Old computers were very well documented. I built expansions cards for ZX Spectrum, MSX and IBM PC both for ISA and LPT port. I built them from various articles from magazines and when I felt comfortable enough, I made my own designs. For the software I used BASIC and Pascal.
Sadly those interfaces are obsolete. The closest today is the LPT port but even this under NT kernel is hard to programm at low level. With ISA, LPT on IBM PC, Spectrum, C64 or MSX interfaces, was easy to put the bits where you needed under dos/win9x. And Basic, Pascal, C, Assembler were just the right tools. I made ISA interfaces that were quite simple (AD/DA 8bit ISA card for example) and programming it did not required any device driver, just to know the IN/OUT adress, IRQ and read/send bytes or butes where you need to do what you need.
@@sebastian19745 The biggest hurdle today is real-time capability. You can still connect USB-to-LPT adapters to a modern PC, but then all you can do is push data in a buffer and hope for the best. No low-level talking to shift registers and similar.
@@graealex Exactly. However, even with a real LPT port under NT you only talk with the device driver and not with the hardware directly. But under dos/win9x you could talk dirrectly with the hardware (in dos mode) bypassing the device driver.
ohh - I bought that magazine - the English edition - and so wanted to make this. Thank you for doing it and showing the pain I would have gone through! :D
I suppose if you want to go for extra luxurious you could use only zif sockets, but those also take up far more space, just due to the mechanism alone, but they also don't come in all sizes.
What a great project! It's so cool to see what was going on in the computer world when I was a child and absolutely ignorant to all of it. Amazing job!
yeah all I really knew of this sort of thing was actual readymade video capture devices, and the occasional very minor project article for making an autofire or whatever...
The reason your camcorder isn't showing color might be the signal level of the color burst. It's possible that the ICs on your ISA card are expecting something with a higher amplitude. There might be a way to tweak the components on the RGB to composite box to boost that. Also, you could just get a modern RGB to Composite solution and see if that works. I really like your idea of trying to get these old boards to work, it was a fun watch. That said, I think I would probably try to get the first board working 100% before trying to throw the second one into the mix. Some things I would try are getting an RGB console to record a still via the RGB inputs. A playstation or PS2 can easily output RGB.
ELFA-katalogen! Vilken nostalgikick. Jag spenderade mycket tid som barn att bläddra i den katalogen och drömma om alla coola grejor jag skulle bygga… Och coolt projekt, det närmaste jag kommer nu förtiden att koppla in grejor man bygger själv är väl en USB till UART konverterare…
excited to see you install slackware, I have fond memories of learning linux with slackware, installing it from floppy disk sets on my 386 took a while but was perfectly usable afterwards.
4:35 "I don't have the software that came with this magazine. I do have schematics and a description, so i wrote the software myself." Now that is hardcore.
This is such an amazing project! The SCART connection you showed in the beginning was interesting, did it scale down the signal to 15khz? How did it display on the tv? In 240p?
I was not aware that there were collections that included the software. Does this include software for their other projects, like their GAL programmers, EPROM burners and such?. While the okayness of redistributing the archive seems a bit unclear (and I'll have to think about it for a bit,) thank you!
@old-computers-sucked on the Dutch website of elektor they have every issue for subscribers and I think the software is downloadable without a subscription. So for the older articles they don't have the software on their website but only on the recent ones, there is a DVD that covers 1990 to 1999 and includes all the software. You can find that DVD online at many places
@old-computers-suckedwell that’s what the internet archive was especially build for wasn’t it? Preservation for the future is so important, this message is a better example than i could ever give.
I remember reading thru electronics magazines and going, hold on, what if we stacked a couple of 386s on top of each other? Yea... I should've patented that idea(Intel Core/AMD x3D(sorta))...
Elfa var ju Bibeln för elektronikintresserade! Glöm inte den lilla boken där alla faktasidor är samlade. Jag har faktiskt två kataloger från Ericsson, ja de Ericsson. De sålde komponenter de med en gång i tiden. 90-talet vara en härlig tid på olika sätt.
