That paper reminds me of my Dad sat at the dining room table late in the evening, scrutinising reams of it that he occasionally brought home from work circa 1990. It never looked like much fun to me!
Sean did a GREAT job running the Midrange Madness exhibit at VCFSE! I wrote that banner printing program in high school (Thornwood H.S.!) in 1984 or so. We had an IBM System/34 in the math department and the school offered programming classes in RPG II, COBOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC on the system. That code has survived all this time to run at VCFSE on a small System/36 machine (from 1984 as well)
It was great getting a chance to finally meet and talk to Adrian at VCF Midwest. I hope you love the LED display. We enjoyed making it. Love the videos as always!
RC25-K - No, it's 26MB! (formatted) cartridge, not 52MB or even 25MB. The RC25 consists of a fixed 26MB platter and a cartridge port for the RC25K you have, that's where the 52MB comes from - it's the total capacity (13MB per side, 1+1 platters so 4 sides total). The product sheet I found on it is from 1983 (not 93) and says the fixed and cartridge platter/heads are identical, even seek speed are the same (apparently it uses pressurised air to purge the cartridge before spinning it up!). This is only the cartridge so I guess it's possible THAT the specific cartridge is from '93 - or that this was when the head crash was! The sales brochure mentions that it was available in "desktop" format and as 6U rack mount with one or two RC25 (side by side). This was standard practice, pretty much all 8" fixed disks were intended to be mounted two side-by-side in 19" racks. The video PCB's had Tang Nano 9K TN VDP printed on them - Tang Nano is a series of cheap chinese FPGA development boards similar to the Pico in size. The 9K ($12) has 8640 LUT4 cells (and lots of other things including flash and memory), looks like it recreates the TMS9118A inside the FPGA and probably output HDMI directly (via the connector on the 9K) and with the extra board marked VGA it provides a VGA compatible signal? Perhaps those are getting rare. I have a Tang Nano 4K that I bought for a "cheap screen latency tester" project, less LUT's but includes a "hard" Cortex M3 processor (the 9K doesn't have a hard processor but you can use part of the larger LUT4 budget on a "soft" core if it needs one).
The Apple III disk drive had a pass-through so that you could daisy chain up to three external drives to the machine, whereas the Disk ][ had no pass-through capability and each drive had to be hooked up to its own pin header on the controller card (of course, the later UniDisk and Disk 5.25 had a daisy chain, but you could only hook a maximum of two 5.25" drives to the 5.25" controller, or two 3.5" and two 5.25" drives on the IIGS). The other thing the Disk /// did that the Disk ][ didn't was have a line which could sense when a diskette was changed. I don't really recall SOS doing anything about it, but I must admit that, back in the day, I didn't really swap disks without a reason 🙂 The Disk ][ and Disk /// drive mechanisms were the same, with the analog board being the only difference. As I recall, either the left 20 pins or the right 20 pins (I forget which) of the Disk III's 26-pin connector was the same as the Disk ]['s 20-pin connector, so you could hook one disk drive up to the other system, or at least it was possible to hook up a Disk ][ to an Apple /// as the last drive in the daisy chain. I understand that the Disk ///, aimed at the business user, was more expensive and that it wasn't that uncommon for people to do this back in the day. Interestingly enough, before Apple actually released the Disk /// in its Apple ///-themed plastic case, they put Disk ///s in mostly-ordinary Disk ][ enclosures (with the same color scheme, front bezel, and "disk ][" label on the bezel); the only differences were the that the back metal piece of the drive enclosure had a cut-out for the daisy chain connector, the label on the back said "connect only to Apple /// floppy disk connector", and the provided metal sticker (the same size and shape as a Disk ][ "Drive 1" or "Drive 2" metal sticker) said "Apple ///" above the drive number. I understand that these were mostly sent out to developers who were working on writing software prior to the Apple ///'s release.
Single sided quad density disks are usefull for the Commodore 8050 dual floppy drive (single sided precursor to the 8250). Dual density disks often but not always worked, especially higher quality ones in the mid 80s worked totally fine. For a 1.2mb drive you'd need a high density disk, which is slightly different from a quad density in using a different formulation for the magnetic material, allowing for more data per track, and so supports higher capacity than a quad density disk.
Exactly and a normal 360k DD drive cannot use these "Quad" density disks as the drive needs to be able to support it like the PET drives do. IIRC quad density was the same basic media as DD but was certified to work in these "Quad" drives. I remember using regular DD disks in HS formatted in the PET 8050 drives and usually had no problems.
What a wonderful dive into a bunch of cool stuff. I loved the WiFi retromodem so much that I just purchased an old Hayes 1200 baud modem on the fleabay and inquired about purchasing the retromodem as well. Thank you!
5:19 - I used one of these pulled from a motherboard to fix an AWE32 SIMM expansion. I just carefully dremelled them apart and soldered them individually.
VCFMW was one of the greatest events I have ever attended! So glad I took the time to figure out how to get a printout of my selfie. I am still working through my haul. Great meeting you Adrian and love that you included your fan pics at the end of your video that was a neat surprise!
The Digital Equipment RX50 drive found in the DEC Rainbow and Professional 3XX series is a dual drive that uses 5.25" Single Sided Quad Density disks. Maybe they are certifying it would work with those systems?
24:17 Around 1999, I got a 2nd-hand IBM PS/2 386 tower that had a 2.88MB floppy drive but I never actually had any 2.88MB discs to use with it. I also recall it being the quietest 3.5" floppy drive ever, like you'd have to put your ear right up to it and you could barely hear it changing tracks. I really miss that PC now! It also had dual ENORMOUS 80MB MFM hard drives, and the sound that beast made when you powered it on, it was downright musical!
