For those confused about analogue transmissions... you can still send (and tune into) an analogue signal using a device such as a VCR, without requiring signals to be passing through our skulls. It's even possible to transmit your own signal using the same process as demonstrated here... ua-cam.com/video/-tuIFYkDDVA/v-deo.html
I can't help but to love the way the motherboard pulls out of the computer yep that was a 90s plus even though it's not that convenient cuz it's pretty massive that was quite a luxury to have at the time great video man
I dearly began to miss that message from the day our family moved from a Win98 Packard Bell to a WinXP Dell Dimension. And I'm just realizing that was 16 years ago. Hhhhh ;-;
You can still see those letters to this very day. That same screen is still with in the kernel file You do not see this message anymore as all PCs are ACPI compliant which turns itself off when the S5 command is given You just need to find a way to disable ACPI on the motherboard
Man, that sound of the hard drive spin down as the computer is shut off is priceless! It brings back some beautiful memories. Back then even IT life was simple.
I love this. I still have an old Amstrad laptop.In original bag,with books and both power units for car and home use.Also it takes a bunch of D cellbatteries for travel.2 floppy drives,one for OS,the other for data[hard drive]
"It's limited production run isn't the only reason it's hard to come by" I instantly thought "Yeah, it's made by Amstrad. It'll fall to bits if you looked at it the wrong way."
I actually remember as a kid having 2 similar PCs, a 386 with Windows 3.1.1, that was still one of the old horizontal style casings, and later a Pentium 166 with Windows 95 (which was only available in english, I was like 6 and german, still navigated it pretty proficiently), that was the more modern vertical casing. The latter one was plenty upgraded though to 96 MB RAM (32MB originally) and had a 16 MB video card (dont ask me which), so it was a beast at running some pretty fancy racing games, one of the games was even designed for a Pentium II and still ran...technically. There was that one race with a time limit that was simply unbeatable because the game ran more slowly than it should due to the CPU while clock ran against normal speed, so no matter how much boost I would pick up, I would never get past the third checkpoint before running out of time. Ah, the times. The nostalgia.
Ahh.. The 90's... When 10 frames per second on that new game you got was cause for celebration! "It runs! It runs!" My how times have changed.... (Also we said "frames per second" instead of "FPS." You kids and your lazy acronyms!)
Stanley Scalf My first pc was a 94 pentium 100 Packard bell and it was more like watch it go full blast with no issues. But yeah definitely experienced the 386 guessing game before as well. Great times.
I honestly don't get the obsession with wanting everything to be at 60FPS nowadays. A couple of games I have are apparently at 30FPS but I just haven't noticed and some games aren't really going to benefit from being much higher anyway.
Same. For example, Quake runs at about 20fps on my NEC Ready 7022 (75/100Mhz P1) and honestly I still find it quite enjoyable to play like that, and RollerCoaster Tycoon often runs at single digits on a P166MMX machine I have and I also find that to still be playable and a really fun experience.
There had also been all-in-ones like the PS/2 Model 25. An 8086 with MCGA graphics. As someone who had been trapped with an 8088 with CGA, that was quite a step up!
During your disassembling sequence I spotted some brown sockets in the mobo. @Nerd, I guess you can pump up your beautiful Integra with some hefty 256KB of SRAM cache chips. And then watch these brilliant MPEG1 clips, finally :))
those are DRAM sockets for S3 Trio, all they offer is a possibility of 1024x768 at 16 bit color, ZERO speed influence on a Trio card, ~10% speed bump on Virge which is meaningless as Virge was a Decelerator.
I picked up one of those G3's at a thrift store for $4.99. And it works. Amazing. One thing I didn't realize about them is that they are friggin' HEAVY. I mean, for such a small machine (although, a little bulky like you said) they are incredibly heavy.
That seems like a good system to play 1995/1996 era dos games on such as Alien Trilogy. I bet it would be the ideal system to play some early windows games such as the quirky Venom Spider-Man Separation Anxiety game that was released in 1995. It was one of the first directx games and it has compatibilty quirks.
I wonder if the "rubber" connecting that plug to the VGA socket on the back actually contains the wiring to get the VGA signal up to the edge connector. If so a lovely hacky solution.
I doubt that . The VGA Connector has a few commonly unused pins (4, 11 & 12). I am pretty sure the dongle just bridge 2 of those together to tell the integrated card to use a different output, in this case the build in Monitor.
Yeah, I'm betting that it's just a custom VGA cable that runs up to the integrated monitor. I really doubt that the signal runs through that edge connector.
