I have been scouring the internet for obscure hardware for over 25 years and it is amazing that there are still hidden gems out there. A SCSI external video device? WHAAAAAAAT?
I can't believe I got to see this thing in action! Was great chit-chatting with you for a minute outside of Consigment yesterday, you fulfilled my UA-camr quotient for VCF east.
You can hang all sorts of things off SCSI, like sound cards, and _other_ computers. And by extension, you can hang all sorts of things off any other interconnect that properly supports SCSI protocol. Like a soundcard over IDE.
Wild to have seen this in person before coming home to watch the video. Shame about Wolf3D not working right, but good to know it wasn't just me failing to use a computer properly ("properly") at the show!
In the Monitors control panel you can drag the menu bar to the second monitor to make it the principal monitor. So you can have your apps and games start directly on this monitor even if they don’t have a monitor selection screen
Lovely to read this- I used Macs as a student from 1989 on, and as the sysadmin of the department full time 1995-2000. We had nearly any type of Mac, and all kinds of equipment for them. Video editing with Powermac 7100/70 (and a big external box, can't recall the brand), in 1996! My-our AWS 95 had 4 or 8 GB total for 100+ student AppleShare home folders, _disk space_ of course. It boggles the mind to think about this today! Had so much fun back then, when the Mac was years ahead of anything else...
I once owned the "Outbound Outrigger" monochrome SCSI portrait monitor. It it had its own 512Kb video memory, 68000 CPU at 20MHz and 640 by 872 pixels resolution. It was a bit slow and very limiting in OS choice.
Reminded me of a US Robotics modem in design. SCSI is cool though how it allowed other devices other than hard drives and CD-ROM's. There were Ethernet adapters too but also not as common.
No shame. This is exactly the sort of approach I take to retro-computing too. There’s two main camps. One is traditional purists,.. the other is,… more about the art of combining new hardware and features and pushing souped up vintage systems to do things they previously couldn’t, or was practically, or financially unfeasible, to do, in the past. It’s the same with vintage automobiles. One can be in one or both camps, or anything in between. I think the threshold from being a souped up vintage computer, to being a different system or machine, entirely, is when you take the original or reasonably equivalent motherboard, and system buss out of the equation of its totality. Everything else, is generally up to the individual’s discretion or whims. ❤
What you need is a 1Ghz+ eMac. Actually has decent 3D games, competitive with DOS at the time, and you can get MacOS9 on it, which just runs brilliantly.
Cursed hydra setup looks like something straight out of an 80's cyberpunk movie. I love it. Does it work for the IIGS? I... doubt it but.... I kinda feel obligated to ask.
In 1991 I had a Mac SE/30 connected to both a Radius Pivot Display and a Sony 16 inch Trinitron, to produce MacroMind Director (before Macomedia) videos for interactive police training courses.
Now we know we need someone to make a PiVideo SCSI adapter that we never knew we needed or wanted. And here I was thinking making a Pi into a PCI/-X/AGP Video/other adapter for PPC Macs was an insane idea.
The Cursed Mac is very impressive, especially in person! I just wish there were more of the SuperMac EGPUs out there or there was a way to clone one for more enthusiasts to enjoy it.
While Noctuas make less noise, they also often move a lot less air than the fans people replace them with, so be aware that there might be some temperature issues.
I was at VCF East today (Saturday) and yesterday. I will be there tomorrow (Sunday and be on the lookout for you). I schlepped to where Usagi Dave was supposed to be to find a sign saying he’d be there on Sunday. I was just ping ponging all over. As said on The Office: my dogs are barking!
this video is just making me wish Apple had kept the compact Mac line alive for a bit longer... imagine a PowerPC Takky with video output, all plug and play... could have been a legit work setup at an affordable price
YES!!! This was epic! Unrelated: The SE30's screen is hooked up to a grayscale addon card? Does that mean the original b/w GPU is still on the mobo, just disabled? Could an empty classic with just a picture-tube be used as a 3rd B/W-only display?