I have several NOS British Telecom-branded Quad Density 5.25" disks, some of them are branded for their "Merlin" computer systems, I have no experience with them, but, I did put together an external disk drive setup to use said disks on my Amiga (which formats to their 880k capacity), for no reason other than "because I could", they physically don't seem any different to double density disks, but I'm no expert in that, they could indeed be a different grain of ferrous material versus DD or HD disks... :)
The green bar paper is another fun memory. My first ever computing experience involved an IBM Selectric terminal with an APL typing ball. You communicated with the APL 360 system on this teletype! It was FREAKING AWESOME. When I run my APL software now (Dyalog) I use a green bar background for my terminal session!
Nice haul and many interesting things. The Tang Nano mentioned on the VGA adapter board with the DAC ladder is a low cost development board for the chinese Gowin FPGA. I think this project does require some Verilog or VHDL magic to work.
That's right -- it has some kind of a module that actually replaced the 9918 entirely, and gives you that nice pixel perfect display via a ladder-DAC. Neat!
I appreciate you talking to me about my Zenith ZTX-11 terminal (Later found the ZTX-11 is just a ZTX-10 with RS232 port). It was like I had a very brief personalized episode with cameos from Robin and June. No one wanted to take it with them though! Ah well. :)
Yeah, I am actually in Sacramento, and we have none of those electronic surplus places - but in San Jose, all of the electronic surplus places have now closed. RIP - Halted, Weirdstuff Warehouse, and all the others too.
On the "computer cassette" thing, I'm not sure if this was the reason they made these, but C90s(and some extra cheap C60s) would stretch over time and become unreadable after a while due to the tape stretching, because of the thin material used to get that much tape on the reel. I assume those will be extra thick 10 minute tapes. Source: Losing a lot of my ill-gotten C64 games because I figured using C90s was the way to go since I could get 3-4 games per side. It wasn't just me since it was discussed in magazines, too, with warnings not to use C90s or extra cheap C60s for saving your programs.
The TapeCart SD is worth trying if you've not used one before. It's limited in the formats it can use, but it's lightning fast at loading PRG files. Not like actually loading from tape at all.
From what I understand, it injects a small fast load executable and then loads the rest of the file at incredible speed. Since it relies on executable code, I would expect it to only be compatible with the Commodore 64. Vice can emulate it, so you can test how it works before you buy or make.
I think the DEC Rainbow used single-sided quad-density 5.25 floppies. The DECmate also used them. Ken Olsen always over-engineered everything. I heard he would push prototypes off his desk and if they did not work after that he sent it back to the engineering team until they made one that passed his test.
I have made several wind chimes from dead disk drives. A typical 3.5in hard disk, you can use the platters and spindle hub rings, and the arms to create a complete 3 level wind chime. If there was some way to post pictures, I would include such.
I had a Hayes Smartmodem 300 when I was a kid and used it with my Apple //c to dial in to Compuserv. I absolutely LOVED it even though it was super slow, even back in the days. The fastest modem on the market at the time was a 9600 baud which was super expensive, and even the 1200 was out of reach for me, so I had settle for the 300. But that Hayes Smartmodem project is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING and I hope they take it mainstream. I would definitely buy one. I would complete the setup I had back in the 1984.
In the mid 70s, Hamleys of London had a 'selfie' station that used a video camera and output an image consisting entirely of ASCII characters which was printed on a T shirt. I have no idea where mine went, but I treasured it when I was a kid.
Thank you Adrian. My first real full-time job was actually on a printing press producing "pyjamas paper" like the one you received. Great stuff! Great video; as always.
Love that modem connection noise. I remember my parents had a modem that looked very similar to that Hayes, though for some reason I think it ran at 14.4k.
Speaking of hard drive platters, a cool thing we do at work is to make clocks out of them. Stowed away under the floor in the data center (which back in the day used to house the mainframe) we've got a bunch of platters someone extracted from the old IBM disc packs - and every time one of the mainframers retires we make one into a clock then get everyone on the staff to sign it.
If I remember correctly, the Tang Nano 9K you showed around +52:00 is actually an FPGA replacement for the TMS VDP that actually does real VGA output. It is fully compatible with the original but has some additional features.
Lots of cool stuff. I found out there was a vintage show about an hour or so drive to the west of me about a couple of weekends ago. I didn't know about until after the event. I'd love to get to a show like that as I have a love of the old tech. The picture of "you" with Jeri was a fun one.
Would love to see an episode using the Wi-Fi Hayes conversion hooked up to your PC/AT in full DOS ANSI BBS glory ... show the kiddos what the pre-internet "online" days were like!
Thanks for the great review! Can you please add back in the part you skipped over where you use AT+CONFIG to connect the Retromodem 1200 to the WiFi network?
The name of the large surplus store was Weird Stuff Warehouse. It was in Sunnyvale California and I have fond memories of walking around looking at all the random computer and electronics stuff. It was a sad day when they closed.
Adrian you have to make a show in the coming winter where you really check all this stuff out, no excuses possible. I can't get my 48-hour day either, deal with it😀
Love the old modems! It was possible to reuse the same phone call with newer modems similar to how you describe by disabling carrier detection (ie. enabling blind dialling) with the ATX0 command, and then dialling a random number (just using ATDT with no args worked from memory) and having your friend type ATA to answer. Both ends would just hang up their handsets when their modem picked up the line and started communicating, and you'd get your data connection. When you wanted to resume the voice call, each end would just picked up their handsets and the modems would disconnect due to noise on the line (or you'd do the +++ ATH operation you described). It was important that the call originator picked up first, else you'd lose the call if their modem hangs up. My friend and I would use this method to re-use a single $0.25 call all weekend while we were building our BBS back in the mid 90's and avoid racking up our parents' telephone bill :)
2:27 Hey, it's you and ConMega...and I don't recognize the 3rd person, but I'm certain he's amazingly cool like the two of you, very awesome! Oh, it's Josh! Yes!