I was part of the pc division at Amstrad and the VGA port dongle runs under the system board and pops out at the front and plugs into the TV board as rj45 type connector as you'll notice when he shows the tray removed
My family used to have a PC with that same model of CDROM back in the early 90s. It was normal that the light was on all the time. It was one of those dual-mode lights that became popular on CD-Writers in later years. In the case of these things, Green meant "Power" or "Ready" and orange meant "Reading". Same as CD Writers used to have Green to mean "reading" and any other colour to mean "Writing"
Hello mate. I got a couple of Fujitsu Intecra P2-66 's. Seriously cool. Pentium 2 333mhz and 8Mb integrated graphics. However there are two PCI slots so any PCI GPU, up to a PCI Geforce 5500 SFF can be installed for powerful graphics. There is also an ISA slot. So Soundblaster heaven. 6 Gb hdd as standard. Cost a pretty penny when new. Flat screen. Nice. I have followed and admired all your work. Thank you for all your hard work. It is appreciated.
What an awesome machine. I love my Compaq 425 (and made a video of it) and it would be awesome to find more classic all in one computers. I didn't know Amstrad created these though! (Fat chance of finding one of these in Australia though). Great video mate!
You could slam a better processor in it, and probably hack an updated video card in, but I think this thing should stay at it's current specification. I'll save the upgrades for more accessible systems.
8:37 Ah the memories of doing this when I had a ball track mouse> I even done it during my gaming sessions, yup removed the ball cleaned it and the wheels and put it back together in 15 seconds.
The Commodore Pet was an early all-in-one computer. At least when it came out in 1977 - when GPIB floppy drives became available later they were external.
I miss my old Amstrad PC1512DD! I went from my Color Computer 2 to the Amstrad in 1991 and decked it out with a 40 meg hard card, a 2400 baud modem, and a Media Vision Thunder Board. I played hookie from school one day to install and play with MS-DOS 5.0. Those were the days. Computers were so much more enjoyable back then before they began fully catering to the masses instead of the true computer people.
To be fair these types of computers didn't cease to exist, they just took a different shape. The iMac is the obvious directly related along with some of the other all in ones like the Surface Studio and other technical all-in-ones, but I'd argue some of the desktop replacement style laptops that weigh a ton and take up and obscene amount of space for a laptop could be compared to this style of computer. Similar limitations on upgrading parts and it is technically an all-in-one.
I have a Compaq Presario from this same year and it actually uses a short little VGA monitor cable to attach to the port on the back! Same with the mic and speaker jacks. So theoretically I could upgrade the video and sound hardware, though I'd be stuck with an ISA sound card because you only get 1(!!!) PCI slot.
I had that same Sony CD drive which showed a green light when powered on and Amber for any activity. I also had that exact Quick Shot joystick bundled with my Time Computer. All the memories this video brought back. And my Sis video card also suffered the same limitation where 1024x768 dropped it back to 256 colours. Interestingly yours didn't have a 24bit colour at 640x480 mode... Pity about the composite video not working on TV Tuner (I did spot a V1 and V2 button in the program alongside the tuner option itself, maybe that is the composite input). That Pentium really could have done with a nice hardware decoder for full frame video (I had a 166+ and I remember how choppy the Buddy Holly music video on the Windows 95 CDROM was if I dare full screen at 800x600 or more. Great vi's!
One of my first PC's that I didn't have to share with the house was a Pentium 133mhz (100 with turboi off). I remember having a blast with Duke 3d, Doom, Rise of the Triad, MIRV, Age of Empires and Warcraft 2 :) Installing DosBOX as I type this :P
I remember the first time I saw a computer that had a vertical tower and thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen because you couldn't set the monitor on top of the CPU, like even my Daddy's cobbled together PC could do. When my school got a couple of GSs, it was like a revolution that the whole system could be seem "compact" like the Mac while the IIC+s and what not that made up most of the computers had a bulk to them.
I remember the Jan 2000 issue of PC Gamer coming with a mouse cleaner, although I didn't know this until I bothered to read the editor's column months later. It looked like a little model microphone.
Ahh, the original iMac. I just happen to have one. Anyways, Those AIOs from the mid 90s are something to behold. Just so quirky. that's why I like them.
mmh. XD I do remember seeing it in a shop once, and I found it amazing back then. Nowadays I'd rather try and get a TeraDrive. Much worse as a PC, but much more unique otherwise, since the PC and Mega Drive halves can actually talk to one another...
If the TV card is similar to one I used to own, it wouldn't be able to record video. It simply routed video from the composite input or tuner to the PC's screen, either full screen or in a window. Some of these cards also had built-in teletext decoders too - handy for watching several sports pages simultaneously.
While it wasn't one of these specifically--I'm in the States, so getting Amstrads in the 90s wasn't a thing--I owned a computer very similar to this one. Packard Bell had an entire line of all-in-ones, the Spectria. I paid $1500 in early 1995 for a Spectria 144 (a 486DX2 with 8M RAM, 420M disk, 2X CD-ROM, 1M VRAM, 15" monitor), which looked almost like the Integra here, with a bit of 90s styling on the bottom and the speakers mounted onto the sides of the monitor instead of the lower casing. It had so many flaws I can't count them. The speakers were unshielded and interfered with the monitor constantly. It had no way to turn off the monitor without killing the PC as well, and no mute button. No reset button. Where the Integra routed the VGA internally and blocked the port, the Spectria had a 4" VGA cord that you had to plug into the backplane. The mouse broke in six months. The internal bay was too short for ISA cards, so they instead provided a riser card that mounted ISA cards horizontally. The PSU was mounted inside the monitor, and was not replaceable. This also meant the power was supplied to the mainboard via a proprietary edge connector, so you couldn't run the PC at all unless it was completely reassembled, and you needed a lot of force to get the power connected. And like most Packard Bell kit in the 90s, it ate itself alive inside of two years. The monitor lasted near 20 years though.
