I commented on Part 1 that many of the boards in your collection came from me, including several that I designed. Now that the holidays are over, I watched Part 2 and can answer some questions you raised: The Orchid TGC (officially called the TurboPGA) will not do anything because it needs initializing software to load the firmware for the onboard 80186 processor's RAM (there is no ROM). Once initialized, I believe it is fully hardware compatible with the IBM PGC, but my memory is not entirely clear on that. The IBM product had a CGA emulator daughter board that produced video at the same scan rates as the main graphics system. The TurboPGA also had a daughter board that you seem to be missing. It was a standard EGA video system, and relied on using a multisync monitor to display either "Pro Graphics" or EGA. Both EGA chips and multisync monitors were fairly new at the time. IBM used a proprietary, single rate monitor. The TurboPGA was considerably faster than the IBM board, and cost about half as much. The "strange" memory chips you see are "Video RAM". Not the generic term for memory used as a frame buffer, but dual port DRAM with a standard random access port for the processor and a serial output port for display refresh. This improved performance by providing nearly 100% bandwidth to the processor. I designed the hardware and most of the firmware under contract to Orchid. There was a paint program available for this board. As you guessed, ScanCap is a specialized video capture card. It has only a "line buffer", and could not capture a whole frame at once. Thus it was only useful for capturing still images. However, it could capture a wide variety of video signals, including some relatively high resolution (for the time period). It was designed for capturing images from various medical imaging systems so they could be transmitted to a remote doctor. It had multiple optional oscillators (left edge) so that a single board could work with various systems, but only 2 or 3 dozen of these were ever built, and most had just 1 or 2 oscillators. I see that there was an optional 2nd A to D converter, but don't recall why. Perhaps this allowed capturing higher resolution images by alternating between the 2 ADCs. I designed this for a client who was a radiologist. He wanted to be able to study medical images from home, and sold a system based on this board to hospitals all over the U.S. Blackfoot was indeed a JPEG accelerator for NuBus (Mac) computers. The motivation for it, as you guessed, was that CPUs of that era could not process JPEG fast enough for real-time video, and were painfully slow at compressing/decompressing large JPEG files. Even when software-based JPEG became practical, they generally took shortcuts to improve the speed, at the expense of image quality. Blackfoot, on the other hand, produced about the highest quality JPEG compression/decompression available at the time. I designed the hardware for this, while 2 partners did the firmware and Mac software. You had one or more boards from Portacom, and I recall that I did some work for them, but don't specifically recognize it. The Vectrix board was, if I remember correctly, given to my by a friend who worked for Vectrix, but I don't really know anything about it.
I was an AT in the Navy in the late 80s and they really drilled corrosion control. Water is highly corrosive, so they taught us to use isopropyl alcohol of at least 91% for cleaning. I was a PC tech in the mid 90s and we would get one-off boards all the time. If we couldn't find documentation, we had to hope we could find a known good to compare with. This was pre-internet days, so you had to go with what manuals you had on hand. There was common circuitry on most cards like the circuit for the ISA interface, but sometimes you had to guess the signals based on board and components. Also 2 things I HATE to deal with (and lucky me that's what I mostly worked on in the Navy) - audio and RF. I've had RF problems only show up if you happen to be touching the gear, for example, and audio is always a pain in the ass. :)
As seen in this video and several other commentors, water is NOT highly CORROSIVE. If You are in a location where the water is mineralized (hard) much better to use distilled, deionized, or typical bottled water. I personally let things dry for 2 days under a moderate fan. And I never immerse transformers that suck water between the layers of windings, as they can take forever to dry and sometimes get mildewy which then sucks water out of the atmosphere, and mildew is slightly conductive when wet.
I have worked in a small company manufacturing custom PCBs. Your method of cleaning is exactly what we did right after manufacturing PCBs to make them look neat. Just soap and water, then rinse, rinse with distilled water and then put them into an oven (70°C) to dry them out. On a large scale, we used a glorified converted dishwasher which was really expensive and basically did the very same job. I’d bet a modern dish washer using a (low temp) ECO program would work just as well. All you need to do is to cover anything which has a vent hole. Dip switches, beepers and the like usually come with a protective sticker you remove after manufacturing the PCB. If soap and water isn’t enough, especially when removing residue from leaked batteries and capacitors, you can use PCC, a “Printed Circuitboard Cleaner”. In Germany, you can source it from “Kontakt Chemie” but I am sure that there is something similar in the US. It also works with TFT where ordinary TFT cleaner fails. I have deep cleaned the TFT of my milling machine numerous times without any damage. I can’t be sure if it is safe to use on any LCD/TFT but when everything else fails, why not? To quick dry, you can use pure isopropanol alcohol. It “dilutes” the water and evaporates without residue. You can buy it in bottles and also as spray cans. For home usage, I prefer the spray cans since you can blast through the cracks between chips and PCBs. For drying, you can also use compressed air from an ordinary compressor. The extra dry air really helps. Make sure there is no oil in the compressed air. There is no ESD issue using compressed air, all the static electricity is blown away safely.
I had this orchid card in 1988, it cost a fortune - $2000 sounds right It was installed in the fastest PC at that time (386?) And hooked upto it was a 25-27" 'super' color monitor, requiring at least 3 men to carry - had to install an extra leg under my desk Used it for autocad and some rudimentary 3d drawings
This sounds like my first bosses setup. He used tango PCB, and AutoCAD, and the monitor was like 5000 lbs. Lmao. It literally bent the middle of his table over time, me ended up getting a new desk lol.
I remember Orchid gear, I was in elementary school. The high school up the street was also the central Pre-Engineering lab for the district, and it was equipped with a fancy CAD and CNC station. Not sure how big the monitor was, but it was huge and colorful compared to the 9" monochrome and 12" green/orange Apple II monitors I had access to at the time.
I think you're doing excellent work by simply showing these cards on your channel. Who knows when someone'll see a video and go "Oh, I know that card!" and they might have a driver disk. So yeah, keep the awareness running.
A surprisingly good DOS program for testing obscure, proprietary video modes supported by extremely few cards is actually the fractal rendering program FRACTINT. You may want to consider adding that to your arsenal of testing software if you don't have it already! ;)
Absolutely, this program runs a lot of extremely obscure video modes, even people that worked in the industry haven't heard of. I first heard about this program from a person that worked for the company Matrox in Canada.
It supported Paradise VGA and other modes that most software didn't. It's a pity that FRACTINT has been forgotten entirely. It was a huge hit back in the day. Real fractals! On your PC! Rendered at lightning speed with integer math! (hence the name) You could zoom in as much as you wanted, and sure enough those were real fractals, infinite. It even supported color cycling for your own hallucinogenic light show. But today? It's gone and nobody remembers it, even on these retro channels.
Re: washing PC parts with tap water and plain soap, I have done that myself, and even though the water in my area is considered very "hard" I have never had any ill effects, despite just letting the water evaporate naturally from the parts. I've even washed PC fans using this method, and they've all worked perfectly afterwards. Oh and Adrian, I really like these long videos where you delve deep down into the nature and history of the things you review. I've always felt that I missed a lot on other retro channels when they just show an item for a brief moment with one or two sentences to explain what it is, but rarely what it does, or why. In other words, please keep making these in-depth videos, TY. Greetings from Denmark.
I worked in a computer store in a town near a Nuclear Reservation and heard MANY stories of how, when a MILLION DOLLAR piece of electronic equipment got "Crapped Up" a real term with radiation, how they would just take it outside and wash it with water and let it dry.
I used to work for a big mfg company, and we wash pcb's with pure (pure H20) as to not leave residues on board/ics and cause the board to fail during FVT.
The CT2770 is a rather noisy card from the get-go. There's two 16v 47uF caps around the amp chip that need to be swapped for 100uF capacitors, and ideally the output filter caps need to be swapped from 16v 470 to 16v 680-1000uF, whatever fits. That last part is a mod, it really helps the low end cutoff but all of this should be done to any SB16 that comes through. As the caps age, given they're using chinese manufacturers such as Wincap and G-Luxon and even Jamicon which they were using until recently, they're all going to go bad from age. Especially in the realm around the cluster to the right of the CT1745A, as that's where a bunch of stuff goes in and out of that chip, and where the hiss mostly originates. the amp just amplifies that hiss and that's what you're hearing, but replacing the two 47uF caps with 100s helps a ton as that then brings it in line with the datasheet.