I have several boxes of 5,25" / 96TPI disks I bought during my time at university. The data center sold these for a good prize and I used them with 5,25" 80 track DD drives as a cheaper alternative to the 3,5" disks on the Amiga...
That's fun y seeing the shrink wrapped C-10 tape yesterday (before watching this video) i was "playing" with my TI99/4a and trying out the TI "Program Recorder" and ti branded tape recorder and in the box was an unopened C-10 cassette, popped it in, saved and retrieved some BASIC programs no problem.
27:58 the computer specific tapes were a thicker substrate and a ferric oxide formulation that worked the same or better than audio tape for the range of frequencies in the encoding (meaning: it *could* work better, but usually was just less optimized for anything outside the box... meaning cheaper). That C-10 there is ten minutes long, see how much of the reel a modern cassette tape takes for ten minutes of play time versus that one. Audio tapes are usually MUCH thinner.
My best friend in high school had a TRS-80 (before it was called a Model 1) with two disk drives. One was the standard 35 track SS/SD drive, and the other was a single sided 77-track drive. While the 77 track drive would format the cheaper SS/SD disks, there would often be errors. Later on, when the 360K DS/DD diskettes became standard, the old 77 track drive usually had no problems with those... even when notched to "flip" them.
In my experience, those 30-pin SIMM slots can prove handy to simply stick into a pair of SIPP sockets (which are, if paired, often spaced perfectly for such a dual SIMM slot) then use regular SIMM30 sticks without the hassle of wiggling those SIPP sticks into/out of the sockets, or making (soldering) them should you not have SIPP modules. Edit. And yeah, the same here - I used simple DD floppies in a 720k drive, formatted to 720k, they worked just fine. Not that I could get QD disks anywhere. (I had a Videoton TVC back then, a Hungarian Z80-based micro. That can use regular 40-cyl 360k drives too and didn't really had any program that actually needed 720k - so it works ok with the much more abundant 360k drives that we used in PCs/XTs.)
Your vids always bring back fun memories! I actually had an Epson HX-20 - the first ever laptop - 20x4 screen yet! - which I bought at the Ga. Tech bookstore for $150 bucks. It came with a 300 baud acoustic modem! I could dial into work for our IBM AT computer which had an 8-port Digiboard and a modem pool. Presto! I could do basic sysadmin tasks with a beer in front of me on Saturday morning :) Ah youth! The breakfast of champions!
back when I was taking programming in high school we had TRS-80's with a 5 1/4 360k drives, we would use a hole punch and exact-o blade to make our disks double sided, the drive wasn't of course but eject the disk, flip it over and reinsert and they all worked just fine.
The DEC RC25K-DC is actually 26MB, not 52MB. Those are specifically used as removable large capacity storage for VAX and PDP11 systems equipped with the RC25 drive. The reason people think it's 52MB is because it's a 26MB removable platter ADDITION to a fixed 26MB platter in the RC25 itself. The PDP11 was still supported into the 90's, and the VAX 8000's would've been fairly current (DEC was still actively supporting OpenVMS on the 8000's at least as late as 1995.) It's only usable in the RC25, and in many systems, the removable platter was typically used as a backup device or a mirrored system disk. IIRC, the actual usable capacity of a 26MB platter would be 25MB when using ODS2 under VMS. But it has been a few decades. ;)
I recognize that Smartmodem 1200 case design. It was the first modem I bought, probably in '87, attached to my //e. I had a few models before eventually getting my sysop deal USR dual standard, which I still have, with the not for resale emblem riveted to the shell.
27:30 I had some of those manual-shutter floppies you speak of, in a luggable computer my aging memory can never remember the name of... Escort 2100... Maybe it was the 2200 because it had two drives. Anyway, its disks were physically rejected by a PC 3.5" drive. 27:55 the claim I remember about the "data" cassettes was that they were "normal" cassettes but on a slightly thicker (thus necessitating the short length) carrier so they wouldn't stretch as much with use.
I was about to say exactly the same thing and you beat me to it. :) The Commodore 8050 was single sided, quad density and Commodore 8250 and SFD-1001 were double sided, quad density.
2:33 our high school in the ‘burbs of Chicago back in the 90’s had a bunch of 3270 terminals connected to a central mainframe. I know the people in the office had them at their desks. And also we used them for accessing the card catalog in the library. In grade school, I remember like the principal had a PS/2, like a 55SX or 30 sized one, in her office. I don’t remember if anyone else had a computer or not. Maybe the librarian? Though, we had card catalogs back then, not computerized either.
yeah, the ATMEGA328P is "not recommended for new designs" on the microchip website. So effectively it's discontinued. But I believe the ATMEGA328PB is intended as an (almost) drop-in replacement. (IThe pinout is slightly different, due to some added I/O, but I think it can run unmodified software for the 328P.)
Atmel app note AT15007 covers migration. It says “The code that is available for your existing ATmega328 variants will continue to work on the new ATmega328PB device.”
The PicoMem is the sort of thing I was imagining should be possible. It would increase the complexity but for emulating an IO device with a predefined IO range it should be relatively easy to add a wait state insertion circuit to enable reliable usage on faster systems.
Hi, Thanks, no need for additionnal circuit. Any i/o and memory Addresses are decoded and IOCHRDY react accordingly. What kind of émulation are you looking for ?
@@freddyvretrozone2849 I didn't realize wait state insertion was working, I figured it wasn't and this was causing the issues when running the bus faster. As for functions I'd actually want, I have no idea beyond disk, network, sound, and video. Some of these would need more pins, is it possible to add another Pico (along with a high-speed interconnect) to enable more features? IIRC you said the PSRAM and SD are on the same SPI controller, so hopefully it's easy to add a second Pico as just another SPI device. And as an eventual stretch goal, a PCMCIA version would also be nice. Obviously this would be much more of a niche product so there's no need for it to be a priority.