If there's one computer to collect, one you like to look at all the time in person (truly regret selling mine), would be, Apple's: Color Classic The cutest of them all.
My Dad had a similar machine (but much earlier, I think it had win3.1) but it was more a TV with a computer added to it as you had to switch it to the computer channel to use it. Spent so much time playing Star Trek 25th anniversary and judgement rights on it. I wish I could remember the model or make as I can't seem to find anything with random google searches. Also had to comment because, Settlers 2 is the best game ever!
Early Sony optical drives had a two-color LED. It was lit green when the drive has power and changed to amber indicating activity. I know this behavior by the Sony CDU561 in an external SCSI case. I didn't know that even internal drives did this.
You mean I have to wait for the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" screen THEN walk round to the back to get to the power button? Ain't nobody got time for that!
My very first PC was an Amstrad 386 DX 66 with 4MB ram, and 60MB HDD. Having sold my Amiga to buy it USED, I was then hit with the PC reality stick. Want to plug in a Joystick? Mouse port right? WRONG! UPGRADE by adding "game card". Oh you want decent sound almost as good as you got on your old Amiga 500? UPGRADE by adding a "sound card". lol good times. The mouse port on the Amstrad interestingly was a proprietary version of the Atari 9 pin D connector, the reverse of all other PC mouse ports, so you could ONLY use Amstrad mice. W@nk3r5!
I'd actually have discounted the Lisa from the AIO list as it spent most of its production run being sold with an external HDD pack. But yeah the AIO design has been Apple's bread and butter since the Macintosh first launched, although having said that the internal expansion possibilities on some of those machines wasn't as limited as people think; it's a shame that's a really damn expensive rabbit hole these days though :(
S3 Trio 32/64 card lacks the needed power for mpeg videos. I suspect it hadn't the proper hw acceleration. At those times (end of '90 and after), I had upgraded my previous Cirrus Logic 5428 1mb with an ATi Mach 64 VT 2mb, and finished with a Tseng Labs ET6000 + Voodoo1 3d dedicated card. OMG nice times! Cheers, M
The TV tuner software was notoriously flakey. Little side note i was the last one to leave the PC Division and spent my remaining time at Amstrad training the Viglen helpdesk bods based in wembley the Amstrad products
I had an old CD-ROM drive back in the day that the light was always on, and it would blink off when there was activity, opposite of what you would expect. It was weird.
would be cool to build a new pc in that Integra shell ^^, And even maybe put in a Lcd screen in there. I would love a video where you are doin that ...:) Would be like a sleeper car.
Used to have a Compaq 520CDS (or was it CDS 520?) in the 90s, many hours of Doom were played on that thing!! And later when working at a computer shop, I acquired a later 5520 with a Pentium processor in it, but the monitor went bang, so, yeah, that went away sadly... :(
That VGA "DONGLE" Is actually the VGA plug connection for the internal monitor, which I assume is just a commodity monitor put inside of a bespoke case.
I had one of these brand new in 1995 running a dx2 80 the cd rom was much different there was only a flap that opened on the front leaving a flush front and the button thats missing was a standby button for the tv and the dongle on the back was a flat cable to the front connector
2:10 Wait, THERE WAS A PC THAT PLAYED MEGA DRIVE GAMES?! Could you do a video on it, as I have literally never heard of this before. I've pretty much seen ever other system that can play Genesis/Mega Drive games that was released through the 90's, but not this.
There were two in fact. An Amstrad (Amstrad Mega PC) one (released in Europe only), and a Sega one in Japan only (Sega TeraDrive). The Amstrad model is a much better PC, but the Japanese one is about an order of magnitude more interesting. The Amstrad is basically just a PC and a Mega Drive jammed into a case together. The Teradrive is a 286 PC and a Mega Drive on the same motherboard, which share components, to the point that you can write code on the PC portion and immediately send it to the Mega Drive hardware, use the sound chip for PC Audio, and a whole bunch of other stuff. The Teradrive gives the impression of having been built to be used as a Mega Drive dev kit, but then adapted to be a consumer product after the fact. (I've been hoping to get hold of a Teradrive for a while... But they're expensive. Like, seriously.) The Mega PC is really just a cheap trick; Jam both things into one case. Neither did very well. The TeraDrive did badly because... Well, it was a 286... And a rather weak one at that, being sold around 1993-1994. So it was just... Awful as a PC compared to what was available at the time. The Amstrad Mega PC failed because... Well, it's a dodgy gimmick and you basically gain nothing from it. From what I remember you can't even share displays; you need a different display for each. (the TeraDrive came with an optional monitor that could handle both 15khz and VGA signals, allowing the use of both halves of the system on the same monitor.) Interesting curiosities, but not much else. XD
Amstrad Mega Pc, it had a 386sx 25mhz, VGA graphics 256colors, SBAudio. And, a Megadrive onboard. You switched systems via an external panel, used to hide the cartridge slot. Only one system at a time can be powered on, afaik.
