USB, this is more how China people copy Elon chips for EV cars.
@@horstschlawutzke6645 China north Korea way of coping western technology!
How to emulate the card on USB?
@@lucasrem Which driver?
Your expression when it all started to work is priceless! Congratulations! About 30 years ago, my father and I developed a dual sided S-100 bus PC board for the Signetics 2650 8-bit microprocessor. It was one of the first Processor/Coprocessor configurations with the main processor on one card and the coprocessor on another. We laid out the dual sided board using self-adhesive black pads and tracing tape on an opaque piece of glass and then took it to a photography studio to produce negatives. Unlike current multi-level tracing on PC boards, we had to have a number of hardwired jumpers. We took the negatives to a company called Conductive Circuits in Houston and had 100 boards made and sold them under the Slavemaster 2650 name through Byte Magazine. Our company, Victoria Micro Digital sold them as kits or fully assembled, less chip insertion into sockets. Unfortunately, the 8080 microprocessor won out over other 8-bit processors. Good times. The Wild West of early PC development.
Absolutely frigging fantastic job, Shelby. As a collector of vintage CD players, I love the way the CM100 upper case is recycled from a CD101, but finished in a suitable Beige rather than the standard hi-fi silver. It was great to see it working. Should you ever need to replace it, that laser mechanism appears to be a standard CDM1, just repurposed for data instead of audio.
Seeing the video link first time I actually thought this to be a prototype version of the CD101 - would've been an appreciable find as well 😄
It is just unfortunate that all CDM pick-ups are super rare and overpriced these days. Specially the swing-arm ones. I've had a hard time finding a CDM12 and big CD jukeboxes are being tossed just because their CDM3 and CDM4 kicked the bucket.
The best part about this video for me was watching your face light up when it finally worked. I can only imagine the joy you felt and how accomplished you felt in that moment. Awesome video, thanks for sharing! I can only imagine how ecstatic those who helped you were too.
Hands down one of the most amazing computer / electrical videos ive ever seen in my life, could not imagine how satisfying it was to sit there and look at that self-made fully functioning card, truly awesome
It's people like you and Roland who keep the scene alive. I look back on many times I threw stuff out and later regretting it. Unless we keep the old days and legacy computing alive, we will lose our access to the best tech we ever got our hands on. The future is proprietary unless we can stop it. So thank you for all the effort you put in to share it with the world. 💯点。PS awesome shirt!
Lol, the shot at "Prototype game collector", i just imagine the owner of the rare "Marble Madness 2" arcade board getting very strong whistles in his hears
Giving a "thank you" to someone else is very rare to see, so thumbs up for that!
And of course for trying and implementing the project.
A technique I have used is to shine a bright flashlight at an angle under big chips, thus providing illumination through the board and revealing traces as shadows.
Well yes , but if you have the physical PCB, you can always "beep through" the traces to see where they are going to. Working from just pictures is much harder. You have to guess where the trace is going to, then use logical reasoning to see if your guess makes sense. and use any information you can gather from what you can see from pictures. for example without a (visible) via you know two traces cannot cross each other.
But yes, with a dual sided board (just two layers used) its often possible to see the trace on the other side of the board, even when the trace is going under an IC. This was a really impressive, and important feat, to document a historically technical device. Well done!
@@martindejong3974 They were probably mentioning the flashlight bit since he was in contact with the person who provided the pictures. They could shine a light and take a picture for them.
One of those videos where the host may be specialized and interested in completely different things, but their passion makes you excited and cheer for them. Really was fun and inspirational
I'm so glad I disc-overed this channel. It's had it's pits and not every video lands. Videos like this are impressive and sheer witchcraft to us laser mortals.
So punny
That’s a good comment in my red book
The executive function you have to tackle this all-encompassing project while still taking on other projects AND producing videos on them is astonishing. Congratulations
Watching this was a bit of nostalgia for me. I worked for one of the first CD-ROM drive sellers in Canada, and traveled all across Ontario demonstrating the NEC CDR-35 with a number of applications like hazardous materials handling guides and the like...all heavily targeted towards industrial uses. It needed an expensive SCSI interface card on a PC, or a SCSI PCMICA card. When sound cards started coming out with the CD-ROM interfaces on the is when the price of drives really started to drop, and become part of the standard load-out for PC systems.