Kévin did the PCMCIA version. Vidéo Pico is more tricky. You was right, it does not work because the emulated RAM used for disk access has no wait states and the pico does not answer fast enaugh. Not because the pico is too slow, this part of the code can be optimized.... (I never tested on a 386)
IBM had 3270 Cluster Controllers which used 2.4-MB 5.25-inch floppies, right before switching to 3.5-inch drives. For 3.5-inch 2.88-MB drives, also only seen them in IBM equipment.
It's been a LONG time since I've seen that green-bar paper. Back in the '90s, the company I work at used to run these lengthy printouts weekly for the master schedule of all the orders coming through the system. If you had a printout headed for the same printer and the 'crutch report' (as it was called) was running, well, you had to remember to come back later and hope that the report was done by then. :)
The "Hayes" of modem fame was an attorney in the Atlanta area who was a member of a home computer club, and got frustrated at the lack of affordable modems, and created the company that designed and built them.
I spent a good chunk of time at VCFMW taking stuff from the free pile. That got a little more interesting when a swarm of bees started guarding the outdoor portion.
Adrian you have to check out the High Speed Tape drive in the Coleco Adam computer. The tape is sectored so it will auto ff/rr to the area where your file is and load it.
Wonder you you could do a builder series for all pcb's and feature each of them as their videos. Many of these prodject boards are really exciting and some could use the extra exposure. I also enjoy watching things being assembled.
I used to buy packs of SSDD disks and use a slot cutter to convert them to DSDD disks. Double the density double the storage space at half or slightly more than half the price of full blown DSDD disks. Verbatim ones last an eternity, I still have C64 programs I wrote to them in 1988 on a Commodore 1541 drive using my C64 and they still work perfectly today. The slot cutter would cut a write protect slot in the opposite side of the diskette.
Every school i know that used such computers did this to save money. It seemed ridiculous companies wouldn't bring the price down, especially qhen they were all superceded by 3.5 floppies, anyways!
The rumor about the ATMEGA328P being discontinued is *partially* true. Atmel (Microchip) has shifted the DIP package version to "not recommended for new designs" meaning that they intend to end-of-life that particular version of the part at some point in the future. They are still manufacturing it, it is still purchasable, it is still a supported part, but they are trying to tell designers "don't use this particular version for new products as the device might not be available for sale relatively soon." The "B" version of the chip (ATMEGA328PB) is the same chip but in a quad-flatpack form, as found on many Arduinos nowadays, and is the version still marked as "in production" by Microchip. It's surface-mount, so it needs to be soldered down and can't easily be socketed, but still a pretty easy SMD solder job if you have a little practice.
Actually, none of the 328P packages are recommended for new designs so it's not only the DIP version but the DIP version is the only one without a substitute as the 328PB is only available in QFN/QFP packages.
That PicoMEM project, I've been thinking about something like that using the DB-10 (The Mister FPGA board) and daughterboards that could work with PCI and AGP, with outputs audio and video, likely supporting both analog over VGA and digital HDMI. This could be used for audio and video cards that are beginning to get hard to obtain, and allow for a single system to hardware emulate many cards using a single slot. This could help make 90's and early 2000's retro PC gaming accessible to a much broader audience.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
The High school green-bar printout at the start was from Sean Ellis! (Hi Sean!)
That paper reminds me of my Dad sat at the dining room table late in the evening, scrutinising reams of it that he occasionally brought home from work circa 1990. It never looked like much fun to me!
we called it watermelon paper.
Sean did a GREAT job running the Midrange Madness exhibit at VCFSE! I wrote that banner printing program in high school (Thornwood H.S.!) in 1984 or so. We had an IBM System/34 in the math department and the school offered programming classes in RPG II, COBOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC on the system. That code has survived all this time to run at VCFSE on a small System/36 machine (from 1984 as well)
LOL that's my son's name. But not him of course.
I think i really need to fix up my old Epson FX80...
It was great getting a chance to finally meet and talk to Adrian at VCF Midwest. I hope you love the LED display. We enjoyed making it. Love the videos as always!
It looks amazing!
Loved hangin' out with ya, Adrian's the absolute NICEST person ever. Proud to support Adrian via Patreon now too... !! See ya next time around!!!
16:25 That dial on sounded about right for 1200 baud. No compression or other fancy options which took time to negotiate at the higher baud rates.
Oh man, I love that modem replacement board, the connection sounds when you dialled up the BBS, so awesome!
there's a free version called Noisy Zimodem
The episode number is also *NICE!* I can't help myself with *that* number 😋
RC25-K - No, it's 26MB! (formatted) cartridge, not 52MB or even 25MB. The RC25 consists of a fixed 26MB platter and a cartridge port for the RC25K you have, that's where the 52MB comes from - it's the total capacity (13MB per side, 1+1 platters so 4 sides total). The product sheet I found on it is from 1983 (not 93) and says the fixed and cartridge platter/heads are identical, even seek speed are the same (apparently it uses pressurised air to purge the cartridge before spinning it up!). This is only the cartridge so I guess it's possible THAT the specific cartridge is from '93 - or that this was when the head crash was!
The sales brochure mentions that it was available in "desktop" format and as 6U rack mount with one or two RC25 (side by side). This was standard practice, pretty much all 8" fixed disks were intended to be mounted two side-by-side in 19" racks.
The video PCB's had Tang Nano 9K TN VDP printed on them - Tang Nano is a series of cheap chinese FPGA development boards similar to the Pico in size. The 9K ($12) has 8640 LUT4 cells (and lots of other things including flash and memory), looks like it recreates the TMS9118A inside the FPGA and probably output HDMI directly (via the connector on the 9K) and with the extra board marked VGA it provides a VGA compatible signal? Perhaps those are getting rare.