FYI, I would be intrigued by a dedicated video capture-card video actually. They weren't uncommon in the 90s, and evolved rapidly into the 2000s. I'm not sure what their state is now, but all the more reason to investigate.
Just a quick note to say that the button on the left hand side above the sound,headphone jack and other things is in fact the button you can use for turning off the computer screen. I thought that I would inform you seeing as you said that you didn't know what it was for
I'm thinking it's not a dongle, and not a piece of rubber to hold the dongle in place, rather a VGA male connector and ribbon leading to the monitor. Great video by the way, I didn't know this even existed...Around this time everything in my local PC World was Packard Bell.
Oh and I am guessing it's a Haupage (sp?) TV Card. I must have bought about 5 of them through the years, they always seemed like a great idea, they always had trouble working.
Nah, it's just a flimsy piece of rubber, it just locks in place on the case. The dongle must bridge some connections to tell the board where to put the VGA signal.
Ah, TV tuners... I had one in my system for quite a while in the late 90's early 2000's... I remember the one I had was almost painfully unstable when used on windows 95/98... But it came with nt4.0 drivers. As it happens I had uhhh.... Obtained a copy of NT 4.0, and had taken to dual-booting that with windows... 98, I think? In any event where the Win9x drivers were hot garbage, on the exact same PC the Windows NT tv card drivers and software were rock solid and completely reliable. Makes you glad to realise that the ancestor of modern windows is windows NT, and not 9x huh... XD
You, and a lot of this audience, no doubt know this, but I'll be a pedant anyway: "Performa" wasn't a model produced by Apple, but was instead Apple's home computer brand, and was comprised of both all-in-ones (often but not always prefixed '5') and desktop counterparts (often but not always prefixed '4' or '6') - for example, the Performa 5200 and the Performa 6200 have identical specifications, but the former is an all-in-one and the latter is a desktop; finally, and for only two models, there were also towers in the Performa brand, the 6400 and 6500 - madly, they have built in sub-woofers.
For those confused about analogue transmissions... you can still send (and tune into) an analogue signal using a device such as a VCR, without requiring signals to be passing through our skulls. It's even possible to transmit your own signal using the same process as demonstrated here... ua-cam.com/video/-tuIFYkDDVA/v-deo.html
I always look forward to new Nostalgia Nerd videos! Your work is appreciated
I loved the long pause waiting for the CPU speed rating, complimented by the UA-cam fade to black for an ad. Very well done.
Thanks!
I can't help but to love the way the motherboard pulls out of the computer yep that was a 90s plus even though it's not that convenient cuz it's pretty massive that was quite a luxury to have at the time great video man
Mr. Nostalgia Nerd, your videos are a constant delight, thank you very much for making them! 🙂
No, no. Thank you for your comment and taking the time to watch them!
The Tommy Walsh Tool Time screwdriver set is a must have.
15:40 NOW ITS SAFE TO TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER. \\\ I do so miss this message so hard...
Mmmm..those beautiful, red-ish letters...
I dearly began to miss that message from the day our family moved from a Win98 Packard Bell to a WinXP Dell Dimension.
And I'm just realizing that was 16 years ago. Hhhhh ;-;
You can still see those letters to this very day.
That same screen is still with in the kernel file
You do not see this message anymore as all PCs are ACPI compliant which turns itself off when the S5 command is given
You just need to find a way to disable ACPI on the motherboard
I always wanted to hack some win 98 machines and subtly change it to read "IT IS NOT SAFE TO TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER"
It creeped me as a kid, I found it skeletal and stuff
Not gonna lie, I'm always jealous of you having all these old PCs.
Man, that sound of the hard drive spin down as the computer is shut off is priceless! It brings back some beautiful memories. Back then even IT life was simple.
Sounds of old hardware is such a nostalgic thing.
I love this. I still have an old Amstrad laptop.In original bag,with books and both power units for car and home use.Also it takes a bunch of D cellbatteries for travel.2 floppy drives,one for OS,the other for data[hard drive]
I'd rather have an Acura Integra.
But can an Acura play Worms?
"It's limited production run isn't the only reason it's hard to come by" I instantly thought "Yeah, it's made by Amstrad. It'll fall to bits if you looked at it the wrong way."
I actually remember as a kid having 2 similar PCs, a 386 with Windows 3.1.1, that was still one of the old horizontal style casings, and later a Pentium 166 with Windows 95 (which was only available in english, I was like 6 and german, still navigated it pretty proficiently), that was the more modern vertical casing. The latter one was plenty upgraded though to 96 MB RAM (32MB originally) and had a 16 MB video card (dont ask me which), so it was a beast at running some pretty fancy racing games, one of the games was even designed for a Pentium II and still ran...technically. There was that one race with a time limit that was simply unbeatable because the game ran more slowly than it should due to the CPU while clock ran against normal speed, so no matter how much boost I would pick up, I would never get past the third checkpoint before running out of time. Ah, the times. The nostalgia.