The “8bit testing” and “16bit testing” SoundBlaster came back to me like a “Blast from the past” when I’ve heard them! I remember when I’ve first got ModPlay on my 386sx/16MHz, with its buzzer on board instead of a speaker. I never thought I’d ever hear sampled audio coming out of it! Also, after I realized that I could make an 8bit sound card with 18 resistors and a capacitor attached to the parallel port as a DAC, this became my first sound card, which I even built 20-30 more times for friends at uni! Great video Adrian!
I worked in IT in many facettes for more than 20 years. I can see the masses of people who would have had a stroke or heart attack at 1:18...... Washing boards/cards/etc. I get it - it works and doesn't harm them. Also, both your work and the work of many others who remove/replace capacitors and do other soldering work on motherboards.... That to would have absoltely killed thousands of PC repair techs back in those days. I love your work and always enjoy it. It often surprises me at the great things you and others are able to do today that would have been forbidden in the past.
Provided you get it fully dry before turning it on it's fine. I agree with not doing that with mechanical drives. It's usually the only effective way of getting rid of dust and grime from so many years. The physical repair is astounding; now and back then it wasn't usually prudent to do that (other than the quick chip repair when you didn't need to solder/desolder). Obviously it's required now, as replacements are dwindling. Cool stuff brings back a ton of memories working with some of those cards/boards and cpus. 3com card especially.
Its perfectly fine as long they dont have any electricity in them. For motherboards you need first remove the battery and drain the caps, after that they are too safe to clean under water. If you dont remove the battery, then corrosion begins to form and the board can become water damaged.
The Heath 150-307 board is a Zenith Data Systems Z-449 video card from their Z-248 era systems. Probably designed to allow CGA/EGA/VGA to run on the fixed frequency Flat Tension Mask monitor ZCM-1490
Appreciate your commitment to deep diving on some of these obscure pieces of hardware. You put in significantly more effort than some of these things are worth to give them their best shot to shine.
It's a shame that so much information of those rare and obscure cards and motherboards are lost forever and as the title says much history behind those cards and stuff are lost to time. That's why people like you and others in the retro computing community are there to preserve information about these old hardware and software before it lost time for the new young generation for many years to come.
The main differences between the AWE32 and 64 families is the change in ram expansion, some slight changes to the chips - the 64s are meant to have a better noise floor (ESP the gold), and in windows, you get 32 software voices to go with the 32 hardware voices (hence the AWE64 name). But the basic design of the chips/audio interface is identical between the 2 families, hence the 64s work perfectly with software for the 32s.
I don't miss the days of putting a new card into my PC and then not even getting to the BIOS... then putting the card in a friend's nearly identical motherboard and it works perfectly.
That MQX-16 is MPU-401 compatible, if memory serves. It used the same breakout dongle/cable as their later straight up clones. So D-sub 1,6,2 (the rightmost pins) -> Midi Out 2,3,4 and D-sub 5,9 (leftmost) -> Midi In 2,4 respectively should do you good. Pins counted solder-side right to left, top to bottom.
As my comment on the first video of Adrian's investigation of the MQX-16 noted, the 3 RCA connectors are almost definitely duplicating the Roland MPU-401 analog audio connectors, for tape synchronisation in and out, and for a metronome audio signal. The jumpers near the ISA board are almost definitely for the address base and/or the IRQ. From memory, I think 0x330 is the default I/O address for the MPU-401.
It's fairly simple, those high end parts required special software, which nobody in the retro computing space wants. We want stuff that works with ALL the software, not some specialty application. I remember back when i worked for computerland, we sold PC XT's and PC AT's with autocad, and special monitors that had 4 coaxial connectors (RGB+synch, i think). That and very expensive HP plotters. But you had to have a special monitor for those high res cards, special drivers, and they only worked with autocad, basically, because nobody else wrote software that could use that extra high resolution, because nobody owned the cards and monitors. Some of these systems sold for 10K, and that's in 1980's dollars. So while that hardware was amazing for the time, it never got widespread adoption, and thus is relegated to the scrap heap of history. That and after a year or two, better cards and monitors came out anyway. Back in the day it was almost always more cost effective to wait a year for the features you wanted, than to be an early adopter.
@@p_mouse8676 Yeah. It is also sad, because some of these products were extremely good, just too expensive for the mainstream. If only the manuals and software had been archived. But history is littered with "we should have saved that," but it wasn't because it was not considered important at the time. Just look at food. What did the ancient Romans eat? How was the food cooked? We really don't know. We have snippets here and there, but no real recipes. That information is likely lost to us forever. Same as this computer history.
Those cards were for business use. I don't know anyone who does business retro computing. The IBM PC was not a games console, it was first and foremost a business machine. Most computing of the 80s was. It's why computers were such a hit and sold like hotcakes, despite the high (to retail consumers) price tags. When it's a business expense that doubles productivity, it's an easy choice. $10k for a workstation? Pocket change.
@@jeromethiel4323 You know what the ancient Romans ate a lot? Insects! No kidding! Lol. But yeah I completely get you! :) It's fascinating how many details get lost in time. Some of them are actually extremely important for the things we take for granted these days!
This is why One of my hobbies was collecting the Data Sheets of EVERY board that came across my bench when I was a Tech in a 80ies-90ies Computer Store as well as making a log in a book when I repaired something as to what was wrong, how I fixed it and any info I might have got from a phone call to the manufacture/vender! We were even a Commodore Authorized Repair Center and I photo copied ALL the Repair/Service Manuals they sent us, for my own use of course! Somewhere around the house I have manuals for the Vic 20, C-64, Pet 2010(?) Commodore's Business System with a separate IEEE 5 1/4 Inch Floppy Drive. As well as the Commodore Dot Matrix Printers of the day.
That EDO thing with the Pentium bus width explains why my dad told me you had to buy them in pairs. Now I get it! No one else has explained that in their videos, and I was always confused.
If you ever get stuck only having EDO RAM but need FPM RAM, lift the OE pin of each chip from the board and wire it to the CS pin and the RAM will behave just like FPM.
Hi Adrian. You are hands down my favourite UA-camr. These videos are fascinating. I hope you are well. You deserve every success. All my heart. One Amiga nerd from the UK
Blast from the past. I've used many of these things back in the day. I use isoprop alcohol instead of water to clean them... The VTEC that's been scratched out is a QA reject. Who knows what it failed. FPM = Fast Page Mode 19:00 Get the PC-Doctor POST card. Or PM me and I'll get you one. 23:00 Write through cache... 25:50 as to tools for checking speeds, I wrote PC Bench for just that purpose in the late 1980's. 31:30 if I recall right, the jumper is for setting base address for multi-card systems. I.e. won't fix a problem if it's not happy. 47:30 Orchid Graphics card -- it was used for video editing systems (among others) in parallel with a CGA or Hercules card. I wrote diagnostics for it back in the stone age. Similar to the Targa card back in the day. It needed custom software to set it up. The BIOS didn't know what to do with it. 1:00:00 I always add a bit of epoxy to jumper wires if I want the card to survive storage...
Really interesting to see the various cards, especially the Creative SoundBlaster 16 which reminded me of the sound cards I used to have & then the Orchid card which reminded me of the Orchid Righteous 3D card I had which was (I think) followed by the 3Dfx Rage 32 (???), then the VooDoo2 & then the VooDoo 3 graphics cards !!! Talk about bringing back old memories. Scary to think that the Orchid was 1985 .... 39 years ago !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! God I'm getting old !!!
The SoundBlaster with the noise is because it's picking up RFI, likely from components on the motherboard. The design or some component on the SoundBlaster might be susceptible to this. The noise will vary depending on the components being utilized, so your simple test isn't triggering the RFI from the PC component, but running a more complex program may.
Also, some modern PSU's have lacking grounding. Pull a 2.5mm2 power-cable from the back-plane of the SB right into the shield of the PSU, and you might drain off a lot of RFI.