Ahhh, takes me back to the pains of the early 90's and trying to figure out why I couldn't display my PC on my 27" tv and vice versa. They're both CRTs, right? lol.
I had an Aura ScuzzyGraph II which I has the same GPU. At the time we didn't have a lot of money so paying $700 for it and another $400 for a VGA monitor was a big ask. But I saved up so my Macintosh SE could get a second display - loved it. An interesting feature of QuickDraw is that it has 8 built in colors that the device will actually let you output even if you have a non-color QuickDraw Mac. With sufficient dithering you could actually (sort of) view color images too. I loved that thing, still have it. Wonder if all the capacitors are blown out...
Normal composite monitors can't sync to a signal with VGA timings, but if you connect the composite output to the Y input of a TV with YPbPr, it might work. You could also try plugging it into something designed for one of the "HD composite" surveillance cameras that Cathode Ray Dude made a video about.
Have you tried to hook it up to a Quadra to check how much difference the I/O subsystem, memory bandwidth, etc. makes when pushing drawing commands and bitmaps through the SCSI bus into the old TMS34010? How did they even glue that chip onto a SCSI bus?
Back in college I was brought in to digitize the school newspaper and we used Mac SEs with Radius monitors. The crazy thing was that the Mac's basic ROM was so flexible in terms of screen handling that Radius didn't have to do much to get MacOS 6 to handle the external monitor correctly because the bones were already there from the Mac II which debuted at the same time.
Great video! Pretty sure he played with us at VCFE, but didn't realize it was outputting to the other monitors 🤣. I'll have to figure out a way to send you the videos of my Pismo's fan mod. I've long since deleted all my social media, so I'll have to look into it when I get a chance.
it was a treat attempting to use this thing at vcfe! if someone could redesign a version of that graphics expander so it was INSIDE the (pretty much full to the brim) compact shell, that would be truly next level. (then the immense heat inside would just cook everything like the toaster mac it is)
I again was at VCF East .. today (Sunday) .. like yesterday. And even though it was just before exhibit close time, I finally you and that Mac and scsi you. Great meeting you! Again I schlepped to where Usagi Dave was supposed to be to find .. Dave this time ! So today was a win 🏆 win! Now I gotta watch the video he released today and comment about how he cool he was with the VCF lanyard fiasco. But shhhh don’t bring it up with Jane.. I mean June .. she is still livid at VCF. But I suspect BilL “double L” Herd is cool with it all.
Marathon probably would have worked if you moved the menu bar over to the external display in the Monitors control panel. That SCSI video box is amazing though. I had heard of them but never saw or knew anyone who had one. I always imagined that it must have been too slow to really use.
The Greatest Monstrosity That's Ever Lived
can i be The Greatest Technician That's Ever Lived
The Greatest Crossover That's Ever Lived!
Always a cool surprise to see you out in other comments sections Mr. TGTTEL
i didn't know racoons liked retro computers
didnt expect to see you here lol
The "Why? Because I can!" approach at its finest! Nice to see the return of the beloved Cursed Mac :)
Being able to add a color display to my monochrome computer back in 1991 would have absulutely blown my mind.
What you’ve done here is BRILLIANCE.-Cursed Mac, 65scribe, and a portable television all in one video-BRILLIANCE.
I have been scouring the internet for obscure hardware for over 25 years and it is amazing that there are still hidden gems out there. A SCSI external video device? WHAAAAAAAT?
I can't believe I got to see this thing in action! Was great chit-chatting with you for a minute outside of Consigment yesterday, you fulfilled my UA-camr quotient for VCF east.
Thanks for the slice of perfectly normal computing to start the day! Delicious!
I, as an idiot, read the title as "i built a monastery"
Why is my brain like this.
Too many hot cross buns?
(Monty Python monks chanting) Pie Iesu Domine... (Mac bonk) Dona eis requiem... (Mac bonk)
I don't know you, but in my opinion, anybody who misreads monstrosity as monastery is brilliant! 😁😮
@@AgentAsteriski That's genius-level stuff right there. 😂
Feels. Last night I read `cannibalism` as `cannabis`. You can imagine how that one went ;_;
That's a nice 90's TV show hacker setup.