Thanks. I've always heart of the Amstrad.
Ahh.. The 90's... When 10 frames per second on that new game you got was cause for celebration! "It runs! It runs!" My how times have changed.... (Also we said "frames per second" instead of "FPS." You kids and your lazy acronyms!)
Stanley Scalf My first pc was a 94 pentium 100 Packard bell and it was more like watch it go full blast with no issues. But yeah definitely experienced the 386 guessing game before as well. Great times.
Try playing Driller on the C64 - it achieves a frame rate of 1 frame per 3 seconds.
I honestly don't get the obsession with wanting everything to be at 60FPS nowadays. A couple of games I have are apparently at 30FPS but I just haven't noticed and some games aren't really going to benefit from being much higher anyway.
Same. For example, Quake runs at about 20fps on my NEC Ready 7022 (75/100Mhz P1) and honestly I still find it quite enjoyable to play like that, and RollerCoaster Tycoon often runs at single digits on a P166MMX machine I have and I also find that to still be playable and a really fun experience.
Your videos are like watching a TV programme, they are really well made and very interesting.
Great video as usual , Alan Sugar looks like Rory McGrath
There had also been all-in-ones like the PS/2 Model 25. An 8086 with MCGA graphics. As someone who had been trapped with an 8088 with CGA, that was quite a step up!
I don't like jazz on it's own, but I appreciate it on background. Gives me comfy 90's vibes.
Agreed.
The background music rocks!!!! Thank you for the good content you produce!
Those performa’s were heavy as shit.
During your disassembling sequence I spotted some brown sockets in the mobo. @Nerd, I guess you can pump up your beautiful Integra with some hefty 256KB of SRAM cache chips. And then watch these brilliant MPEG1 clips, finally :))
those are DRAM sockets for S3 Trio, all they offer is a possibility of 1024x768 at 16 bit color, ZERO speed influence on a Trio card, ~10% speed bump on Virge which is meaningless as Virge was a Decelerator.
rasz hmmm, I guess you're right. But maybe there are sockets for SRAM cache as well? Worth to take a glance :)
My first PC was an IBM. It was a gift from my aunt and uncle.
My first PC I bought, was a Compaq Presario 486.
i learned everything i know about sex from grolier and encarta
I picked up one of those G3's at a thrift store for $4.99. And it works. Amazing. One thing I didn't realize about them is that they are friggin' HEAVY. I mean, for such a small machine (although, a little bulky like you said) they are incredibly heavy.
Cant believe those apples were 20 years ago. Still look good
I miss 3d maze I wish I could get back
3:44 Sweet Spot to sort your smokes and ashtrays out.
No smokes... no sale.
I actually liked the idea of a tv card video!
That seems like a good system to play 1995/1996 era dos games on such as Alien Trilogy. I bet it would be the ideal system to play some early windows games such as the quirky Venom Spider-Man Separation Anxiety game that was released in 1995. It was one of the first directx games and it has compatibilty quirks.
I wonder if the "rubber" connecting that plug to the VGA socket on the back actually contains the wiring to get the VGA signal up to the edge connector. If so a lovely hacky solution.
I was wondering if the internal monitor was plugged with the dongle thing
I doubt that . The VGA Connector has a few commonly unused pins (4, 11 & 12). I am pretty sure the dongle just bridge 2 of those together to tell the integrated card to use a different output, in this case the build in Monitor.
donpalmera- Yep thats my thought too. Amstrad were cheap that they would do that over more elegant engineering design choices
Yeah, I'm betting that it's just a custom VGA cable that runs up to the integrated monitor. I really doubt that the signal runs through that edge connector.
I was part of the pc division at Amstrad and the VGA port dongle runs under the system board and pops out at the front and plugs into the TV board as rj45 type connector as you'll notice when he shows the tray removed
My family used to have a PC with that same model of CDROM back in the early 90s. It was normal that the light was on all the time. It was one of those dual-mode lights that became popular on CD-Writers in later years. In the case of these things, Green meant "Power" or "Ready" and orange meant "Reading". Same as CD Writers used to have Green to mean "reading" and any other colour to mean "Writing"
Hello mate. I got a couple of Fujitsu Intecra P2-66 's. Seriously cool. Pentium 2 333mhz and 8Mb integrated graphics. However there are two PCI slots so any PCI GPU, up to a PCI Geforce 5500 SFF can be installed for powerful graphics. There is also an ISA slot. So Soundblaster heaven. 6 Gb hdd as standard. Cost a pretty penny when new. Flat screen. Nice. I have followed and admired all your work. Thank you for all your hard work. It is appreciated.