We got our first 2X CD-ROM drive at the same time as a Sound Blaster Pro, it had an IDE interface on the card, I think. We might have used the hard drive interface for IDE, however.
This vid showed up in my recommended. So glad I tapped on it. Your tenacity was compelling but the sheer raw reaction when it started working was worth every minute of viewing! Congrats and now you have the experience and clones to potentially help someone else!
The sheer glee on your face when the drive starts working is absolutely adorable; thank you for sharing this with us all.
That was the best moment of the entire thing. Loved every second.
@@JustFixIt99 It really was. Nerds are so cute when enthused.
You're lucky that the card you cloned had all its traces visible on the front and back surfaces. As a PCB engineer in the disk drive industry, I regularly dealt with 4-, 6- and 8-layer boards where many traces were on inner layers. We normally designed boards with power and ground planes on the inner layers, but some traces still needed to go on inner layers when dealing with high-density, LSI custom ICs.
Most of these cards are extremely old and it was much more rare to use multi-layer boards back then.
What an incredible story! I preserve old film so I share your frustration with collectors who don’t also preserve. And as a fellow KiCAD user I’m super impressed with what you did to reverse-engineer the board. Congratulations!
I think KiCAD really needs a "trace-over background" mode. I know that I'd use it. Trying to keep up with whatever zoom level it wants to be at must have been a pain in the rear.
I hate stingy collectors. The rareness of the actual content doesn’t matter so much as the rareness of the actual thing. E.g. sharing a ROM dump of a beta copy of a game isn’t going to decrease the value of their physical copy because there’s only so many physical copies. It could even increase the value if more people are made aware of it. You wouldn’t see a digital photo of the Mona Lisa and not want to visit the Louvre because “I’ve already seen it” or hear a digital recording of a band and not want to see them live because “I’ve already heard it”.
What I have just watched is nothing short of heroic! Yes, a bunch of people did help which I want to appreciate, and yes in the end there was luck with that oddball driver but you worked so hard and so well. The fact that your card worked from the start once a proper driver was available, no later rework/bodges, is mindblowing. Props to you, Sir.
This is an *outstanding* milestone for all preservationists. You're part of this glorious history. Well done friend!
I'm a retired EE, but back in the late '80s we had a bunch of equipment running Seagate ST-506 5 Mb Winchester hard drives. Our controller cards were failing from a proprietary chip which would get hot and die. We didn't want to rewrite any of the software on the main system. The original vendor of the controller card no longer has documentation. We bought a new controller card that was highly configurable. But we could not make it work until I was cleaning up a cabinet, and noticed some greenbar printer paper on the floor. It had, deus ex machina, the scrap of info we needed. I felt exactly like you did when yours finally worked. Engineers live for such moments!
This channel is just a pleasure to watch, I really admire that you had enough patience to work this through !
This was one of the most amazing videos I've ever seen. Sensational to carry out a cloning project of this size. Congratulations to you and everyone who helped you.
Hey man. I felt that joy right there with you at the 23:00 mark. Congratulations on your persistence.
As a senior mechanical engineering student who works at Geek Squad, loves tinkering with modding consoles, RP and building PCs, I really enjoyed following along this process and you are really quite a unique individual for perusing such a niche and rare project! Very impressive that you persisted and how much information you were able to get on literally the first CD drive from the 80s. Really inspires me to keep learning more about electrical engineering and to stay patient while trouble shooting and investigating rare tech issues I am trying to better understand and solve myself!
I am *really* impressed! I worked on contract at Philips in Eindhoven in 1987, using a CM100 with it's controller card in a Philips XT clone machine (the PMS 3100). I'm not sure this was the card I used as I remember it being a full-length 8-bit ISA - don't quote me, though. The project was to assess the stamper wear on a CD production line.