So used to SCSI as just a storage device interface, it blew my mind to see it used for video.
You can hang all sorts of things off SCSI, like sound cards, and _other_ computers.
And by extension, you can hang all sorts of things off any other interconnect that properly supports SCSI protocol. Like a soundcard over IDE.
if someone wants to reverse engineer this I would buy the heck out of it (oh! and LOVE the 65scribe reference!)
there's been work on getting this emulated in PISCSI.... so you actually get an hdmi display
This was really interesting. I didn't know there were eGPU solutions that early on.
Love the small camping TV too. It's just so cute :D
Wild to have seen this in person before coming home to watch the video. Shame about Wolf3D not working right, but good to know it wasn't just me failing to use a computer properly ("properly") at the show!
I remember my grade school had one of these in the computer lab hooked up to a large TV so we could see the teacher demonstrate things!
In the Monitors control panel you can drag the menu bar to the second monitor to make it the principal monitor. So you can have your apps and games start directly on this monitor even if they don’t have a monitor selection screen
To be clear: it’s the tiny menu bar inside the little display geometry representation inside the Monitors control panel window
Lovely to read this- I used Macs as a student from 1989 on, and as the sysadmin of the department full time 1995-2000. We had nearly any type of Mac, and all kinds of equipment for them. Video editing with Powermac 7100/70 (and a big external box, can't recall the brand), in 1996! My-our AWS 95 had 4 or 8 GB total for 100+ student AppleShare home folders, _disk space_ of course. It boggles the mind to think about this today! Had so much fun back then, when the Mac was years ahead of anything else...
Now that the "cursed Mac" is upgraded to the max and all fixed up, is it the "blessed Mac"?
love it !!!!! this is so cool, would've liked to see you hook that up to that PowerBook though
0:15 You just need a USB-C to SCSI adapter
I found mine on temu
I once owned the "Outbound Outrigger" monochrome SCSI portrait monitor. It it had its own 512Kb video memory, 68000 CPU at 20MHz and 640 by 872 pixels resolution. It was a bit slow and very limiting in OS choice.
The more chaotic and random shenanigans are my favorites!
To quote the legend Himself, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
The Flex casually trowing an Eizo monitor.
A close up of that tiny tv with that wallpaper on it, would itself make an amazing wallpaper.
The Outrun background on the flickering TV screen is probably a "retro aesthetics" peak.
0:17 I *love* this reference to 65scribe
Damn! 😂
Doesnndonnyythnng? I lost it ❤😂
0:14 rather
Reminded me of a US Robotics modem in design. SCSI is cool though how it allowed other devices other than hard drives and CD-ROM's. There were Ethernet adapters too but also not as common.
65scribe reference was top notch. 🤣
It doesn't do anything?
Sounds like the "USB to VGA" adapters we had in the 00's
Dude, you have some of the coolest sh!....stuff!! So much envy! lol Keep having fun!
SuperMac was quite the company back in the day. I remember buying a SuperMac NuBus video card new for my IIci in 1990.
No shame. This is exactly the sort of approach I take to retro-computing too. There’s two main camps. One is traditional purists,.. the other is,… more about the art of combining new hardware and features and pushing souped up vintage systems to do things they previously couldn’t, or was practically, or financially unfeasible, to do, in the past. It’s the same with vintage automobiles. One can be in one or both camps, or anything in between. I think the threshold from being a souped up vintage computer, to being a different system or machine, entirely, is when you take the original or reasonably equivalent motherboard, and system buss out of the equation of its totality. Everything else, is generally up to the individual’s discretion or whims. ❤
If you think that's weird, there were entire monitors that connected via SCSI. I remember reading reviews of them in MacWorld and/or MacUser.
"...but I have an even better, more hilarious idea!"
have to say, I love it when a plan starts off like that...
I like how it's like the OG dongle to compensate for the lack of IO in apple laptops ...
some things never change ay?