I have owned this “Noisy Soundblaster 16”. This is perfectly normal, it does pick up any EMI it can. Back in the days, I had wrapped it in a sandwich made out of paper and tinfoil and had put it into the bottom most slot. I had to swap around all the other cards until I had a configuration which was reasonably quit. In some games (e.g. Sim City 2000 and Windows 3.11) there was a faint screeching noise when updating the entire screen. Also I was unable to get rid of the faint sounds moving the mouse. This thing is a disaster but it was a very cheap disaster, all I could afford back then. I had to get rid of it after buying my first Ethernet card and went for a SB gold.
I have a modern laptop. STILL screeching when moving mouse. It gets better if you pull grounding wires from certain heat-shields and RFI covers straight to the Power supply GND. Basically, poor grounding makes the RFI-shields and signal ground act like a capacitor rather than 0.00V Sometimes putting an ESD-bag between cards can work miracles. Soldering a cable to the chassis, and back-plane, and attaching to true ground also can help a lot of times.
Back in the early days of CAD when we needed better graphics we had two cards in the system connected to two monitors. The base card was typically a cheap CGA card as it was only used to execute drivers and software to enable the more enhanced graphics card. Usually, the enhanced graphics card requires a special type of monitor. I am familiar with the Nth Engine card for example.
The other one I am familiar with was the proprietary “BaileyCAD” card that had an EGA card switched through an ultra high resolution (modern HD in 1985 on an IBM XT/ Compaq Portable) video card.
My dad, who was into computing from the eighties onwards, would have loved this stuff. I never inherited his instinctive understanding of what was actually going on inside a machine, but I still enjoy watching someone who really knows their stuff at work!
Funny enough, my first IT job was for Orchid Europe back in 1994/1995 as a tech support engineer. It was all about the Fahrenheit, Kelvin, GameWave32 and SoundWave32. Great fun working for a tech company back in the day started fresh faced. I was sad when they did cut backs and was made redundant.
Just something to bear in mind. I worked for a company right out of college that made very, very high end systems for crash testing and turbine monitoring. A lot of our own cards and acquisition cards like the other ones in the box were insanely sensitive to bus timing. ISA bus timings could vary a lot once you get to later 386 clones.
Wow. Jpeg decoding and encoding was a processor intensive task that demanded a dedicated co-processor - and then a few years later, MJPEG was a popular video format.
The large mystery EGA/VGA card looks familiar. I have pulled out a bunch of them disassembling old CAD stations back in 1994. Some of them even had 286 processors on board! Those stations were used for AutoCAD. I have asked the owners some questions and sadly, I can’t remember everything I had learned back then. I am very sure that they have a compatibility mode for booting purposes only. Once AutoCAD is running, it takes over and uses them in a totally different mode. This might explain why they are so slow in your test. The machines I had disassembled had 20+ inch color CRTs for the workspace and a small monochrome monitor for selecting the tools and status information. The small monitor was connected to the 9-pin output and the gigantic screen was connected by VGA. Those large monitors were fixed frequency and couldn’t be used with a standard VGA card. Also they didn’t display anything during booting. I had kept some of the cards as souvenirs because they look cool, but I was not allowed to have any software, the special driver disks had to remain at the site.
I would still use at least de ionized water and final rinse would be with IPA or something similar and imnediate drying off with air and high temp. I dont believe that just water rinsing wouldn't hurt anything at all.
Quite literally every electronic part and board made is washed in some fashion during it's build cycle. The wafers that the microchips themselves are made from (prior to packaging) are washed many times, as they go through various etch stages. Of course, this is with very pure DI water, and rinsed with 100% pure alcohol (or other solvents depending on the stages). Used to work on a wet-etch line at ST Microelectronics, we had very fancy "spin washers/dryers" that a basket of wafers (literally 5-6 figures worth of microchips in a small "basket" measuring maybe 8x8x10 or something like that) would insert into, close the door just like a front-load washer, hit the button and "off they go " rinsing. PCBs do the same, again with appropriate solvents to dissolve/wash off fluxes and such, then a pure water wash to get the solvents out. As others have mentioned, the key of course is making sure the water is gone before power is ever applied (although 100% pure DI water isn't a good conductor at all actually, but just a tiny percent of contamination can change that). Technically, you could run a computer under water if it was pure enough, and some have built fully mineral-oil bathed computers in fact (easier to avoid contamination with oil as contaminants don't react as easily and they tend to just "fall out" unlike water where they dissolve into new conductive compounds). Pure water is too hard to "keep pure" and also evaporates much faster than something like mineral oil, but it could be done as a lark. I've often told people over the years when they say "my keyboard is really dirty (or "I ruined it by spilling a soda on it") to put it in the dishwasher and run a cycle with soap, then another without as an extra rinse, then rinse it with the purest alcohol they can find (typically 99% is avaiable at drug stores if you look hard enough)... the alcohol combines with the water to rapidly evaporate it out, then let it dry really well. (Set on a windowsill, or outside on a sunny breezy day, for several hours (or longer won't hurt obviously). It may or may not work, but if you were going to trash it anyhow, it's worth a shot. (Turn off the heated drying cycle in the d-washer, and top-rack only, LOL). If you can safely remove the keycaps, even better, and if you can fully disassemble it to housing and PCB, almost certainly can get it in great shape again.
I once plugged an old 500MB Maxtor HDD into a newer 790FX machine just to see if it worked. It also turned my bios red, and the windows 10 loading screen, red. Which also persisted on the next boot without the drive installed. It changed back to black on the 3rd boot. The drive did still work, empty, but file system type was msdos.
i lived in San Jose and scavengers would bring me bins upon bins of dumpster rescues....i would ID, function and estimate value of literally thousands of cards, boards, monitors, scanners and more for an agreed upon percentage of overall value paid out as my pick of the litter...made alot of money just tinkering in a bed room at my mom's house assembling and selling systems from the aquired in this way... by 2001 i had a dual P3-750 with somehing like 512Mgb ram rith a striped and mirrored raid array running Debian in an SMP configuration that had about 5 gigs of drivers, software and scanned manuals that i had collected....I gave that machine to a friend in Oregon that taught me alot about large networks, web services and security...He got much use from it until his death 7 years ago.....no idea what happened to that machine as we were on oppisite corners of the country at the time...i haven't work in IT for nearly 10 years now, what i knew is no longer useful and has mostly been forgotten... RIP Surf Griz i still remember you
I've washed / cleaned components that way with zero issues. Of course only boards never mechanical hard disks, drives ect. I have a high flow blower I use as well for automotive cleaning purposes. One thing I insure is my water in my area was very hard and I used only water out of my reverse osmosis tap. I'd also wait a good day regardless at minimum to power up any card or board as a last safe guard to fully insure any residual water was dried. As a side note I gave areas where socket or larger IC chips were located extra attention so if any water or moisture made it's way under the chip it was gone or dried. Love your videos, sadly only stumbled upon it recently 😢. I'm located in Hong Kong now so you got another viewer from there now 😅
After washing with water, you should displace it with isopropanol by submerging the cct board for several minutes and then evaporating the alcohol with the blower. We have repaired million-dollar broadcast video switchers, that had bottled water dumped into the tub, with this method, and it works very well.
A lot of these more complex video cards were aimed purely at Autocad so didn't even bother supporting standard modes. I have a Pepper SGT somewhere that was superb (expensive) in its day but is basically junk unless you want to use a very early version of autocad :D
One old board I can't bear to part with, even though I don't use it any more, is a 3Com 3c905b PCI Ethernet card. It has a 32-pin EEPROM socket, and vortex--diag (linux) can read/write to the socket. I used to burn custom sports car chips with it in the 2000s
4:20 The sound burned into my head fromthis time period was from every time I'd reboot my trusty 386-40: "SBOS INSTALLED!!!" from the SoundBlaster emulation utility I managed to shove into himem for my beloved Gravis Ultrasound. Good times, good times.
I had an Orchid Fahrenheit Pro VLB I bought in the 90s. I don't remember it being that expensive at that time, so they definitely made some more affordable cards. Maybe that was not true earlier on.
In regards to the 486 motherboard: Back in the day, I was working Win95 support and a friend had a call just as we were going for lunch. Guy bought a new US Robotics modem and was having install issues. He was trying to install it the easy way that was suggested which was to run it in PnP mode. To do that he had to remove all jumpers and now he had a bowl full of jumpers and his system was no longer booting. It was one of those earlier motherboards with no real silkscreening and a ton if jumpers, that unless you had the install manual, you were sol on those jumper settings.