Great video, like a trip back to the 90s. Btw: 15:34 you built such beautiful and elaborate PCBs, solder everything together and then bite such a hole around the Scart connector? I don't get it 😀
I'm trying to get some motivation to do something similar with a CPLD that's on a board from a E1 modem. I don't know exactly if I want to sample everything from an adc and do the magic on the cpld, or sync everything externally and only sample the actual line data (which could be only intensity, and chroma in two different adcs, or separate them inside the cpld). cool that this thing is ona a ISA card. such standard was so simple, but I think most tinkerers were afraid of developing for it. I saw some isa dev cards for you to do something with them, but not many projects on electronic magazines or similar, at least on my country
LOL, ok so NTSC "Never Twice The Same Color" was a joke in the television engineering community. It really stands for National Television Standards Committee. Because the NTSC color standard, while allowing for color transmission on black and white TVs, was susceptible to slight color variations due to its reliance on precise timing and phase, which could lead to inconsistent color reproduction on different sets. But that is funny.
It's actually the reason why US TV sets have a tint control. PAL TVs rarely had that, since PAL is phase-compensated and there was no reason to adjust the color.
Love the dedication to not using any modern resources, at least as much as is actually possible... Question, though - once you saw the input stage of the RGB converter pre-splits the composite signal to an S-video one for processing anyway... why not just build that part and pipe it into the composite input of the card, at least for initial testing? It's such a simple circuit, and I've got some two-way SV/Comp converters that are basically the size of the two plugs because the electronics fit neatly inside. Also it might not have helped for the colour capture, but doesn't the NES have S-video output? (maybe RGB in Europe, even) Also videotape downconverts the colour signal to be even lower bandwidth than regular RF TV or live-modulated composite. That might be something to do with not having any colour in the captured images? Perhaps whatever signal is coming out of the camera isn't using quite the right frequency so the converter doesn't pick it up, or it's even the colour transition enhancer getting confused and cancelling it out? Or something to do with the PAL phasing, if the line lengths aren't quite right (could easily happen with slightly stretched tape or other analogue media woes). There's green and purple fringes on a lot of the edges after all, especially vertical ones or very thin horizontal, which is one of the primary colour axes for composite encoding (I think maybe what you get when both quadrature components are fully positive or negative together? You see it in corrupt digital video signals and files particularly). There's a reason professional studios always had a timebase converter in the stack. How does it look if you play the tape back on a TV, or through a VCR with an adaptor? Can you point the camera at a scene and use the live composite / Svideo (RGB??) output from it as a test? I think maybe the NES has slightly scruffy timings vs true PAL also, might work to tune a standard def channel on a digital TV box (or analogue if still available where you are), play a commercial VHS tape or allow a slight stray into modernity by using a DVD player, just for verification purposes? That would eliminate or better confirm suspicions. Also the weirdness in the capture itself... I wonder if something's just not sitting right on the board. You said the sockets were cheap and nasty, and poor seating or connections in them are the source of a lot of unhappiness when it comes to computers. Maybe try cleaning the sockets and reseating the chips one at a time and see if that improves things, like what happened with the slot itself? There was also a question in my mind over IRQ and DMA assignments ... I don't know if a card like this needs them, as you're basically always polling it via direct memory mapped register writes and reads, but maybe the lack of arbitration itself could lead to there being interference from other devices on the bus? You've got a lot of things plugged in there, and ISA isn't that fast so it might be very busy, especially with the video card and maybe hard disk controller sharing the bandwidth? Could be interfering with both the reads and the writes, even, hence pixels being jittered back and forth, and the periodic brightness glitching that doesn't look like it's either 1/10th or 1/64th of the image width. (though, the fading effect suggests more a capacitor or inductor issue... something's the wrong value or not working right, or has the wrong resistance connected with it... Also also, running a 24MHz clock on the card? Very odd choice for them to make. Doesn't match with PAL pixels or ISA bus speed, even with divisions, unless yours happens to run at a true flat 8.0MHz. Wonder if that itself could be causing phasing problems. Unless of course it's all happening in the RGB converter...)