What an awesome machine. I love my Compaq 425 (and made a video of it) and it would be awesome to find more classic all in one computers. I didn't know Amstrad created these though! (Fat chance of finding one of these in Australia though). Great video mate!
Kinda want to see an "updating" video of this; later video cards, maxing out ram, faster cpu; just to see how good it COULD be.
Or at least Tomb Raider with gfx drivers... Yknow, something it should be able to do out of the box (as in without modifying hardware)
You could slam a better processor in it, and probably hack an updated video card in, but I think this thing should stay at it's current specification. I'll save the upgrades for more accessible systems.
That takes me right back ...
8:37 Ah the memories of doing this when I had a ball track mouse>
I even done it during my gaming sessions, yup removed the ball cleaned it and the wheels and put it back together in 15 seconds.
The Commodore Pet was an early all-in-one computer. At least when it came out in 1977 - when GPIB floppy drives became available later they were external.
Jecel Assumpção Jr
And it still looks like a sci-fi prop
I miss my old Amstrad PC1512DD! I went from my Color Computer 2 to the Amstrad in 1991 and decked it out with a 40 meg hard card, a 2400 baud modem, and a Media Vision Thunder Board. I played hookie from school one day to install and play with MS-DOS 5.0. Those were the days. Computers were so much more enjoyable back then before they began fully catering to the masses instead of the true computer people.
I see you shiver with antici...............pation!
That button on the front did function when new from factory in shoebury, Essex but I can't remember what we had it do..
Playing Quake with the Arrow keys like a champ!
To be fair these types of computers didn't cease to exist, they just took a different shape. The iMac is the obvious directly related along with some of the other all in ones like the Surface Studio and other technical all-in-ones, but I'd argue some of the desktop replacement style laptops that weigh a ton and take up and obscene amount of space for a laptop could be compared to this style of computer. Similar limitations on upgrading parts and it is technically an all-in-one.
"Dongle" is one of my favorite computer related terms. Tied with SCSI, I think.
I have a Compaq Presario from this same year and it actually uses a short little VGA monitor cable to attach to the port on the back! Same with the mic and speaker jacks.
So theoretically I could upgrade the video and sound hardware, though I'd be stuck with an ISA sound card because you only get 1(!!!) PCI slot.
Ah the Mega PC, loved mine! Some nice b-roll shots of the machines there :)
I had that same Sony CD drive which showed a green light when powered on and Amber for any activity. I also had that exact Quick Shot joystick bundled with my Time Computer. All the memories this video brought back. And my Sis video card also suffered the same limitation where 1024x768 dropped it back to 256 colours. Interestingly yours didn't have a 24bit colour at 640x480 mode...
Pity about the composite video not working on TV Tuner (I did spot a V1 and V2 button in the program alongside the tuner option itself, maybe that is the composite input). That Pentium really could have done with a nice hardware decoder for full frame video (I had a 166+ and I remember how choppy the Buddy Holly music video on the Windows 95 CDROM was if I dare full screen at 800x600 or more.
Great vi's!
One of my first PC's that I didn't have to share with the house was a Pentium 133mhz (100 with turboi off). I remember having a blast with Duke 3d, Doom, Rise of the Triad, MIRV, Age of Empires and Warcraft 2 :)
Installing DosBOX as I type this :P
I remember the first time I saw a computer that had a vertical tower and thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen because you couldn't set the monitor on top of the CPU, like even my Daddy's cobbled together PC could do. When my school got a couple of GSs, it was like a revolution that the whole system could be seem "compact" like the Mac while the IIC+s and what not that made up most of the computers had a bulk to them.
that background music is hell..
It was you who coined the term limitating :) good word
Thanks!
Maybe swapping out the godawful s3 Trio for a 3dfx Voodoo Rush would put some pep in that machine.
At any rate, great video as always.
I remember the Jan 2000 issue of PC Gamer coming with a mouse cleaner, although I didn't know this until I bothered to read the editor's column months later. It looked like a little model microphone.
Love the nudge into Settlers II!
Ahh, the original iMac. I just happen to have one. Anyways, Those AIOs from the mid 90s are something to behold. Just so quirky. that's why I like them.
Those old Compaqs were oddly built. Ive had several of them starting with Deskpro 386/20
I love your video style
This setup would work best with Windows 3.11. Awesome video.
But no built in megadrive! 😭
lol. No. But the Amstrad one was terrible anyway.
KuraIthys maybe so, but didnt stop me wanting one back in the day 😂 👍
mmh. XD
I do remember seeing it in a shop once, and I found it amazing back then.
Nowadays I'd rather try and get a TeraDrive. Much worse as a PC, but much more unique otherwise, since the PC and Mega Drive halves can actually talk to one another...
That's next.
One VERY minor quibble...a 33.6Kbps modem is actually only 3429 baud. Only 300 baud and lower modems always have equal baud/bps values rates.
...despite being always on, CD-ROM's light changes its color though
It does indeed.
wow, id love one of these
If the TV card is similar to one I used to own, it wouldn't be able to record video. It simply routed video from the composite input or tuner to the PC's screen, either full screen or in a window. Some of these cards also had built-in teletext decoders too - handy for watching several sports pages simultaneously.