I didn't watch your whole video and stopped at 9:33 where you talk about the board with the BT DAC chip. The top right of that board right below the R5 looks to be an erroneous component not quite soldered in correctly, or is that just my old eyes playing tricks on me, my tech skills have seen better days.
I think I remember the SCAN-CAP cards used for science and medical purposes. I had the opportunity to work with an electron microscope a long time ago. The microscope was generating a BAS (monochrome) signal which was displayed on a TV screen. The PC was connected between the microscope and the screen and used to print out the image, zoom into the picture and save the picture to disk. I am not perfectly sure, but I think this was a SCAN-CAP card. Also I know that such cards were also often used for normal microscopes. Instead of snapping slides, a video camera was used connected to a computer or video printer. To snap pictures of games, they usually did that using a camera with film. The German 64’er magazine even printed an article how to do that. Which monitor works best, which distance and setting for a 35mm camera, etc.
I have a board similar to that SCAN CAP, the Truevision Targa+. Yes, it's a full frame grabber for video. I got mine for a few bucks when a local news station offloaded a bunch of the things back in the 90s. I had the software for it at one point.
The cache is working correctly on both systems. The 120MHz system even does L1 write-back caching, as observed by "move" line in L1 being so high. The straight line in the write test is expected on any 486 system, as they don't use write allocation. I wrote a detailed post for that on VOGONS. I will post the link in a separate comment to prvent this comment from being "spam filtered" by UA-cam.
46:48 The Orchid PGC replacement this is talking about is almost certainly the Orchid TurboPGA, which is pretty well known, and is a totally different card than the one you have there
Hi Adrian! Regarding the MPU X16(?) MIDI card, the RCA jacks are likely for SMPTE input / output, which is an audible FSK time-code for synchronizing to, or from a multi-track tape recorder. The 3rd RCA jack, could be a "click" output that is used as a metronome, during recording, It looks like there is an opto-isolator on that card (the 6-pin DIP), that would be used for MIDI input. There should be 2 signals on the DB9 that connect to the LED in the isolator through 220 ohm resistors. For MIDI output, positive is typically 220 ohms to 5V, and negative is usually 220 ohms to a couple of inverters in series, as a buffer, that connect to a UART. MIDI UART spec is 31.25Kbaud, no parity, 8-bit, 1 stop bit. It may work as a generic mpu-401, perhaps? Good luck!
I've got boxes of old Cards including Graphics, Sound, Modem and Network Cards plus a big box of Voodoo Graphics & Accelerator Cards which includes a range of the different iterations etc... :)
It’s wild how much has been lost, and how soon it was forgotten. One of my first tinkering computers growing up was a Compaq Deskpro 386 that I rescued from somewhere. Those machines required a setup disk to change BIOS parameters, and when I pulled out the battery I lost those settings. I never was able to get them back because the standard BIOS software didn’t work on my machine because it had EISA slots and required a special version. Never did find it. Sucked too cause I lost the configuration for the 16MB of RAM on an expansion card in the machine. After that it would only ever see 2MB. These days the community would build something to fix it but in the late 90s this workstation class machine that was only 7-8 years old was a doorstop.
I have a vague memory that the old Cad cards sometimes used a jumper cable between themselves and regular video cards capable of it, to pass video (similar to the newer SLI). The Cad cards were more for special processing, and didn't work like a regular video card, even thought they had the external connector. They were some what hardware/software specific. I never encountered one, so I'm not for certain, as I said, it's vague memory. I also remember using FCC ID's to try to get some idea what blank cards were, with mixed success.
enjoyed the adapter sluething. I remember PGA/PGC from when I worked at IBM and the Orchid cards as well. Matrix also had a PGA card back in '87. PC Mag explained PGA in their May 26, 1987 edition (Petzold n Rosch) if you're tired of reading old IBM manuals. I think that 1991 Scan-Cap board can not only capture video but probably supported Video in a Window. Hauppauge had a adapter board in 1992 with almost the same external jacks. Was called Win/TV or something.
I work as a volunteer in a computer museum and we are very familiar with the problems. We have tons of machines, cards and software in storage for which you can no longer find any documentation. Which is a shame because we want to keep such rare things alive.
I have a bunch of cards. Some are large scale database programs, some are office programs. Mainframe stuff. All I know about the mainframes is that their cases were light grey with bold royal blue accents. I once knew the names but it's too long ago.
Hi Adrian. It’s likely that Compaq card only works (in MDA mode) on the machine it came out of, which was likely an all-in-one with a monochrome monitor, like the TRS-80 Level 3, but labeled Compaq.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. I have de-constructed some old computers from the 1980s, that had some weird cards installed. I regret that I tossed them, because I would have enjoyed sending them to you just for the information you would have been able to glean from just having the card in front of you. I do have a box of old motherboards, and will have a look through them to see if there is anything interesting.
26:20 Those "move" throughput differences are extreme -- is that possibly a write-back vs. write-through cache setting difference between the CPU tests? I would expect if the cache strategy is write-through, the CPU might be delayed on making its next read until the write is complete, which would constrain the move speed to be no more than the base memory write speed, which is kind of what we see in the 2nd graph.
Adrian - have you done a dedicated video talking about your OSSC? I own one, and I love it, but I'd be interested to see where you get your profiles and how you set them up.
Cubic player will also load the samples into the sound card RAM as long as they have enough RAM to do so, I did that many many a time with my AWE32 so I could program in Turbo Pascal 7 with Mods playing in the background without being stopped due to not enough free "low ram" back in the day
Good to see working cache on these 486 boards. As it was well known that many 486 boards had fake cache. Where the cache sockets would be would be populated and the board register as having the cache chips installed even though the chips were just blank and did nothing. There are DOS utilities you can use to test if your motherboard has fake cache.
I had one of those Trident video cards. Software that came with it included an image editor that allowed you to create a 3D spinning text object using any font and colors. It could extrude the font by a specified amount, create a linear or radial gradient colored background behind the text, and other effects. It would save the animation as a sequence of images which you would then have to combine to create an animated GIF or other video format.
The Vectrix card(s) look to be an expansion card for either their VX workstatikn graphics or the Pepe card -- VX workstations ran analog video over 3 bnc connectiins (one per color)
rinsing in *distilled* water is a good cleaning method, however beware large surface-mount chips, especially BGAs. Water tends to get sucked in there by capillary (surface tension) forces and may stay there for literal years because it cannot escape, slowly corroding everything. It may seem fine for a few days or weeks of active use and then start failing for seemingly no reason. DIPs don't exhibit this problem, and small non-BGA chips don't seem matter much. Not sure about larger chips... Blowing water from the boards is most definitely NOT enough drying. They need at least a full day of drying before being used. Older DIP boards are more tolerant, newer with 0.1mm traces are much less so, modern laptops and smartphones are probably not washable outside specialized labs.
Sometimes I find that putting a card in the freezer for 5-15 mins does wonders for drying them. Longer than that and they might actually freeze, and that is death for many components.
Interware cards are kind of problematic these days if you don't get the software with them, since there's no repository for most of their drivers anymore (I can't use my PicPom PC Card or NuBus MPEG card, for example, because I don't have drivers). One of my more interesting mysteries is an IBM 12" PCI card with a 68EC040 and a 2032 button cell battery on it. I have no idea what it does based on cursory searches that have turned up nothing. I haven't tried to plug it in to see if it does a POST screen.
I was curious about that Vectrix EX1280 and other than the bitsavers pictures you found, it looks like there is support for it in MAME oddly enough. Or at least support was started there, not sure how complete it is. But you might be able to do some testing using MAME to at least see if it works at all. Or maybe even try contacting the dev who committed the code - I think the commit was just from 2020 so relatively recent. He must have some pretty in-depth info to implement the driver.
Oh man yes, great to see all these old but not crazy old components on here- bringing me back in time. Made me think of the AdLib sound cards. I remember my friend showing me one way back, and how his computer could make 'music' - I was amazed. It was an ISA with volume knob on the card- I'm amazed to see some selling for $300+ on eBay these days!