I have a vague memory that the same control interface was used on early LaserDisc players, which later went over to SCSI interfaces.
Well done - I admire your persistence.
you're always great about providing shout outs and sources. your effort isn't to be discounted but the interconnectedness of the internet makes things like this work and you honestly never know where this sort of information is going to lead other people, i've taken some weird things from people for projects haha
The sheer joy that I see on your face when you got it working was great.
Alive Alive my god it' ALIVE 😁🤓❤
Best DIR ever. Thanks for sharing that epic journey!
Seriously, well done! Not only for taking on the challenge to recreate the card but also document the entire process. Really sets a precedent and inspiration for the feasibility of reverse engineering lost tech in the community.
Also really jealous now of all the fun I missed out on in the streams, I should have stayed awake for at least one.
I have to congratulate you on some top tier technical archaeology! Seeing the emotion when it was working on the (replayed) live stream in this video put a genuine smile on my face, I'm really happy for you bud.
It was truly awesome to see your reaction and payoff to all that hard work. There's few of us that make it through the gauntlet when it comes to challenges like this. This is an experience to cherish. I am a proud supporter of all your retro adventures!
Fantastic story telling. I've never seen your channel and had no context for the project, but I was hooked. Your excitement when it worked was worthy of an Oscar. Congrats!!
The amount of commitment this guy has is immesurable. Seeing your reaction when it worked was priceless. You sir, definitely deserve a medal. You and all those people who helped make it happen are legends in my book.
I wonder how many people know just how impossible what you did was! This is amazing!
That's so awesome! I love how happy you are when you finally see your design working! Way to go!
These days we dont even use CD drives anymore.
It was however very interesting following your huge work back-engineering this very rare ISA CD i/o card.
I still have some multi i/o (and other type) ISA cards laying around simply because I've been too lazy over the years to clear out my workshop.
It's been more than 20y's I last fooled around with my old IBM 286's.
Thanks for the video - you almost got me hooked on retro computing 😉
This has been one of the most inspirational videos (about persistence and resolution) I've seen in a long while! The amount of effort put into this project is just unreal!!
I am more than impressed, both by your engineering and your stamina! Your helpers deservedly were generously thanked by you, yet it was you that carried the load.
Dude, I missed the whole stream about this. But from one person who's attempted this kind of work, I am so happy for you!
Man, seeing the raw, unfiltered joy as you finally got it to work was awesome. I can tell this really weighed on you and I'm glad it resolved alright.
Congratulations on all of your hard work paying off. During the early 80’s to 1992 I worked at an early PC / clone shop that was also an electronic engineering shop. Seeing this video makes me wish I’d have kept all of the I/O boards we had for misc scanners, plotters, cd roms, external HD’s etc. we had boxes full along with manuals, dongles and such. Who knew just how valuable some would be someday. On the engineering side I got to lay out pcb, and program EPROMs too. Those were interesting days.
Bloody hell!
I used to work in PCB production and can say this is one hell of an achievement.
My boss used to do something similar except he reverse engineered an old CNC controller from 1973 and made it work in an XT PC running DOS 2.X something.
Absolutely amazing and congratulations on your achievement.
Great story! Well done to you and your members and friends for getting this to work - seriously impressive stuff!
As an EE who has done competitive analysis I'm pretty blown away you cloned this card from pictures. I would not be confident that were possible. I've had a difficult time just deconstructing products, let alone clone them.
My first CD ROM drive was a Mitsumi 1.5x speed that IIRC came with its own card and drivers. It had a plastic caddy that you would place the CD in so it became a square disk and then you inserted it into the drive. It was in a home brew 386DX50 PC.
No affordable internet (I did have a 1200bps modem and ludicrous British Telecom per minute charges for BBS). So getting magazine cover disks packed with shareware and game demos was great.
This drive is 10 years earlier !
Mitsumi 1994 model you bought, You needed the ISA I/F card, flat cable to the drive, same issues as here!
later models used the IDE interface
This was an insanely wild ride.
Congrats on everything and as many hats as I could possibly muster off to you for documenting everything and open sourcing this.