While it wasn't one of these specifically--I'm in the States, so getting Amstrads in the 90s wasn't a thing--I owned a computer very similar to this one. Packard Bell had an entire line of all-in-ones, the Spectria. I paid $1500 in early 1995 for a Spectria 144 (a 486DX2 with 8M RAM, 420M disk, 2X CD-ROM, 1M VRAM, 15" monitor), which looked almost like the Integra here, with a bit of 90s styling on the bottom and the speakers mounted onto the sides of the monitor instead of the lower casing.
It had so many flaws I can't count them. The speakers were unshielded and interfered with the monitor constantly. It had no way to turn off the monitor without killing the PC as well, and no mute button. No reset button. Where the Integra routed the VGA internally and blocked the port, the Spectria had a 4" VGA cord that you had to plug into the backplane. The mouse broke in six months. The internal bay was too short for ISA cards, so they instead provided a riser card that mounted ISA cards horizontally. The PSU was mounted inside the monitor, and was not replaceable. This also meant the power was supplied to the mainboard via a proprietary edge connector, so you couldn't run the PC at all unless it was completely reassembled, and you needed a lot of force to get the power connected. And like most Packard Bell kit in the 90s, it ate itself alive inside of two years. The monitor lasted near 20 years though.
I remember building pc in 90s... it wasn't easy like today where it's more like ikea than engineering.
TV-card issue: is it a PAL-I compatible? (there were a few incompatible versions of PAL)
If there's one computer to collect, one you like to look at all the time in person (truly regret selling mine), would be, Apple's: Color Classic
The cutest of them all.
My Dad had a similar machine (but much earlier, I think it had win3.1) but it was more a TV with a computer added to it as you had to switch it to the computer channel to use it.
Spent so much time playing Star Trek 25th anniversary and judgement rights on it.
I wish I could remember the model or make as I can't seem to find anything with random google searches.
Also had to comment because, Settlers 2 is the best game ever!
Yeah, this beautiful beast definitely needs SRAM cache to be installed...
Early Sony optical drives had a two-color LED. It was lit green when the drive has power and changed to amber indicating activity.
I know this behavior by the Sony CDU561 in an external SCSI case. I didn't know that even internal drives did this.
In the late 80s early 90s there was a Honda Integra that was a really good car!
dude the integra lasted well into the 00's with the DC5
That vga port would allow you to stick a voodoo 3d accelerator card in that machine.
When I saw the picture for this video, a little bit of wee came out. Oh, and I got told off for shouting “yay!!!!”
You mean I have to wait for the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" screen THEN walk round to the back to get to the power button? Ain't nobody got time for that!
My very first PC was an Amstrad 386 DX 66 with 4MB ram, and 60MB HDD. Having sold my Amiga to buy it USED, I was then hit with the PC reality stick. Want to plug in a Joystick? Mouse port right? WRONG! UPGRADE by adding "game card". Oh you want decent sound almost as good as you got on your old Amiga 500? UPGRADE by adding a "sound card". lol good times. The mouse port on the Amstrad interestingly was a proprietary version of the Atari 9 pin D connector, the reverse of all other PC mouse ports, so you could ONLY use Amstrad mice. W@nk3r5!
I'd actually have discounted the Lisa from the AIO list as it spent most of its production run being sold with an external HDD pack. But yeah the AIO design has been Apple's bread and butter since the Macintosh first launched, although having said that the internal expansion possibilities on some of those machines wasn't as limited as people think; it's a shame that's a really damn expensive rabbit hole these days though :(
S3 Trio 32/64 card lacks the needed power for mpeg videos. I suspect it hadn't the proper hw acceleration. At those times (end of '90 and after), I had upgraded my previous Cirrus Logic 5428 1mb with an ATi Mach 64 VT 2mb, and finished with a Tseng Labs ET6000 + Voodoo1 3d dedicated card. OMG nice times! Cheers, M
yeah those cheap ati cards were the best for smooth dvd playback
The TV tuner software was notoriously flakey.
Little side note i was the last one to leave the PC Division and spent my remaining time at Amstrad training the Viglen helpdesk bods based in wembley the Amstrad products
I had an old CD-ROM drive back in the day that the light was always on, and it would blink off when there was activity, opposite of what you would expect. It was weird.
would be cool to build a new pc in that Integra shell ^^, And even maybe put in a Lcd screen in there. I would love a video where you are doin that ...:) Would be like a sleeper car.
Used to have a Compaq 520CDS (or was it CDS 520?) in the 90s, many hours of Doom were played on that thing!! And later when working at a computer shop, I acquired a later 5520 with a Pentium processor in it, but the monitor went bang, so, yeah, that went away sadly... :(
Hmm, beautiful isn't really the first thing that comes to mind. ;)
I see a theme here. I love it personally.
You could probably use a really tiny VGA cable to hook into the dongle and get a nice fancy video card.