The TOPS cards! My very first job was in an office that had half macs, half PCs. The PCs had TOPS cards and ran a TSR program that shared out directories as AppleShare servers, and you could print from the PCs to LaserWriters and ImageWriters that were on the AppleTalk network. I still have a TOPS card in a box somewhere, but now I wonder if I still have a floppy somewhere with the software on it.
Just stumbled on your channel... I like your content but I cant get past the Les Grossman vibes..I think its the glasses.... LOL.... Awesome content though, brings back memories!
There was a theatrical lightboard called the Status Que that came with a MQX-16 MIDI card preinstalled in it's desktop computer. It could do midi and SMPTE.
18:25 Seeing that startup screen was like a gut punch of nostalgia. My first computer was (IIRC) a pentium running at 133MHz with Win 98SE. Can't recall how much RAM it had, probably 32 or 64 MB.
What's needed is a repository that encourages good organization of all these old pieces of tech documentation. It's so frustrating relying on old magazine snippets when whole manuals and disks are available in attics. They're probably already scanned by eager folks, but not cataloged anywhere - so they sit and rot on a SSD or cloud storage somewhere, never to be found. Internet Archive goes some distance, but there's no organization to it, just a billion artifacts in a lump digital pile with a search index -- and no common formatting to encourage visibility. It's halfway there, but it's not up to the full task. You think we'll ever get a purpose-built repository for old hardware documentation?
10:51 I’ve encountered this in automotive parts as well! I first noticed it when I got a MAF sensor from the company that supplies the part to the OEM. It was identical save for the (rather crude) removal of the automaker specific part number and logo.
I upgraded my 386 in late 1993 early 1994 and i remember the prices for comparison in AUD australian dollars.... 486 dx4-100 cpu $179 486 motherboard $149 double speed cdrom $110 1 meg memory $50 per dim Sound blaster 16 value $220 then later in early 1996 33kbps internal modem $280 ( there were so expensive, internet was only just becoming popular when win 95 released when netscape navigator version 3 was the number 1 browser) . so you can see in about 1993 a computer still cost $2000 plus AUD about $5000 in todays dollars ( 3700 USD) .... a desktop computer now would cost $700 USD for most people for home use
If we want to be really pedantic here, the 386SX had a 16-bit data bus (which was fine for just using with 16-bit ISA slots) but the 386DX is fully 32-bit.
I checked out the pgc card and it does require a 3rd full size cga board sandwich together with smaller board in middle and all together looks to plug into 2 isa slots lol
That mod file you're playing when testing the soundcards, Surfing on a Sine Wave, has an 8-bit AY version that I always use for testing ZX Spectrums and other AY computers. I've always thought of it as my version of "8-bit Dance Party", so that's a really nice coincidence 😊
8:10 - any chance the internal amplifier is enabled? Those cards have an on-board speaker amplifier which allows it to drive unpowered speakers directly. It's set via jumpers - and it seriously increases the noise floor.
It is sad that information about so many things has been lost purely because "it's old and we're not interested", and now that we're interested in learning about the tech of yesteryear,the documents, specifications and funcions are long lost to history, and unless someone is sitting on a repository (also known as a garage, attic or shed filled with old paperwork), it's not likely that we'll find out about a ot of things that we now no longer know anything about... :(
.. If I remember correctly the main difference between AWE32 and AWE64 was that it had two opl-4 chips instead of one.. which means you could play up to 64 notes simultaneously instead of 32.. Just to say; I am fairly sure that the FM-synthesizer logic on the OL4 IS the same as on OPL2, so there is no actual.. "emulation" going on.. It is native sound blaster, just with more things. . I have an AWE54-gold card that I sooner or later will put in a retro computer for dos-gaming (I need ISA ports, so the fastest I can use would be a pentium-3, and.. In addition to the awe-64 I also have a Yamaha-keyboard with those XS/XG sounds, AND Roland Sound canvas 55, revision B, which can be put in to a MT-32 c compatible mode.. (Only thing is that the MT-32 had two drum channels, channel 10 and 16, whereas the sound-canvas standard setting is that only channel 10 is one, and it doesn't change channel 16 to a drum channel automatically, so IF a game either uses BOTH, OR just the 16th channel.. I will have to do some extra setting up to make it sound right.. sometimes I don't even initially realize this is what is going on, just that the music sounds a bit.. "Sour"..
R50 near "Patent pending R5" is that SMD resistor supposed to be in that location? (when suspecting the bad RamDAC) @9:44 ? (S3 isa video card /Orchid II)
I suspect this card was a way to extend the life of old machines that couldn't normally support VGA. It runs really poorly but that may have been for compatibility with 8086 era machines.
I commented on Part 1 that many of the boards in your collection came from me, including several that I designed. Now that the holidays are over, I watched Part 2 and can answer some questions you raised: The Orchid TGC (officially called the TurboPGA) will not do anything because it needs initializing software to load the firmware for the onboard 80186 processor's RAM (there is no ROM). Once initialized, I believe it is fully hardware compatible with the IBM PGC, but my memory is not entirely clear on that. The IBM product had a CGA emulator daughter board that produced video at the same scan rates as the main graphics system. The TurboPGA also had a daughter board that you seem to be missing. It was a standard EGA video system, and relied on using a multisync monitor to display either "Pro Graphics" or EGA. Both EGA chips and multisync monitors were fairly new at the time. IBM used a proprietary, single rate monitor. The TurboPGA was considerably faster than the IBM board, and cost about half as much. The "strange" memory chips you see are "Video RAM". Not the generic term for memory used as a frame buffer, but dual port DRAM with a standard random access port for the processor and a serial output port for display refresh. This improved performance by providing nearly 100% bandwidth to the processor. I designed the hardware and most of the firmware under contract to Orchid. There was a paint program available for this board.
As you guessed, ScanCap is a specialized video capture card. It has only a "line buffer", and could not capture a whole frame at once. Thus it was only useful for capturing still images. However, it could capture a wide variety of video signals, including some relatively high resolution (for the time period). It was designed for capturing images from various medical imaging systems so they could be transmitted to a remote doctor. It had multiple optional oscillators (left edge) so that a single board could work with various systems, but only 2 or 3 dozen of these were ever built, and most had just 1 or 2 oscillators. I see that there was an optional 2nd A to D converter, but don't recall why. Perhaps this allowed capturing higher resolution images by alternating between the 2 ADCs. I designed this for a client who was a radiologist. He wanted to be able to study medical images from home, and sold a system based on this board to hospitals all over the U.S.
Blackfoot was indeed a JPEG accelerator for NuBus (Mac) computers. The motivation for it, as you guessed, was that CPUs of that era could not process JPEG fast enough for real-time video, and were painfully slow at compressing/decompressing large JPEG files. Even when software-based JPEG became practical, they generally took shortcuts to improve the speed, at the expense of image quality. Blackfoot, on the other hand, produced about the highest quality JPEG compression/decompression available at the time. I designed the hardware for this, while 2 partners did the firmware and Mac software.
You had one or more boards from Portacom, and I recall that I did some work for them, but don't specifically recognize it. The Vectrix board was, if I remember correctly, given to my by a friend who worked for Vectrix, but I don't really know anything about it.
Do you still have disks flying around from that era? :)
@@trampoliiin Although I have WAY too much old junk still in boxes, the chances of finding anything useful for these boards is nearly zero.
I was an AT in the Navy in the late 80s and they really drilled corrosion control. Water is highly corrosive, so they taught us to use isopropyl alcohol of at least 91% for cleaning. I was a PC tech in the mid 90s and we would get one-off boards all the time. If we couldn't find documentation, we had to hope we could find a known good to compare with. This was pre-internet days, so you had to go with what manuals you had on hand. There was common circuitry on most cards like the circuit for the ISA interface, but sometimes you had to guess the signals based on board and components. Also 2 things I HATE to deal with (and lucky me that's what I mostly worked on in the Navy) - audio and RF. I've had RF problems only show up if you happen to be touching the gear, for example, and audio is always a pain in the ass. :)
As seen in this video and several other commentors, water is NOT highly CORROSIVE. If You are in a location where the water is mineralized (hard) much better to use distilled, deionized, or typical bottled water. I personally let things dry for 2 days under a moderate fan. And I never immerse transformers that suck water between the layers of windings, as they can take forever to dry and sometimes get mildewy which then sucks water out of the atmosphere, and mildew is slightly conductive when wet.