*looking at you prototype game collectors*
Very very well done sir! I had one of the original 19-inch rack-mountable re-writeable SCSI Philips drives. it would only work successfully with adapted SCSI DOS drivers, and it was only a single-speed drive! The CDROM blanks were the old-style gold sputtered polycarbonate discs, that cost around $50 dollars apiece... Sadly I made a few very expensive coffee coasters several times...
The drive was very expensive and cost around $5000 dollars back in the early 90s!
I understood almost nothing, but the fact that it was a wild ride and I'm left excited and happy for you man, great work, keep doing that which you enjoy
That's fricken amazing, How did you not cry?? I would have. So much hard work, so many hours, so much research, so many disappointments and heart ache and the mental stress of it all. Wow..YOU DID IT MAN!!!!..Well done. Philips need to flick you some sign of appreciation for your dedication to one of their rare legacy items.. Lets make this thing viral and get some acknowledgment for your dedication.
I just about cried!
My family had a Magnavox CDD 461 back in the day. We were the coolest kids in the trailer park (for real). Very few people in our poor Louisiana town even had a CD audio drive, and here we were playing games off of a CD.
This video brought back some fantastic memories. Thanks man. And great work.
This is such a heartwarming story. Congratulations on this feat of engineering, perseverance and community! 👍🏼
I got excited for you watching this. Wow, what a great accomplishment after a long and arduous journey. The more difficult the journey, just makes the satisfaction of completion that much more rewarding. Great story. This is the first video I've seen of yours. Kudos to you for giving props out to the people who helped you along the way and... kudos to them as well for lending their knowledge.
Very impressive. Some might say why, but I can imagine how great it felt when the CD reveled its directory. A real accomplishment.
Absolutely awesome! Great job sticking with the original design. I've had to replicate existing in-house designs in Kicad at an old job and it was definitely a frustrating process over designing something from scratch, but amazing seeing your success with it and reducing risk by sticking with something that's already a tried and true design. Great work, so awesome to see it live!
The whole "I have something cool and I'm not gonna share! Neener neener!" attitude really grinds my gears. I was watching another channel recently (Necroware) where they wanted to clone the custom IC that is needed to add Creative Music System (CMS) support to SoundBlaster 2.0 cards. Someone in the community reverse engineered the logic and came up with a set of equations that could be programmed into a GAL chip which takes the place of the Creative Labs chip that switches between OPL and CMS. Unfortunately the reverse engineered logic turned out to have some bugs, and only worked on a subset of Sound Blaster cards. The project stalled for a while until one guy claimed that they solved the problem.... but wouldn't release it to the public, except by way of selling their own chips that they made. Anyways, Necroware said "screw you!" and reverse engineered it themselves, releasing it as Open Source. This stuff is getting harder to find by the day, and is threatening to disappear into history, and absolutely should be preserved. People who get in the way of that have their own special circle in Hell as far as I'm concerned. They are the equivalent of those rich old farts who own priceless paintings or manuscripts or whatever and refuse to let them out of their private collections.
Thumb up for necroware, that guy is awesome.
Necroware did not say screw you, he asked and OP either didn't reply nor give him the info. Maybe NW complained but I think another forum user said OP did the work if he wants to profit so be it and if Necroware wanted to share his own work he could. So NW learned and did it better than OP
@@michaelisom4267 I think it was hyperbole.
Capitalism baby.
@@baronvonlimbourgh1716 No, that's not capitalism; he's not investing capital in an enterprise for the purpose of getting a return on the investment. Common mistake for a prol, but as a Baron you should know this.
Awesome stuff! A labour of love indeed. That joy was contagious. I didn't know about the CM100, but I DO have a working CD100, and found this fascinating. Well done!
This is really awesome, putting in so much effort to make it not just work for you, but to preserve the knowledge and share it with everyone. Really the internet at its best.
Right? It's fantastic! I love the internet.
Shelby, your contribution will never be forgotten. Your work has a place in a Museum of Technology somewhere. This. Is. Friggin. AWESOME!