I have a Tang Nano 4K that I bought for a "cheap screen latency tester" project, less LUT's but includes a "hard" Cortex M3 processor (the 9K doesn't have a hard processor but you can use part of the larger LUT4 budget on a "soft" core if it needs one).
Contrary to what you said, I think that all that disk media is revolutionary,
Upvoted because I hope this is a pun.
Thanks!
That's a fun setup at 49:30 where you pointed the camera at the monitor but on the side we could see another camera's view of you!
I had one of those 2.88 mb drives on a PS/2 8595 back in the day, this thing was real for sure.
I am still using ED drives on a Sinclair QL. ED disks formats to 3.2MB with either the Gold card or SuperGold card from Miracle Systems Ltd.
I love when a SMMC is more than an hour long. 🙂
SMMC stands for Super Maxi Mail Call.
@@AndrewTubbiolo Super Mini Mail call ;-)
It's mini in the same way a "minicomputer" is mini.
The Apple III disk drive had a pass-through so that you could daisy chain up to three external drives to the machine, whereas the Disk ][ had no pass-through capability and each drive had to be hooked up to its own pin header on the controller card (of course, the later UniDisk and Disk 5.25 had a daisy chain, but you could only hook a maximum of two 5.25" drives to the 5.25" controller, or two 3.5" and two 5.25" drives on the IIGS).
The other thing the Disk /// did that the Disk ][ didn't was have a line which could sense when a diskette was changed. I don't really recall SOS doing anything about it, but I must admit that, back in the day, I didn't really swap disks without a reason 🙂
The Disk ][ and Disk /// drive mechanisms were the same, with the analog board being the only difference. As I recall, either the left 20 pins or the right 20 pins (I forget which) of the Disk III's 26-pin connector was the same as the Disk ]['s 20-pin connector, so you could hook one disk drive up to the other system, or at least it was possible to hook up a Disk ][ to an Apple /// as the last drive in the daisy chain. I understand that the Disk ///, aimed at the business user, was more expensive and that it wasn't that uncommon for people to do this back in the day.
Interestingly enough, before Apple actually released the Disk /// in its Apple ///-themed plastic case, they put Disk ///s in mostly-ordinary Disk ][ enclosures (with the same color scheme, front bezel, and "disk ][" label on the bezel); the only differences were the that the back metal piece of the drive enclosure had a cut-out for the daisy chain connector, the label on the back said "connect only to Apple /// floppy disk connector", and the provided metal sticker (the same size and shape as a Disk ][ "Drive 1" or "Drive 2" metal sticker) said "Apple ///" above the drive number. I understand that these were mostly sent out to developers who were working on writing software prior to the Apple ///'s release.
Single sided quad density disks are usefull for the Commodore 8050 dual floppy drive (single sided precursor to the 8250). Dual density disks often but not always worked, especially higher quality ones in the mid 80s worked totally fine.
For a 1.2mb drive you'd need a high density disk, which is slightly different from a quad density in using a different formulation for the magnetic material, allowing for more data per track, and so supports higher capacity than a quad density disk.
Exactly and a normal 360k DD drive cannot use these "Quad" density disks as the drive needs to be able to support it like the PET drives do. IIRC quad density was the same basic media as DD but was certified to work in these "Quad" drives. I remember using regular DD disks in HS formatted in the PET 8050 drives and usually had no problems.
What a wonderful dive into a bunch of cool stuff. I loved the WiFi retromodem so much that I just purchased an old Hayes 1200 baud modem on the fleabay and inquired about purchasing the retromodem as well. Thank you!
5:19 - I used one of these pulled from a motherboard to fix an AWE32 SIMM expansion. I just carefully dremelled them apart and soldered them individually.
So glad to see the Ram running! I love activity lights more than RGB… lol so practical! :)
VCFMW was one of the greatest events I have ever attended! So glad I took the time to figure out how to get a printout of my selfie. I am still working through my haul. Great meeting you Adrian and love that you included your fan pics at the end of your video that was a neat surprise!
Gotta love the creativity of the retro community.
The Digital Equipment RX50 drive found in the DEC Rainbow and Professional 3XX series is a dual drive that uses 5.25" Single Sided Quad Density disks. Maybe they are certifying it would work with those systems?
I remember there was a Sharp XT system that used the 720k disks, and an IBM PS2 that used the 2.8 m floppy.
24:17 Around 1999, I got a 2nd-hand IBM PS/2 386 tower that had a 2.88MB floppy drive but I never actually had any 2.88MB discs to use with it. I also recall it being the quietest 3.5" floppy drive ever, like you'd have to put your ear right up to it and you could barely hear it changing tracks. I really miss that PC now! It also had dual ENORMOUS 80MB MFM hard drives, and the sound that beast made when you powered it on, it was downright musical!
4:10 - Oops! The software didn't allow for non-square pixels! note the printed photo is 'squished'
I have several NOS British Telecom-branded Quad Density 5.25" disks, some of them are branded for their "Merlin" computer systems, I have no experience with them, but, I did put together an external disk drive setup to use said disks on my Amiga (which formats to their 880k capacity), for no reason other than "because I could", they physically don't seem any different to double density disks, but I'm no expert in that, they could indeed be a different grain of ferrous material versus DD or HD disks... :)
The green bar paper is another fun memory. My first ever computing experience involved an IBM Selectric terminal with an APL typing ball. You communicated with the APL 360 system on this teletype! It was FREAKING AWESOME. When I run my APL software now (Dyalog) I use a green bar background for my terminal session!
Nice haul and many interesting things. The Tang Nano mentioned on the VGA adapter board with the DAC ladder is a low cost development board for the chinese Gowin FPGA. I think this project does require some Verilog or VHDL magic to work.