I have worked in a small company manufacturing custom PCBs.
Your method of cleaning is exactly what we did right after manufacturing PCBs to make them look neat. Just soap and water, then rinse, rinse with distilled water and then put them into an oven (70°C) to dry them out.
On a large scale, we used a glorified converted dishwasher which was really expensive and basically did the very same job. I’d bet a modern dish washer using a (low temp) ECO program would work just as well.
All you need to do is to cover anything which has a vent hole. Dip switches, beepers and the like usually come with a protective sticker you remove after manufacturing the PCB.
If soap and water isn’t enough, especially when removing residue from leaked batteries and capacitors, you can use PCC, a “Printed Circuitboard Cleaner”. In Germany, you can source it from “Kontakt Chemie” but I am sure that there is something similar in the US. It also works with TFT where ordinary TFT cleaner fails. I have deep cleaned the TFT of my milling machine numerous times without any damage. I can’t be sure if it is safe to use on any LCD/TFT but when everything else fails, why not?
To quick dry, you can use pure isopropanol alcohol. It “dilutes” the water and evaporates without residue. You can buy it in bottles and also as spray cans. For home usage, I prefer the spray cans since you can blast through the cracks between chips and PCBs.
For drying, you can also use compressed air from an ordinary compressor. The extra dry air really helps. Make sure there is no oil in the compressed air. There is no ESD issue using compressed air, all the static electricity is blown away safely.
I had this orchid card in 1988, it cost a fortune - $2000 sounds right
It was installed in the fastest PC at that time (386?)
And hooked upto it was a 25-27" 'super' color monitor, requiring at least 3 men to carry - had to install an extra leg under my desk
Used it for autocad and some rudimentary 3d drawings
This sounds like my first bosses setup. He used tango PCB, and AutoCAD, and the monitor was like 5000 lbs. Lmao. It literally bent the middle of his table over time, me ended up getting a new desk lol.
@@jkramerks my desk bend over, I think we used a car jack to get it somewhat looking like a desk again and then build a custom leg
I remember Orchid gear, I was in elementary school. The high school up the street was also the central Pre-Engineering lab for the district, and it was equipped with a fancy CAD and CNC station. Not sure how big the monitor was, but it was huge and colorful compared to the 9" monochrome and 12" green/orange Apple II monitors I had access to at the time.
I think you're doing excellent work by simply showing these cards on your channel. Who knows when someone'll see a video and go "Oh, I know that card!" and they might have a driver disk.
So yeah, keep the awareness running.
A surprisingly good DOS program for testing obscure, proprietary video modes supported by extremely few cards is actually the fractal rendering program FRACTINT. You may want to consider adding that to your arsenal of testing software if you don't have it already! ;)
I dimly remember that one! It had modes for cards I’d never even heard of.
Wow fractint is a blast from the past indeed! 😎👍👍🤯🤯
Heh yes, if a cart made it into the wild, fractint supports it including some really obscure modes.
Absolutely, this program runs a lot of extremely obscure video modes, even people that worked in the industry haven't heard of. I first heard about this program from a person that worked for the company Matrox in Canada.
It supported Paradise VGA and other modes that most software didn't. It's a pity that FRACTINT has been forgotten entirely. It was a huge hit back in the day. Real fractals! On your PC! Rendered at lightning speed with integer math! (hence the name) You could zoom in as much as you wanted, and sure enough those were real fractals, infinite. It even supported color cycling for your own hallucinogenic light show. But today? It's gone and nobody remembers it, even on these retro channels.
According to Wiki, Orchid's 1st product was a LAN adapter card and "Lan" is the Vietnamese word for an orchid, hence the name of the company.
cool to know!
Huh.
兰，a chinese charater for orchid too😁
Re: washing PC parts with tap water and plain soap, I have done that myself, and even though the water in my area is considered very "hard" I have never had any ill effects, despite just letting the water evaporate naturally from the parts. I've even washed PC fans using this method, and they've all worked perfectly afterwards.
Oh and Adrian, I really like these long videos where you delve deep down into the nature and history of the things you review. I've always felt that I missed a lot on other retro channels when they just show an item for a brief moment with one or two sentences to explain what it is, but rarely what it does, or why.
In other words, please keep making these in-depth videos, TY.
Greetings from Denmark.
Me too. Motherboards, cards, fans, power supplies (out of their metal chassis, of course) .. anything not mechanical, really. :-) Works fine!
I worked in a computer store in a town near a Nuclear Reservation and heard MANY stories of how, when a MILLION DOLLAR piece of electronic equipment got "Crapped Up" a real term with radiation, how they would just take it outside and wash it with water and let it dry.
I bet it is safer from ESD issues too because everything is grounded to each other due to the water. Dry air is where static becomes a danger.
@@noname-gp6hk Yep, you're absolutely right about the dry air.
I used to work for a big mfg company, and we wash pcb's with pure (pure H20) as to not leave residues on board/ics and cause the board to fail during FVT.
The CT2770 is a rather noisy card from the get-go. There's two 16v 47uF caps around the amp chip that need to be swapped for 100uF capacitors, and ideally the output filter caps need to be swapped from 16v 470 to 16v 680-1000uF, whatever fits. That last part is a mod, it really helps the low end cutoff but all of this should be done to any SB16 that comes through. As the caps age, given they're using chinese manufacturers such as Wincap and G-Luxon and even Jamicon which they were using until recently, they're all going to go bad from age. Especially in the realm around the cluster to the right of the CT1745A, as that's where a bunch of stuff goes in and out of that chip, and where the hiss mostly originates. the amp just amplifies that hiss and that's what you're hearing, but replacing the two 47uF caps with 100s helps a ton as that then brings it in line with the datasheet.
The “8bit testing” and “16bit testing” SoundBlaster came back to me like a “Blast from the past” when I’ve heard them! I remember when I’ve first got ModPlay on my 386sx/16MHz, with its buzzer on board instead of a speaker. I never thought I’d ever hear sampled audio coming out of it! Also, after I realized that I could make an 8bit sound card with 18 resistors and a capacitor attached to the parallel port as a DAC, this became my first sound card, which I even built 20-30 more times for friends at uni! Great video Adrian!
I worked in IT in many facettes for more than 20 years. I can see the masses of people who would have had a stroke or heart attack at 1:18...... Washing boards/cards/etc. I get it - it works and doesn't harm them.
Also, both your work and the work of many others who remove/replace capacitors and do other soldering work on motherboards.... That to would have absoltely killed thousands of PC repair techs back in those days.
I love your work and always enjoy it. It often surprises me at the great things you and others are able to do today that would have been forbidden in the past.
Provided you get it fully dry before turning it on it's fine. I agree with not doing that with mechanical drives. It's usually the only effective way of getting rid of dust and grime from so many years. The physical repair is astounding; now and back then it wasn't usually prudent to do that (other than the quick chip repair when you didn't need to solder/desolder). Obviously it's required now, as replacements are dwindling. Cool stuff brings back a ton of memories working with some of those cards/boards and cpus. 3com card especially.
Its perfectly fine as long they dont have any electricity in them. For motherboards you need first remove the battery and drain the caps, after that they are too safe to clean under water. If you dont remove the battery, then corrosion begins to form and the board can become water damaged.
The Heath 150-307 board is a Zenith Data Systems Z-449 video card from their Z-248 era systems. Probably designed to allow CGA/EGA/VGA to run on the fixed frequency Flat Tension Mask monitor ZCM-1490
Appreciate your commitment to deep diving on some of these obscure pieces of hardware. You put in significantly more effort than some of these things are worth to give them their best shot to shine.
It's a shame that so much information of those rare and obscure cards and motherboards are lost forever and as the title says much history behind those cards and stuff are lost to time. That's why people like you and others in the retro computing community are there to preserve information about these old hardware and software before it lost time for the new young generation for many years to come.
Like tears in rain.