Holy cow, congratulations! I don't know anything about that drive, but I can definitely sympathize with your excitement - I can remember all the times I've tried getting a project to work, and actually jumping up and down when it suddenly powers up. 😂 It's great when everyone helps each other like this and now another piece of computer history is being documented and preserved. Amazing work!
Okay but honestly, the dot matrix print out of your paid subs is awesome
There are truly no words to describe the joy and happiness that I feel for you. You are incredibly talented and a wonderful humanbeing
What an amazing project! It makes me wonder how much collectable gear I've helped recycled over the years. I used to work in the old DEC / Compaq office in Schaumburg Illinois, and I helped them clean out literal tons of old gear.
I'm honestly very glad that you managed to get this working, some computer museum might be able to get a CM100 they have in their archives working now (or at least be able to display a replica of the correct card for it next to the drive), thanks to you reverse-engineering it.
But the thing that really surprised me was the outro with the dot-matrix printer.
I remember when I was a kindergartner, I'd walk past the school's office or computer lab and more often than not you'd hear the tell-tale buzz of the dot matrix printer (that may or may not have been connected to some form of network connecting all those computers, or maybe terminals at the time, I guess it depends).
In any case, that's not what surprised me, because you putting your credits on the dot-matrix printer is very much in agreement with the rest of this video.
The thing that surprised me was how FAST the dot-matrix printer was going.
Either I never saw one going that fast, or I forgot that they COULD go that fast.
It surprised me that it is keeping up quite nicely with modern commercially available inkjet printers, such as the mechanism at the core of the print/scan/copy/fax multipurpose machine I have at my house (I don't need the fax machine part, and the scanner part doesn't get used often, but these kind of machines are all you can get these days at the big box stores).
And that's with the modern printer set up to "speed and ink savings over print quality" mode, a setting that I don't think exists for the dot matrix printers.
Is there some way to modify how fast a dot matrix printer prints other than things that the manufacturer of the printer could have done during the design phase?
I guess another way of putting my question is this:
Is there a link between the rate of data being transferred to the dot-matrix printer and the speed at which the dot-matrix printer outputs text?
Or is it like modern printers where they have a relatively large data buffer that allows them to accept print jobs of some number of pages as fast as the computer can send the data, and then the printer will output that data on paper at a speed that can potentially be configured (but is likely to be fixed at a set speed)?
Because I can see that if someone wanted to save money on print supplies, or just preferred an overall darker print, they might somehow tell the printer to strike each dot multiple times, therefore transferring more ink overall (or transferring the same amount of ink but using a print ribbon that has been used one or more times already). I'm totally spit-balling that, I have no idea if any commercially available dot matrix printers were ever made that had such features as either part of the printer or printer driver.
Many dot matrix printers offered several quality settings. The fastest setting made a single pass of the print head for each line. Higher quality settings made multiple, slower, slightly offset passes. I had an 8 pin dot matrix that could produce documents with the same quality as a fancy 24 pin printer, but it took my printer almost 5 minutes per page at maximum quality.
What a ride. I'm 4 months late to the party, but this was an incredibly inspiring journey to watch. I WISH I had been here since the beginning, watching the streams on Twitch. You're an absolute wizard, and your patience and persistence is UNMATCHED from anything else I've seen before. Hope to be as cool as you someday!
Impressive work and dedication.
I don't know anything about electronics but I really enjoyed the video and your happy face to discover that after so much work you achieved your goal.
Congratulations!
That's an amazing video! Really impressed by the commitment of yourself and everyone who helped. I would never have thought it was possible to do that!
I think I might have missed something. Where did you source the AMD 8251A? Was it NOS or did you find a work-alike? Was the programming for it in the driver code or did it need to be flashed? Pardon my lack of knowledge, just a n00b trying to follow along.
Thank you for documenting your journey. I'm glad you chose to mention that you're a Linux user, and that you chose to use KiCad and make your work available. This project, with its surprising reach, is going into my file of stuff to share to show why, e.g. using KiCad instead of Eagle or Altium is important (not throwing shade at those who need those, just that KiCad's existence is important), just as the first x86/ISA clones and everything in between to Linux are important. Thanks again for sharing.