That's right -- it has some kind of a module that actually replaced the 9918 entirely, and gives you that nice pixel perfect display via a ladder-DAC. Neat!
I appreciate you talking to me about my Zenith ZTX-11 terminal (Later found the ZTX-11 is just a ZTX-10 with RS232 port). It was like I had a very brief personalized episode with cameos from Robin and June. No one wanted to take it with them though! Ah well. :)
Yeah, I am actually in Sacramento, and we have none of those electronic surplus places - but in San Jose, all of the electronic surplus places have now closed. RIP - Halted, Weirdstuff Warehouse, and all the others too.
On the "computer cassette" thing, I'm not sure if this was the reason they made these, but C90s(and some extra cheap C60s) would stretch over time and become unreadable after a while due to the tape stretching, because of the thin material used to get that much tape on the reel. I assume those will be extra thick 10 minute tapes.
Source: Losing a lot of my ill-gotten C64 games because I figured using C90s was the way to go since I could get 3-4 games per side. It wasn't just me since it was discussed in magazines, too, with warnings not to use C90s or extra cheap C60s for saving your programs.
VCFMW was a blast, as usual. I can attest that Adrian is a very nice guy!
Nice video! Some interesting equipment there.
It is amazing the projects you can now get for retro computers and the ingenuity of the people that create them
Nicee! Hope i can go next year! This yeas was looking epic again with everthing out side the main building
The TapeCart SD is worth trying if you've not used one before. It's limited in the formats it can use, but it's lightning fast at loading PRG files. Not like actually loading from tape at all.
Yep... different than normal tape loading. Has a nice loader menu too.
From what I understand, it injects a small fast load executable and then loads the rest of the file at incredible speed. Since it relies on executable code, I would expect it to only be compatible with the Commodore 64. Vice can emulate it, so you can test how it works before you buy or make.
I like that wifi retromodem. It's not necessarily needed, but lets you do things as we did 'back in the day'.
I think the DEC Rainbow used single-sided quad-density 5.25 floppies. The DECmate also used them. Ken Olsen always over-engineered everything. I heard he would push prototypes off his desk and if they did not work after that he sent it back to the engineering team until they made one that passed his test.
i can agree with that....i worked for a guy who would toss out going packages off the roof to see if they would survive shipping...
I have made several wind chimes from dead disk drives. A typical 3.5in hard disk, you can use the platters and spindle hub rings, and the arms to create a complete 3 level wind chime. If there was some way to post pictures, I would include such.
I had a Hayes Smartmodem 300 when I was a kid and used it with my Apple //c to dial in to Compuserv. I absolutely LOVED it even though it was super slow, even back in the days. The fastest modem on the market at the time was a 9600 baud which was super expensive, and even the 1200 was out of reach for me, so I had settle for the 300. But that Hayes Smartmodem project is ABSOLUTELY AMAZING and I hope they take it mainstream. I would definitely buy one. I would complete the setup I had back in the 1984.
It was good to meet you briefly while you were at lunch. VCFMW was great
Awesome stuff, I had that Hayes modems, but living in Eurrope I had the same case but selled from Datatronics.
OMG that 'modem' . I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!
I never saw the DEC cartridge hardware but we did have a Bernoulli Box in the mid 80s. Same idea, similar capacity. So 92 sounds right.
In the mid 70s, Hamleys of London had a 'selfie' station that used a video camera and output an image consisting entirely of ASCII characters which was printed on a T shirt. I have no idea where mine went, but I treasured it when I was a kid.
Thank you Adrian. My first real full-time job was actually on a printing press producing "pyjamas paper" like the one you received. Great stuff! Great video; as always.
Love that modem connection noise. I remember my parents had a modem that looked very similar to that Hayes, though for some reason I think it ran at 14.4k.
The selfies remind me of carnivals in the 70s. Get your very own "computer eye" printout. Pretty crazy
For some reason, that Hayes Modem mod just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Same with the PicoMEM, just wow.
Thanks 😀
I love the real sound effects of the wifi retro modem it brings back memories.,
Speaking of hard drive platters, a cool thing we do at work is to make clocks out of them. Stowed away under the floor in the data center (which back in the day used to house the mainframe) we've got a bunch of platters someone extracted from the old IBM disc packs - and every time one of the mainframers retires we make one into a clock then get everyone on the staff to sign it.
If I remember correctly, the Tang Nano 9K you showed around +52:00 is actually an FPGA replacement for the TMS VDP that actually does real VGA output. It is fully compatible with the original but has some additional features.
Lots of cool stuff. I found out there was a vintage show about an hour or so drive to the west of me about a couple of weekends ago. I didn't know about until after the event. I'd love to get to a show like that as I have a love of the old tech. The picture of "you" with Jeri was a fun one.
I wish all your videos were an hour or two long. There's never a dull moment.
These are "Super Mini" as well. Imagine a "Maxi" Episode! 😛
Would love to see an episode using the Wi-Fi Hayes conversion hooked up to your PC/AT in full DOS ANSI BBS glory ... show the kiddos what the pre-internet "online" days were like!
Thanks for the great review! Can you please add back in the part you skipped over where you use AT+CONFIG to connect the Retromodem 1200 to the WiFi network?
The name of the large surplus store was Weird Stuff Warehouse. It was in Sunnyvale California and I have fond memories of walking around looking at all the random computer and electronics stuff.
It was a sad day when they closed.
all of these are so cool.
Adrian you have to make a show in the coming winter where you really check all this stuff out, no excuses possible. I can't get my 48-hour day either, deal with it😀
ROTFL!
That selfie printout was pretty cool.