That VGA "DONGLE" Is actually the VGA plug connection for the internal monitor, which I assume is just a commodity monitor put inside of a bespoke case.
Brilliant
Damned old age.
I had one of these brand new in 1995 running a dx2 80 the cd rom was much different there was only a flap that opened on the front leaving a flush front and the button thats missing was a standby button for the tv and the dongle on the back was a flat cable to the front connector
2:10 Wait, THERE WAS A PC THAT PLAYED MEGA DRIVE GAMES?! Could you do a video on it, as I have literally never heard of this before. I've pretty much seen ever other system that can play Genesis/Mega Drive games that was released through the 90's, but not this.
It had a white Megadrive pad branded Amstrad too. There was also another one made by IBM / Sega called the Sega TeraDrive.
The nVidia NV1 could run Saturn games:
ua-cam.com/video/jChtlWNIAL4/v-deo.html
There were two in fact.
An Amstrad (Amstrad Mega PC) one (released in Europe only), and a Sega one in Japan only (Sega TeraDrive).
The Amstrad model is a much better PC, but the Japanese one is about an order of magnitude more interesting.
The Amstrad is basically just a PC and a Mega Drive jammed into a case together.
The Teradrive is a 286 PC and a Mega Drive on the same motherboard, which share components, to the point that you can write code on the PC portion and immediately send it to the Mega Drive hardware, use the sound chip for PC Audio, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
The Teradrive gives the impression of having been built to be used as a Mega Drive dev kit, but then adapted to be a consumer product after the fact.
(I've been hoping to get hold of a Teradrive for a while... But they're expensive. Like, seriously.)
The Mega PC is really just a cheap trick; Jam both things into one case.
Neither did very well.
The TeraDrive did badly because... Well, it was a 286... And a rather weak one at that, being sold around 1993-1994. So it was just... Awful as a PC compared to what was available at the time.
The Amstrad Mega PC failed because... Well, it's a dodgy gimmick and you basically gain nothing from it.
From what I remember you can't even share displays; you need a different display for each.
(the TeraDrive came with an optional monitor that could handle both 15khz and VGA signals, allowing the use of both halves of the system on the same monitor.)
Interesting curiosities, but not much else. XD
I've just had the board for it repaired by Back office show, so hopefully I'll be able to film that video soon.
Amstrad Mega Pc, it had a 386sx 25mhz, VGA graphics 256colors, SBAudio. And, a Megadrive onboard. You switched systems via an external panel, used to hide the cartridge slot. Only one system at a time can be powered on, afaik.
FYI, I would be intrigued by a dedicated video capture-card video actually. They weren't uncommon in the 90s, and evolved rapidly into the 2000s. I'm not sure what their state is now, but all the more reason to investigate.
usb dongles £8 on ebay does dab fm and dvb-t
Just a quick note to say that the button on the left hand side above the sound,headphone jack and other things is in fact the button you can use for turning off the computer screen. I thought that I would inform you seeing as you said that you didn't know what it was for
I had encarta in 97
I'm thinking it's not a dongle, and not a piece of rubber to hold the dongle in place, rather a VGA male connector and ribbon leading to the monitor. Great video by the way, I didn't know this even existed...Around this time everything in my local PC World was Packard Bell.
Oh and I am guessing it's a Haupage (sp?) TV Card. I must have bought about 5 of them through the years, they always seemed like a great idea, they always had trouble working.
Nah, it's just a flimsy piece of rubber, it just locks in place on the case. The dongle must bridge some connections to tell the board where to put the VGA signal.
You know what I'm waiting for there sir .
It begins also on A.
Put Your back in to it mate , or RetroManCave will beat You to it.
I too am waiting excitedly for the Atari Falcon to get the Nerd treatment
HOLY SHIT YOU GOT A MEGA PC
I miss my Color Classic. I wish I never sold it.
Yep ,this all in 1 pc video is not complete without duke nukem 3D, his all time favorite game.
Ah, TV tuners...
I had one in my system for quite a while in the late 90's early 2000's...
I remember the one I had was almost painfully unstable when used on windows 95/98...
But it came with nt4.0 drivers.
As it happens I had uhhh.... Obtained a copy of NT 4.0, and had taken to dual-booting that with windows... 98, I think?
In any event where the Win9x drivers were hot garbage, on the exact same PC the Windows NT tv card drivers and software were rock solid and completely reliable.
Makes you glad to realise that the ancestor of modern windows is windows NT, and not 9x huh... XD
I play worms on my android tablet now. I used to play Tomb raider 3 a lot.
You, and a lot of this audience, no doubt know this, but I'll be a pedant anyway: "Performa" wasn't a model produced by Apple, but was instead Apple's home computer brand, and was comprised of both all-in-ones (often but not always prefixed '5') and desktop counterparts (often but not always prefixed '4' or '6') - for example, the Performa 5200 and the Performa 6200 have identical specifications, but the former is an all-in-one and the latter is a desktop; finally, and for only two models, there were also towers in the Performa brand, the 6400 and 6500 - madly, they have built in sub-woofers.