1353.00 for that card in 93 would be like 4000 dollars today. I remember buying an ATI full motion PCI card that popped back through my VGA card and sound card. It cost around 300.dollars So, I. Think the 1353.00 is not US dollars
In those days, we might have just extracted RGB from a real TV instead of building a board. Everyone had at least 2 TV's. The real cost was the test equipment. Guess it was ISA because the edge connector was cheaper than a parallel or serial cable.
No TV would give you the RGB externally, and working inside a CRT isn't something that a magazine should promote, especially since they can have varying architectures, some of which aren't isolated from mains.
I remember back then, we had an audio digitizer for the Amiga 500, which over time would fry the parallel port.
Old computers were very well documented. I built expansions cards for ZX Spectrum, MSX and IBM PC both for ISA and LPT port. I built them from various articles from magazines and when I felt comfortable enough, I made my own designs. For the software I used BASIC and Pascal.
The interfaces are still well documented. Just that the signal integrity measures today need to be a lot better.
lol, same here, even the Pascal. I just pulled my old atari ST out and have been upgrading it.
Sadly those interfaces are obsolete. The closest today is the LPT port but even this under NT kernel is hard to programm at low level. With ISA, LPT on IBM PC, Spectrum, C64 or MSX interfaces, was easy to put the bits where you needed under dos/win9x. And Basic, Pascal, C, Assembler were just the right tools.
I made ISA interfaces that were quite simple (AD/DA 8bit ISA card for example) and programming it did not required any device driver, just to know the IN/OUT adress, IRQ and read/send bytes or butes where you need to do what you need.
@@sebastian19745 The biggest hurdle today is real-time capability. You can still connect USB-to-LPT adapters to a modern PC, but then all you can do is push data in a buffer and hope for the best. No low-level talking to shift registers and similar.
@@graealex Exactly. However, even with a real LPT port under NT you only talk with the device driver and not with the hardware directly. But under dos/win9x you could talk dirrectly with the hardware (in dos mode) bypassing the device driver.
ohh - I bought that magazine - the English edition - and so wanted to make this. Thank you for doing it and showing the pain I would have gone through! :D
Believe me, these "period-correct cheap, nasty IC sockets", are much more reliable than modern cheap round-hole type IC sockets.
I suppose if you want to go for extra luxurious you could use only zif sockets, but those also take up far more space, just due to the mechanism alone, but they also don't come in all sizes.
Oh really? The machined round hole sockets seem to have some sort of internal spring that grips the leads quite well.
@@Scrogan It works only with brand new ICs, and is very prone to contamination and oxidation. Also IC pins are flat, not round...
What a great project! It's so cool to see what was going on in the computer world when I was a child and absolutely ignorant to all of it. Amazing job!
yeah all I really knew of this sort of thing was actual readymade video capture devices, and the occasional very minor project article for making an autofire or whatever...
Du måste ju helt klart göra fler såna här videos, riktigt skoj att titta på! ❤
The reason your camcorder isn't showing color might be the signal level of the color burst. It's possible that the ICs on your ISA card are expecting something with a higher amplitude. There might be a way to tweak the components on the RGB to composite box to boost that. Also, you could just get a modern RGB to Composite solution and see if that works. I really like your idea of trying to get these old boards to work, it was a fun watch. That said, I think I would probably try to get the first board working 100% before trying to throw the second one into the mix. Some things I would try are getting an RGB console to record a still via the RGB inputs. A playstation or PS2 can easily output RGB.
ELFA-katalogen! Vilken nostalgikick. Jag spenderade mycket tid som barn att bläddra i den katalogen och drömma om alla coola grejor jag skulle bygga…
Och coolt projekt, det närmaste jag kommer nu förtiden att koppla in grejor man bygger själv är väl en USB till UART konverterare…
Cool idea
I can see you used Tesla TDA3505. I still have a lot of these (and others) in old TV modules.