What you need is a 1Ghz+ eMac. Actually has decent 3D games, competitive with DOS at the time, and you can get MacOS9 on it, which just runs brilliantly.
this was sooooooo cool omg i had no idea you could do this!
"This would be an affront to everything we hold dear . . . .
"Okay. Let's get started!"
😂
That EIZO screen is just gorgeous.❤
Cursed hydra setup looks like something straight out of an 80's cyberpunk movie. I love it.
Does it work for the IIGS?
I... doubt it but.... I kinda feel obligated to ask.
My favorite feature of this setup: the hubris of man
"I have built a monstrosity!"
So, just another Saturday for you, then?
In 1991 I had a Mac SE/30 connected to both a Radius Pivot Display and a Sony 16 inch Trinitron, to produce MacroMind Director (before Macomedia) videos for interactive police training courses.
I also had an SE/30 with a Radius Pivot back in the early 90's.
See new action retro while on vacation stops everything to watch
I would love seeing him manage to jerry rig a rtx 4090 into that scsi egpu enclosure🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
imagine having this set up back in the day. you would have been the envy of all nerds
Yay! The cursed SE/30 returns, to become even more cursed than ever!
Now we know we need someone to make a PiVideo SCSI adapter that we never knew we needed or wanted.
And here I was thinking making a Pi into a PCI/-X/AGP Video/other adapter for PPC Macs was an insane idea.
Exactly what I said! We need open-source hardware SCSI e-GPUs now!
This already pretty much exists in rascsi
@@ewanuno Very cool, now I guess I can wish for using the Pi as a PCI/AGP card in my Power Mac G4 MDD now.
This is what 90s and early 2000s TV shows and films think hacking looks like.
By the original intent this is exactly what hacking is hah, lol, making things do stuff they were never intended for, or even thought possible.
The Cursed Mac is very impressive, especially in person! I just wish there were more of the SuperMac EGPUs out there or there was a way to clone one for more enthusiasts to enjoy it.
While Noctuas make less noise, they also often move a lot less air than the fans people replace them with, so be aware that there might be some temperature issues.
I was at VCF East today (Saturday) and yesterday. I will be there tomorrow (Sunday and be on the lookout for you). I schlepped to where Usagi Dave was supposed to be to find a sign saying he’d be there on Sunday. I was just ping ponging all over. As said on The Office: my dogs are barking!
"I don't care because this is epic"- words to live by lol
This is great. Thanks for the content!
I genuinely look forward to seeing what shenanigans will be happening each week and this one didn’t disappoint!
this video is just making me wish Apple had kept the compact Mac line alive for a bit longer... imagine a PowerPC Takky with video output, all plug and play... could have been a legit work setup at an affordable price
As much as i love the translucent case on the Cursed Mac, I do miss the black case sometimes
YES!!! This was epic!
Unrelated: The SE30's screen is hooked up to a grayscale addon card? Does that mean the original b/w GPU is still on the mobo, just disabled? Could an empty classic with just a picture-tube be used as a 3rd B/W-only display?
Cursed Mac be like "Mooore Power!!"
Me : I have one screen
Action Retro : I got three screens. Totally Normal!
This looks like most setups where money is tight and you have a graveyard of computer parts laying about
IIRC scsi video card existed as far back as the 80s. Too ahead of it's time!
This was awesome! So cool to see this ridiculousness on Saturday and meet you at VCF East, Sean! Can't wait to see what you come up with next.
Ahhh, takes me back to the pains of the early 90's and trying to figure out why I couldn't display my PC on my 27" tv and vice versa. They're both CRTs, right? lol.
oh. my. god. becky! look at that screen! 🤣
It is SO big! 🤣
Baby.
Got.
MAC!
I had an Aura ScuzzyGraph II which I has the same GPU. At the time we didn't have a lot of money so paying $700 for it and another $400 for a VGA monitor was a big ask. But I saved up so my Macintosh SE could get a second display - loved it. An interesting feature of QuickDraw is that it has 8 built in colors that the device will actually let you output even if you have a non-color QuickDraw Mac. With sufficient dithering you could actually (sort of) view color images too. I loved that thing, still have it. Wonder if all the capacitors are blown out...