As someone that is doing this on the regular: I salute you. That's some impressive work! :)
Dude... this is sick. the cloning process, I just can't describe how a challenge it was. I wouldn't even start into a project like that
on windows, you can do a similar transparent overlay thing using the "ontopreplica" software.
Fellow nerd here, and though this is not of any particular interest to me, I really loved going down the rabbit hole and seeing the passion and enthusiasm you have for it.
How did you solve the 8251 problem?
I was able to get some on ebay, but it turns out Jameco has some as well.
I have no idea why the algorithm brought me here. But the pure joy on your face when you pulled up the Wolf3d Directory was worth it. Fantastic video and congratulations on all your hard work paying off
This is impressive. Interesting that the card didn't have a ROM chip on it, I would think that would make it even harder to clone.
ROM chips could be dumped and remade, PALs/GALs would be so much worse to clone
Just found your channel, and this is the first clip I've seen. I'm impressed by your technical skill, but more so by many other aspects of this project. Your tenacity in sticking with it being one of the key virtues you’ve demonstrated. The main one for me, however, is the altruism.
After all this painful development, the frustration you’ve endured, the time and effort you’ve expended, you've not only cracked the task you set yourself, but you're giving away all this hard-earned knowledge to the world for free. You da man! Subscribed? Oh yes.
It could be actually interesting to disassemble/debug the 2.2 driver in order to see what the error 17 means.
stack overflow
Seeing your reaction to the machine working put a HUGE smile on my face.
This was very, very well deserved indeed.
Awesome journey, so glad you decided to take us along with it!
You are an amazing young man. I am impressed as about 23 years ago I was dabbling in MS DOS, 95 and mostly 98.
However never this deep. You are blazing trails with reverse engineering and software operations.
You are articulate, slightly comical (very pleasantly welcomed) and very watchable with your detailed explanations
You are a nice, intelligent guy with a great demeanor. Keep up the great work!
From a 71 year old who still dabbles in tech (just wiped and reloaded one of my office dells the other day with new HDD and win 7) I'd say you are in way deeper than that. Stay with it!
The pure joy at 23:15 is beautiful for any tech fan. Great work mate!
I really respect the effort to never give up. The face you made when it was working was priceless. Keep tinkering on..
I’ve never heard of or seen your channel, but this is an awesome video. I can only image how you felt after all that work and time spent building the card and having it actually work. The fact that it “just worked” when you least expected it is how this kinda shit works for me, too.
Congrats, man!
Nice work! This reminds me of the day I had a summer job and wrote a DOS device driver for an Intel Bubble Memory device. I also had to write a format program to write the critical sectors to let DOS know the true capacity of the unit.
What a great effort! Well done!
Your skill and perseverance made this possible!
I'm so delighted that it worked, and I would also like to add my thanks to all those that helped!
I've never been more excited to see a dir of E:
Wow. Love tech stuff, didn't expect to watch all of this, but man that was a Rollercoaster of emotion. So glad you got it working and great job at portraying your story.
This is an amazing project! Thank you for pushing through and making the design open source. I've been watching almost all of the stream VODs here on UA-cam in the background while working and seeing this video to conclude it all was just pure fun! Well done to everyone involved in this!
The kicker here was the generic error 17 code. You had no way of knowing where to start debugging! But you followed your instincts and in due time ... Once the correct driver was drop kicked into the puzzle... You prevailed! Man my hat if off to you, no matter what anyone says to you riding that high must have been a blast!
Congrats! Your journey was amazing and inspiring. You have also accomplished what was until now, thought to be an art mastered only by select Chinese clone manufactures. By the power invested in me by.... well, lets say watching more than one million technology and computing videos, I bestow upon you the honorary title of Tech Jesus.
Man, I accidentally ran across your video and got addicted to seeing how you would solve this seemingly impossible problem. You've earned yourself a subscriber. Well done!!!