Love the old modems! It was possible to reuse the same phone call with newer modems similar to how you describe by disabling carrier detection (ie. enabling blind dialling) with the ATX0 command, and then dialling a random number (just using ATDT with no args worked from memory) and having your friend type ATA to answer. Both ends would just hang up their handsets when their modem picked up the line and started communicating, and you'd get your data connection. When you wanted to resume the voice call, each end would just picked up their handsets and the modems would disconnect due to noise on the line (or you'd do the +++ ATH operation you described). It was important that the call originator picked up first, else you'd lose the call if their modem hangs up. My friend and I would use this method to re-use a single $0.25 call all weekend while we were building our BBS back in the mid 90's and avoid racking up our parents' telephone bill :)
2:27 Hey, it's you and ConMega...and I don't recognize the 3rd person, but I'm certain he's amazingly cool like the two of you, very awesome! Oh, it's Josh! Yes!
So much retro goodness in this one - looking forward to being able to attend VCF in person one of these days!
I have several boxes of 5,25" / 96TPI disks I bought during my time at university. The data center sold these for a good prize and I used them with 5,25" 80 track DD drives as a cheaper alternative to the 3,5" disks on the Amiga...
That's fun y seeing the shrink wrapped C-10 tape yesterday (before watching this video) i was "playing" with my TI99/4a and trying out the TI "Program Recorder" and ti branded tape recorder and in the box was an unopened C-10 cassette, popped it in, saved and retrieved some BASIC programs no problem.
Great Video!
27:58 the computer specific tapes were a thicker substrate and a ferric oxide formulation that worked the same or better than audio tape for the range of frequencies in the encoding (meaning: it *could* work better, but usually was just less optimized for anything outside the box... meaning cheaper).
That C-10 there is ten minutes long, see how much of the reel a modern cassette tape takes for ten minutes of play time versus that one. Audio tapes are usually MUCH thinner.
My best friend in high school had a TRS-80 (before it was called a Model 1) with two disk drives. One was the standard 35 track SS/SD drive, and the other was a single sided 77-track drive. While the 77 track drive would format the cheaper SS/SD disks, there would often be errors. Later on, when the 360K DS/DD diskettes became standard, the old 77 track drive usually had no problems with those... even when notched to "flip" them.
69th episode, nice!
In my experience, those 30-pin SIMM slots can prove handy to simply stick into a pair of SIPP sockets (which are, if paired, often spaced perfectly for such a dual SIMM slot) then use regular SIMM30 sticks without the hassle of wiggling those SIPP sticks into/out of the sockets, or making (soldering) them should you not have SIPP modules.
Edit. And yeah, the same here - I used simple DD floppies in a 720k drive, formatted to 720k, they worked just fine. Not that I could get QD disks anywhere. (I had a Videoton TVC back then, a Hungarian Z80-based micro. That can use regular 40-cyl 360k drives too and didn't really had any program that actually needed 720k - so it works ok with the much more abundant 360k drives that we used in PCs/XTs.)
Your vids always bring back fun memories! I actually had an Epson HX-20 - the first ever laptop - 20x4 screen yet! - which I bought at the Ga. Tech bookstore for $150 bucks. It came with a 300 baud acoustic modem! I could dial into work for our IBM AT computer which had an 8-port Digiboard and a modem pool. Presto! I could do basic sysadmin tasks with a beer in front of me on Saturday morning :) Ah youth! The breakfast of champions!
Lots of good stuff!
I just got one of the Tape Cart devices. The load speed is very impressive!
Ooh the AW11, had that and an AW20 as well. Such fun cars.
Those LED memory modules are neat. kinda a neat gamer mod for a retro system. But yeah also useful diagnostics.
back when I was taking programming in high school we had TRS-80's with a 5 1/4 360k drives, we would use a hole punch and exact-o blade to make our disks double sided, the drive wasn't of course but eject the disk, flip it over and reinsert and they all worked just fine.
The DEC RC25K-DC is actually 26MB, not 52MB. Those are specifically used as removable large capacity storage for VAX and PDP11 systems equipped with the RC25 drive. The reason people think it's 52MB is because it's a 26MB removable platter ADDITION to a fixed 26MB platter in the RC25 itself. The PDP11 was still supported into the 90's, and the VAX 8000's would've been fairly current (DEC was still actively supporting OpenVMS on the 8000's at least as late as 1995.) It's only usable in the RC25, and in many systems, the removable platter was typically used as a backup device or a mirrored system disk.
IIRC, the actual usable capacity of a 26MB platter would be 25MB when using ODS2 under VMS. But it has been a few decades. ;)
I recognize that Smartmodem 1200 case design. It was the first modem I bought, probably in '87, attached to my //e. I had a few models before eventually getting my sysop deal USR dual standard, which I still have, with the not for resale emblem riveted to the shell.
At VCF Southwest in Dallas, there was a guy who set up a selfie station connected to an HP plotter, like the kind that Tech Tangents like to show off.
27:30 I had some of those manual-shutter floppies you speak of, in a luggable computer my aging memory can never remember the name of... Escort 2100... Maybe it was the 2200 because it had two drives. Anyway, its disks were physically rejected by a PC 3.5" drive.
27:55 the claim I remember about the "data" cassettes was that they were "normal" cassettes but on a slightly thicker (thus necessitating the short length) carrier so they wouldn't stretch as much with use.
The quad density was for drives like the 8050 and the 8250 in 96 TPI, vs 48 TPI for Double density.
I was about to say exactly the same thing and you beat me to it. :) The Commodore 8050 was single sided, quad density and Commodore 8250 and SFD-1001 were double sided, quad density.
I remember those Hayes modems. Maximum Up to 2400 baud.
I also used the 3com us robotics modem up to 33600 and 115200 baud.
I LOVE old times
2:33 our high school in the ‘burbs of Chicago back in the 90’s had a bunch of 3270 terminals connected to a central mainframe. I know the people in the office had them at their desks. And also we used them for accessing the card catalog in the library.