So glad I got to see this in person at VCF, my SE can only dream of having this much raw computing power someday.
ah, using the clear power cable from the iMac G3 on the egpu - i knew Sean was a man of culture (I use the same power cable on my gaming pc lol)
It's not a monstrosity, it's a masterpiece!
Normal composite monitors can't sync to a signal with VGA timings, but if you connect the composite output to the Y input of a TV with YPbPr, it might work.
You could also try plugging it into something designed for one of the "HD composite" surveillance cameras that Cathode Ray Dude made a video about.
I came here to say the same. Plug that RCA output into the component video input of an EDTV/HDTV.
iCab! Yesssssss! I've missed that hand-drawn taxi heading along the Information Superhighway.
Have you tried to hook it up to a Quadra to check how much difference the I/O subsystem, memory bandwidth, etc. makes when pushing drawing commands and bitmaps through the SCSI bus into the old TMS34010? How did they even glue that chip onto a SCSI bus?
The SCSI bus supports a very wide variety of thongs...
Always nice to see the curséd Mac making an appearance.
Back in college I was brought in to digitize the school newspaper and we used Mac SEs with Radius monitors. The crazy thing was that the Mac's basic ROM was so flexible in terms of screen handling that Radius didn't have to do much to get MacOS 6 to handle the external monitor correctly because the bones were already there from the Mac II which debuted at the same time.
really a mad construction! Thank you very much for this 'terminator like' invention !
Love these shenanigans😂
I wonder if a vintage Windows PC could make heads or tails of it over SCSI.
0:14 Loved the 65scribe shoutout.
These are the kinds of videos that I come here to see!
It really is a decent setup, only most of us didn't have this in 1992 - jealous! 😆
I used one of these to output graphics from MacroMedia Director to a video switcher off of a Mac IIsi and an SE/30. It was fabulous.
Really interesting. I have never seen a SCSI video adapter before.
Great video! Pretty sure he played with us at VCFE, but didn't realize it was outputting to the other monitors 🤣. I'll have to figure out a way to send you the videos of my Pismo's fan mod. I've long since deleted all my social media, so I'll have to look into it when I get a chance.
oh yeah your fan mod was really cool!
Wish their external graphics box was successful so many drivers were released for many MacOS versions.... thank you for this review!
it was a treat attempting to use this thing at vcfe! if someone could redesign a version of that graphics expander so it was INSIDE the (pretty much full to the brim) compact shell, that would be truly next level. (then the immense heat inside would just cook everything like the toaster mac it is)
That is Crazy Sean that is pushing that device
I again was at VCF East .. today (Sunday) .. like yesterday. And even though it was just before exhibit close time, I finally you and that Mac and scsi you. Great meeting you! Again I schlepped to where Usagi Dave was supposed to be to find .. Dave this time ! So today was a win 🏆 win!
Now I gotta watch the video he released today and comment about how he cool he was with the VCF lanyard fiasco. But shhhh don’t bring it up with Jane.. I mean June .. she is still livid at VCF. But I suspect BilL “double L” Herd is cool with it all.
Looking forward to this!
🤣 Epic computing here! 🖥
This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen
I love that 65scribe reference
I love it. Especially the cursed Mac.
I have to say, after seeing all this today at VCF East, it's even more cursed in person.
This is why I watch Action Retro
Frogfind looks like a amazing vibe in my POV :D
Sean: I wonder if there's any CRT that can display this
Sean off-camera: Oh DUH I forgot to switch it to Channel 3!
Dual monitors in 1992 would have been wild with a setup like that
Marathon probably would have worked if you moved the menu bar over to the external display in the Monitors control panel.
That SCSI video box is amazing though. I had heard of them but never saw or knew anyone who had one. I always imagined that it must have been too slow to really use.
6:30 It is so... Retro. I like weird things and I cannot lie
I'm sure software developers of the time would love the stability this solution provides
You need a transparent case for the SuperView, else it is not cursed...
Man, 65scribe, I wish there were more frequent videos from that guy, he's awesome.