Good work :)
excited to see you install slackware, I have fond memories of learning linux with slackware, installing it from floppy disk sets on my 386 took a while but was perfectly usable afterwards.
I started out with Slackware too. Slackware 3.0. Which was also called Slackware 95. It was from the Windows 95 era. So it came with FVWM95.
4:35 "I don't have the software that came with this magazine. I do have schematics and a description, so i wrote the software myself." Now that is hardcore.
18:08 That looks like one of those creepypasta pictures that floated around the internet in the late 1990s, showing “ghosts” and paranormal activity.
Now you need to party likes it 19-9-9!
This is such an amazing project!
The SCART connection you showed in the beginning was interesting, did it scale down the signal to 15khz?
How did it display on the tv?
In 240p?
I have the original software for this card on the collection DVD of the Dutch edition of the magazine, I sent you the zip file by email.
I was not aware that there were collections that included the software. Does this include software for their other projects, like their GAL programmers, EPROM burners and such?.
While the okayness of redistributing the archive seems a bit unclear (and I'll have to think about it for a bit,) thank you!
@old-computers-sucked on the Dutch website of elektor they have every issue for subscribers and I think the software is downloadable without a subscription.
So for the older articles they don't have the software on their website but only on the recent ones, there is a DVD that covers 1990 to 1999 and includes all the software. You can find that DVD online at many places
@old-computers-suckedwell that’s what the internet archive was especially build for wasn’t it?
Preservation for the future is so important, this message is a better example than i could ever give.
@old-computers-suckedWhen the original manufacturer gives up on distribution, it's usually considered fair game for archival.
This is very cool.
Okay this is cool.
I remember reading thru electronics magazines and going, hold on, what if we stacked a couple of 386s on top of each other?
Yea... I should've patented that idea(Intel Core/AMD x3D(sorta))...
Elfa var ju Bibeln för elektronikintresserade!
Glöm inte den lilla boken där alla faktasidor är samlade.
Jag har faktiskt två kataloger från Ericsson, ja de Ericsson. De sålde komponenter de med en gång i tiden.
90-talet vara en härlig tid på olika sätt.
Great video, like a trip back to the 90s.
Btw: 15:34 you built such beautiful and elaborate PCBs, solder everything together and then bite such a hole around the Scart connector? I don't get it 😀
I think this PCB is made at the factory. Now you can order it online.
@@yaroslavpronin5111 yeah, possibly. But non the less, so much work and this kind of hole doesn't fit together 🙂
@ronny332 Apparently, he went a bit crazy at the end)
I'm trying to get some motivation to do something similar with a CPLD that's on a board from a E1 modem. I don't know exactly if I want to sample everything from an adc and do the magic on the cpld, or sync everything externally and only sample the actual line data (which could be only intensity, and chroma in two different adcs, or separate them inside the cpld). cool that this thing is ona a ISA card. such standard was so simple, but I think most tinkerers were afraid of developing for it. I saw some isa dev cards for you to do something with them, but not many projects on electronic magazines or similar, at least on my country
LOL, ok so NTSC "Never Twice The Same Color" was a joke in the television engineering community. It really stands for National Television Standards Committee. Because the NTSC color standard, while allowing for color transmission on black and white TVs, was susceptible to slight color variations due to its reliance on precise timing and phase, which could lead to inconsistent color reproduction on different sets. But that is funny.
It's actually the reason why US TV sets have a tint control. PAL TVs rarely had that, since PAL is phase-compensated and there was no reason to adjust the color.
Grymt jobbat!! Dessutom, koda C i DOS är inte för folk med svaga nerver. 🙂
Love the dedication to not using any modern resources, at least as much as is actually possible...