The main differences between the AWE32 and 64 families is the change in ram expansion, some slight changes to the chips - the 64s are meant to have a better noise floor (ESP the gold), and in windows, you get 32 software voices to go with the 32 hardware voices (hence the AWE64 name). But the basic design of the chips/audio interface is identical between the 2 families, hence the 64s work perfectly with software for the 32s.
Too bad Windows stopped supporting hardware voices when Windows Vista came out. Now it is al done in software. CPU's are fast enough to handle that.
@@G3ld3r3n yeah it really sucks that everything is easy and better now
I don't miss the days of putting a new card into my PC and then not even getting to the BIOS... then putting the card in a friend's nearly identical motherboard and it works perfectly.
That MQX-16 is MPU-401 compatible, if memory serves. It used the same breakout dongle/cable as their later straight up clones. So D-sub 1,6,2 (the rightmost pins) -> Midi Out 2,3,4 and D-sub 5,9 (leftmost) -> Midi In 2,4 respectively should do you good. Pins counted solder-side right to left, top to bottom.
As my comment on the first video of Adrian's investigation of the MQX-16 noted, the 3 RCA connectors are almost definitely duplicating the Roland MPU-401 analog audio connectors, for tape synchronisation in and out, and for a metronome audio signal. The jumpers near the ISA board are almost definitely for the address base and/or the IRQ. From memory, I think 0x330 is the default I/O address for the MPU-401.
I know I'm a bit late to the party -- but there appears to be some info (including user guide and software) for the Music Quest cards on Dosdays
Kinda ironic that the most expensive cards back in the days are sort of worthless, while some very basic things go for a lot of money these days. 😅
It's fairly simple, those high end parts required special software, which nobody in the retro computing space wants. We want stuff that works with ALL the software, not some specialty application.
I remember back when i worked for computerland, we sold PC XT's and PC AT's with autocad, and special monitors that had 4 coaxial connectors (RGB+synch, i think). That and very expensive HP plotters. But you had to have a special monitor for those high res cards, special drivers, and they only worked with autocad, basically, because nobody else wrote software that could use that extra high resolution, because nobody owned the cards and monitors. Some of these systems sold for 10K, and that's in 1980's dollars.
So while that hardware was amazing for the time, it never got widespread adoption, and thus is relegated to the scrap heap of history.
That and after a year or two, better cards and monitors came out anyway. Back in the day it was almost always more cost effective to wait a year for the features you wanted, than to be an early adopter.
@@jeromethiel4323 Yeah, from a logical perspective it all makes sense. But that's why I said it's ironic :) ;)
Great story btw!
@@p_mouse8676 Yeah. It is also sad, because some of these products were extremely good, just too expensive for the mainstream. If only the manuals and software had been archived.
But history is littered with "we should have saved that," but it wasn't because it was not considered important at the time.
Just look at food. What did the ancient Romans eat? How was the food cooked? We really don't know. We have snippets here and there, but no real recipes.
That information is likely lost to us forever. Same as this computer history.
Those cards were for business use. I don't know anyone who does business retro computing. The IBM PC was not a games console, it was first and foremost a business machine. Most computing of the 80s was. It's why computers were such a hit and sold like hotcakes, despite the high (to retail consumers) price tags. When it's a business expense that doubles productivity, it's an easy choice. $10k for a workstation? Pocket change.
@@jeromethiel4323 You know what the ancient Romans ate a lot? Insects! No kidding! Lol.
But yeah I completely get you! :)
It's fascinating how many details get lost in time. Some of them are actually extremely important for the things we take for granted these days!
You really are a guy who enjoys what you do.
This is why One of my hobbies was collecting the Data Sheets of EVERY board that came across my bench when I was a Tech in a 80ies-90ies Computer Store as well as making a log in a book when I repaired something as to what was wrong, how I fixed it and any info I might have got from a phone call to the manufacture/vender! We were even a Commodore Authorized Repair Center and I photo copied ALL the Repair/Service Manuals they sent us, for my own use of course! Somewhere around the house I have manuals for the Vic 20, C-64, Pet 2010(?) Commodore's Business System with a separate IEEE 5 1/4 Inch Floppy Drive. As well as the Commodore Dot Matrix Printers of the day.
That EDO thing with the Pentium bus width explains why my dad told me you had to buy them in pairs. Now I get it! No one else has explained that in their videos, and I was always confused.
If you ever get stuck only having EDO RAM but need FPM RAM, lift the OE pin of each chip from the board and wire it to the CS pin and the RAM will behave just like FPM.
Bits und bolts actually made a ram stick that has a switch to go between edo and fpm
Hi Adrian. You are hands down my favourite UA-camr. These videos are fascinating. I hope you are well. You deserve every success. All my heart. One Amiga nerd from the UK
Blast from the past. I've used many of these things back in the day. I use isoprop alcohol instead of water to clean them...
The VTEC that's been scratched out is a QA reject. Who knows what it failed.
FPM = Fast Page Mode
19:00 Get the PC-Doctor POST card. Or PM me and I'll get you one.
23:00 Write through cache...
25:50 as to tools for checking speeds, I wrote PC Bench for just that purpose in the late 1980's.
31:30 if I recall right, the jumper is for setting base address for multi-card systems. I.e. won't fix a problem if it's not happy.
47:30 Orchid Graphics card -- it was used for video editing systems (among others) in parallel with a CGA or Hercules card. I wrote diagnostics for it back in the stone age. Similar to the Targa card back in the day. It needed custom software to set it up. The BIOS didn't know what to do with it.
1:00:00 I always add a bit of epoxy to jumper wires if I want the card to survive storage...
Really interesting to see the various cards, especially the Creative SoundBlaster 16 which reminded me of the sound cards I used to have & then the Orchid card which reminded me of the Orchid Righteous 3D card I had which was (I think) followed by the 3Dfx Rage 32 (???), then the VooDoo2 & then the VooDoo 3 graphics cards !!!
Talk about bringing back old memories.
Scary to think that the Orchid was 1985 .... 39 years ago !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
God I'm getting old !!!
The SoundBlaster with the noise is because it's picking up RFI, likely from components on the motherboard. The design or some component on the SoundBlaster might be susceptible to this. The noise will vary depending on the components being utilized, so your simple test isn't triggering the RFI from the PC component, but running a more complex program may.
Also, some modern PSU's have lacking grounding. Pull a 2.5mm2 power-cable from the back-plane of the SB right into the shield of the PSU, and you might drain off a lot of RFI.
Every standalone TIGA card I've used required a primary video card in the PC.
The #9 card I have used had on-board paradise vga chip. It wasn't very good, so a separate vga card was better.
On the video card that had the dim output, you can see a broken off resistor
I have owned this “Noisy Soundblaster 16”.
This is perfectly normal, it does pick up any EMI it can.
Back in the days, I had wrapped it in a sandwich made out of paper and tinfoil and had put it into the bottom most slot. I had to swap around all the other cards until I had a configuration which was reasonably quit.
In some games (e.g. Sim City 2000 and Windows 3.11) there was a faint screeching noise when updating the entire screen. Also I was unable to get rid of the faint sounds moving the mouse.
This thing is a disaster but it was a very cheap disaster, all I could afford back then.
I had to get rid of it after buying my first Ethernet card and went for a SB gold.
I have a modern laptop. STILL screeching when moving mouse. It gets better if you pull grounding wires from certain heat-shields and RFI covers straight to the Power supply GND. Basically, poor grounding makes the RFI-shields and signal ground act like a capacitor rather than 0.00V Sometimes putting an ESD-bag between cards can work miracles. Soldering a cable to the chassis, and back-plane, and attaching to true ground also can help a lot of times.
Back in the early days of CAD when we needed better graphics we had two cards in the system connected to two monitors. The base card was typically a cheap CGA card as it was only used to execute drivers and software to enable the more enhanced graphics card. Usually, the enhanced graphics card requires a special type of monitor. I am familiar with the Nth Engine card for example.
The other one I am familiar with was the proprietary “BaileyCAD” card that had an EGA card switched through an ultra high resolution (modern HD in 1985 on an IBM XT/ Compaq Portable) video card.
My dad, who was into computing from the eighties onwards, would have loved this stuff. I never inherited his instinctive understanding of what was actually going on inside a machine, but I still enjoy watching someone who really knows their stuff at work!