In grade school, I remember like the principal had a PS/2, like a 55SX or 30 sized one, in her office. I don’t remember if anyone else had a computer or not. Maybe the librarian? Though, we had card catalogs back then, not computerized either.
Definitely probably gonna need to get me one of those PicoMEM cards and some blinky RAM...
yeah, the ATMEGA328P is "not recommended for new designs" on the microchip website. So effectively it's discontinued. But I believe the ATMEGA328PB is intended as an (almost) drop-in replacement. (IThe pinout is slightly different, due to some added I/O, but I think it can run unmodified software for the 328P.)
Atmel app note AT15007 covers migration. It says “The code that is available for your existing ATmega328 variants will continue to work on the new ATmega328PB device.”
Yep, the PB can work with the same code, but it isn't available as (P-)DIP and the signature is different.
That pixel art display is a tremendous gift - I hope you find somewhere in the basement for it so we get to see it sometimes :)
The PicoMem is the sort of thing I was imagining should be possible. It would increase the complexity but for emulating an IO device with a predefined IO range it should be relatively easy to add a wait state insertion circuit to enable reliable usage on faster systems.
Hi,
Thanks, no need for additionnal circuit. Any i/o and memory Addresses are decoded and IOCHRDY react accordingly.
What kind of émulation are you looking for ?
@@freddyvretrozone2849 I didn't realize wait state insertion was working, I figured it wasn't and this was causing the issues when running the bus faster. As for functions I'd actually want, I have no idea beyond disk, network, sound, and video. Some of these would need more pins, is it possible to add another Pico (along with a high-speed interconnect) to enable more features? IIRC you said the PSRAM and SD are on the same SPI controller, so hopefully it's easy to add a second Pico as just another SPI device.
And as an eventual stretch goal, a PCMCIA version would also be nice. Obviously this would be much more of a niche product so there's no need for it to be a priority.
Kévin did the PCMCIA version.
Vidéo Pico is more tricky.
You was right, it does not work because the emulated RAM used for disk access has no wait states and the pico does not answer fast enaugh.
Not because the pico is too slow, this part of the code can be optimized.... (I never tested on a 386)
IBM had 3270 Cluster Controllers which used 2.4-MB 5.25-inch floppies, right before switching to 3.5-inch drives.
For 3.5-inch 2.88-MB drives, also only seen them in IBM equipment.
It's been a LONG time since I've seen that green-bar paper. Back in the '90s, the company I work at used to run these lengthy printouts weekly for the master schedule of all the orders coming through the system. If you had a printout headed for the same printer and the 'crutch report' (as it was called) was running, well, you had to remember to come back later and hope that the report was done by then. :)
The Syquest drives were 44 and later 88Meg and were 5 1/4 inch. Used a number of them with some Mac projects.
The "Hayes" of modem fame was an attorney in the Atlanta area who was a member of a home computer club, and got frustrated at the lack of affordable modems, and created the company that designed and built them.
I spent a good chunk of time at VCFMW taking stuff from the free pile. That got a little more interesting when a swarm of bees started guarding the outdoor portion.
I got some 12 volt power adapters which I use to power my various projects.
Thank you Adrian for entertaining videos. Unfortunately I don't have anything interesting to send you, but cheers from Finland anyway.
Oh and I laughed so hard when that rgb-display showed text "it works". :D
I wonder if you use ATDP to dial out with the wifi modem if you would get the sounds of rotary dial pulses when “dialing” BBS’s by telnet?
Adrian you have to check out the High Speed Tape drive in the Coleco Adam computer. The tape is sectored so it will auto ff/rr to the area where your file is and load it.
Just make sure you have the tape in the drive before you turn on the Adam…💣🧲💥⚡️
Wonder you you could do a builder series for all pcb's and feature each of them as their videos. Many of these prodject boards are really exciting and some could use the extra exposure. I also enjoy watching things being assembled.
Great 😊
I used to buy packs of SSDD disks and use a slot cutter to convert them to DSDD disks. Double the density double the storage space at half or slightly more than half the price of full blown DSDD disks. Verbatim ones last an eternity, I still have C64 programs I wrote to them in 1988 on a Commodore 1541 drive using my C64 and they still work perfectly today. The slot cutter would cut a write protect slot in the opposite side of the diskette.
Every school i know that used such computers did this to save money. It seemed ridiculous companies wouldn't bring the price down, especially qhen they were all superceded by 3.5 floppies, anyways!
Great 😊
The rumor about the ATMEGA328P being discontinued is *partially* true. Atmel (Microchip) has shifted the DIP package version to "not recommended for new designs" meaning that they intend to end-of-life that particular version of the part at some point in the future. They are still manufacturing it, it is still purchasable, it is still a supported part, but they are trying to tell designers "don't use this particular version for new products as the device might not be available for sale relatively soon."
The "B" version of the chip (ATMEGA328PB) is the same chip but in a quad-flatpack form, as found on many Arduinos nowadays, and is the version still marked as "in production" by Microchip. It's surface-mount, so it needs to be soldered down and can't easily be socketed, but still a pretty easy SMD solder job if you have a little practice.
Actually, none of the 328P packages are recommended for new designs so it's not only the DIP version but the DIP version is the only one without a substitute as the 328PB is only available in QFN/QFP packages.
Phoenix Enterprises/PE Connectors is a good source for the angled dual 30 pin SIMM sockets with metal latches.
That PicoMEM project, I've been thinking about something like that using the DB-10 (The Mister FPGA board) and daughterboards that could work with PCI and AGP, with outputs audio and video, likely supporting both analog over VGA and digital HDMI. This could be used for audio and video cards that are beginning to get hard to obtain, and allow for a single system to hardware emulate many cards using a single slot. This could help make 90's and early 2000's retro PC gaming accessible to a much broader audience.