Question, though - once you saw the input stage of the RGB converter pre-splits the composite signal to an S-video one for processing anyway... why not just build that part and pipe it into the composite input of the card, at least for initial testing? It's such a simple circuit, and I've got some two-way SV/Comp converters that are basically the size of the two plugs because the electronics fit neatly inside. Also it might not have helped for the colour capture, but doesn't the NES have S-video output? (maybe RGB in Europe, even)
Also videotape downconverts the colour signal to be even lower bandwidth than regular RF TV or live-modulated composite. That might be something to do with not having any colour in the captured images? Perhaps whatever signal is coming out of the camera isn't using quite the right frequency so the converter doesn't pick it up, or it's even the colour transition enhancer getting confused and cancelling it out? Or something to do with the PAL phasing, if the line lengths aren't quite right (could easily happen with slightly stretched tape or other analogue media woes). There's green and purple fringes on a lot of the edges after all, especially vertical ones or very thin horizontal, which is one of the primary colour axes for composite encoding (I think maybe what you get when both quadrature components are fully positive or negative together? You see it in corrupt digital video signals and files particularly). There's a reason professional studios always had a timebase converter in the stack. How does it look if you play the tape back on a TV, or through a VCR with an adaptor? Can you point the camera at a scene and use the live composite / Svideo (RGB??) output from it as a test?
I think maybe the NES has slightly scruffy timings vs true PAL also, might work to tune a standard def channel on a digital TV box (or analogue if still available where you are), play a commercial VHS tape or allow a slight stray into modernity by using a DVD player, just for verification purposes? That would eliminate or better confirm suspicions.
Also the weirdness in the capture itself... I wonder if something's just not sitting right on the board. You said the sockets were cheap and nasty, and poor seating or connections in them are the source of a lot of unhappiness when it comes to computers. Maybe try cleaning the sockets and reseating the chips one at a time and see if that improves things, like what happened with the slot itself? There was also a question in my mind over IRQ and DMA assignments ... I don't know if a card like this needs them, as you're basically always polling it via direct memory mapped register writes and reads, but maybe the lack of arbitration itself could lead to there being interference from other devices on the bus? You've got a lot of things plugged in there, and ISA isn't that fast so it might be very busy, especially with the video card and maybe hard disk controller sharing the bandwidth? Could be interfering with both the reads and the writes, even, hence pixels being jittered back and forth, and the periodic brightness glitching that doesn't look like it's either 1/10th or 1/64th of the image width.
(though, the fading effect suggests more a capacitor or inductor issue... something's the wrong value or not working right, or has the wrong resistance connected with it... Also also, running a 24MHz clock on the card? Very odd choice for them to make. Doesn't match with PAL pixels or ISA bus speed, even with divisions, unless yours happens to run at a true flat 8.0MHz. Wonder if that itself could be causing phasing problems. Unless of course it's all happening in the RGB converter...)
Any chance you can look at the Kenwood KDM-7 DTMF keypad and see if you can create the pcb for the kit or 3D print the keys ?
Jaså du är Svensk! Det var som fan :D AoE-tidningarna är inte att förakta!
2:43 RIFA intensifies, ewwwww! - I have to grab that and make a GIF out of it :)
Next up, HDMI capture on a 5150, 8088mph style
1353.00 for that card in 93 would be like 4000 dollars today.
I remember buying an ATI full motion PCI card that popped back through my VGA card and sound card.
It cost around 300.dollars
So, I. Think the 1353.00 is not US dollars
With blackjack and what? :-)
I'm gonna build my own 8-bit ISA card
With blackjack and hookers
in fact, forget the ISA card
Hoo-
04:51 hahaha
A lot of work for less than stellar results is often frustrating. But hey you tried at least. Some result is better than no result.
It's entirely possible that neither of those boards worked particularly well even back then.
@@graealex true dat
In those days, we might have just extracted RGB from a real TV instead of building a board. Everyone had at least 2 TV's. The real cost was the test equipment. Guess it was ISA because the edge connector was cheaper than a parallel or serial cable.
No TV would give you the RGB externally, and working inside a CRT isn't something that a magazine should promote, especially since they can have varying architectures, some of which aren't isolated from mains.