Funny enough, my first IT job was for Orchid Europe back in 1994/1995 as a tech support engineer. It was all about the Fahrenheit, Kelvin, GameWave32 and SoundWave32. Great fun working for a tech company back in the day started fresh faced. I was sad when they did cut backs and was made redundant.
Just something to bear in mind. I worked for a company right out of college that made very, very high end systems for crash testing and turbine monitoring. A lot of our own cards and acquisition cards like the other ones in the box were insanely sensitive to bus timing. ISA bus timings could vary a lot once you get to later 386 clones.
Wow. Jpeg decoding and encoding was a processor intensive task that demanded a dedicated co-processor - and then a few years later, MJPEG was a popular video format.
I love that you exist to show some love and regard to these old cards!
The large mystery EGA/VGA card looks familiar.
I have pulled out a bunch of them disassembling old CAD stations back in 1994. Some of them even had 286 processors on board!
Those stations were used for AutoCAD. I have asked the owners some questions and sadly, I can’t remember everything I had learned back then.
I am very sure that they have a compatibility mode for booting purposes only. Once AutoCAD is running, it takes over and uses them in a totally different mode. This might explain why they are so slow in your test.
The machines I had disassembled had 20+ inch color CRTs for the workspace and a small monochrome monitor for selecting the tools and status information. The small monitor was connected to the 9-pin output and the gigantic screen was connected by VGA. Those large monitors were fixed frequency and couldn’t be used with a standard VGA card. Also they didn’t display anything during booting.
I had kept some of the cards as souvenirs because they look cool, but I was not allowed to have any software, the special driver disks had to remain at the site.
In all my years of tinkering with electronics and watching how-to-guides, I had no idea you could just wash a circuit board in the sink.
Depends on your water quality. some sources are full of iron and other bad particles that can be flushed into contacts.
yes you can but you have to be damned sure it's fully dried out before you power it back on or put the battery back into it or it's ruined
I would still use at least de ionized water and final rinse would be with IPA or something similar and imnediate drying off with air and high temp. I dont believe that just water rinsing wouldn't hurt anything at all.
Quite literally every electronic part and board made is washed in some fashion during it's build cycle. The wafers that the microchips themselves are made from (prior to packaging) are washed many times, as they go through various etch stages. Of course, this is with very pure DI water, and rinsed with 100% pure alcohol (or other solvents depending on the stages). Used to work on a wet-etch line at ST Microelectronics, we had very fancy "spin washers/dryers" that a basket of wafers (literally 5-6 figures worth of microchips in a small "basket" measuring maybe 8x8x10 or something like that) would insert into, close the door just like a front-load washer, hit the button and "off they go " rinsing.
PCBs do the same, again with appropriate solvents to dissolve/wash off fluxes and such, then a pure water wash to get the solvents out.
As others have mentioned, the key of course is making sure the water is gone before power is ever applied (although 100% pure DI water isn't a good conductor at all actually, but just a tiny percent of contamination can change that). Technically, you could run a computer under water if it was pure enough, and some have built fully mineral-oil bathed computers in fact (easier to avoid contamination with oil as contaminants don't react as easily and they tend to just "fall out" unlike water where they dissolve into new conductive compounds). Pure water is too hard to "keep pure" and also evaporates much faster than something like mineral oil, but it could be done as a lark.
I've often told people over the years when they say "my keyboard is really dirty (or "I ruined it by spilling a soda on it") to put it in the dishwasher and run a cycle with soap, then another without as an extra rinse, then rinse it with the purest alcohol they can find (typically 99% is avaiable at drug stores if you look hard enough)... the alcohol combines with the water to rapidly evaporate it out, then let it dry really well. (Set on a windowsill, or outside on a sunny breezy day, for several hours (or longer won't hurt obviously). It may or may not work, but if you were going to trash it anyhow, it's worth a shot. (Turn off the heated drying cycle in the d-washer, and top-rack only, LOL). If you can safely remove the keycaps, even better, and if you can fully disassemble it to housing and PCB, almost certainly can get it in great shape again.
I once plugged an old 500MB Maxtor HDD into a newer 790FX machine just to see if it worked. It also turned my bios red, and the windows 10 loading screen, red. Which also persisted on the next boot without the drive installed. It changed back to black on the 3rd boot.
The drive did still work, empty, but file system type was msdos.
i lived in San Jose and scavengers would bring me bins upon bins of dumpster rescues....i would ID, function and estimate value of literally thousands of cards, boards, monitors, scanners and more for an agreed upon percentage of overall value paid out as my pick of the litter...made alot of money just tinkering in a bed room at my mom's house assembling and selling systems from the aquired in this way...
by 2001 i had a dual P3-750 with somehing like 512Mgb ram rith a striped and mirrored raid array running Debian in an SMP configuration that had about 5 gigs of drivers, software and scanned manuals that i had collected....I gave that machine to a friend in Oregon that taught me alot about large networks, web services and security...He got much use from it until his death 7 years ago.....no idea what happened to that machine as we were on oppisite corners of the country at the time...i haven't work in IT for nearly 10 years now, what i knew is no longer useful and has mostly been forgotten... RIP Surf Griz i still remember you
I've washed / cleaned components that way with zero issues. Of course only boards never mechanical hard disks, drives ect. I have a high flow blower I use as well for automotive cleaning purposes. One thing I insure is my water in my area was very hard and I used only water out of my reverse osmosis tap. I'd also wait a good day regardless at minimum to power up any card or board as a last safe guard to fully insure any residual water was dried.
As a side note I gave areas where socket or larger IC chips were located extra attention so if any water or moisture made it's way under the chip it was gone or dried.
Love your videos, sadly only stumbled upon it recently 😢. I'm located in Hong Kong now so you got another viewer from there now 😅
After washing with water, you should displace it with isopropanol by submerging the cct board for several minutes and then evaporating the alcohol with the blower.
We have repaired million-dollar broadcast video switchers, that had bottled water dumped into the tub, with this method, and it works very well.
I agree, plus dries so much quicker and certain to safely run in a minute
A lot of these more complex video cards were aimed purely at Autocad so didn't even bother supporting standard modes. I have a Pepper SGT somewhere that was superb (expensive) in its day but is basically junk unless you want to use a very early version of autocad :D
Some had drivers for like Lotus123 (spreadsheets) and few other popular msdos programs. And often, Flight Simulator 3 or 4.
One old board I can't bear to part with, even though I don't use it any more, is a 3Com 3c905b PCI Ethernet card. It has a 32-pin EEPROM socket, and vortex--diag (linux) can read/write to the socket. I used to burn custom sports car chips with it in the 2000s
4:20 The sound burned into my head fromthis time period was from every time I'd reboot my trusty 386-40: "SBOS INSTALLED!!!" from the SoundBlaster emulation utility I managed to shove into himem for my beloved Gravis Ultrasound. Good times, good times.
I remember Orchid making high end video cards. But we sold very few of them, because they were crazy expensive.
I had an Orchid Fahrenheit Pro VLB I bought in the 90s. I don't remember it being that expensive at that time, so they definitely made some more affordable cards. Maybe that was not true earlier on.
In regards to the 486 motherboard: Back in the day, I was working Win95 support and a friend had a call just as we were going for lunch. Guy bought a new US Robotics modem and was having install issues. He was trying to install it the easy way that was suggested which was to run it in PnP mode. To do that he had to remove all jumpers and now he had a bowl full of jumpers and his system was no longer booting. It was one of those earlier motherboards with no real silkscreening and a ton if jumpers, that unless you had the install manual, you were sol on those jumper settings.
I didn't watch your whole video and stopped at 9:33 where you talk about the board with the BT DAC chip. The top right of that board right below the R5 looks to be an erroneous component not quite soldered in correctly, or is that just my old eyes playing tricks on me, my tech skills have seen better days.
I think I remember the SCAN-CAP cards used for science and medical purposes. I had the opportunity to work with an electron microscope a long time ago. The microscope was generating a BAS (monochrome) signal which was displayed on a TV screen. The PC was connected between the microscope and the screen and used to print out the image, zoom into the picture and save the picture to disk. I am not perfectly sure, but I think this was a SCAN-CAP card.
Also I know that such cards were also often used for normal microscopes. Instead of snapping slides, a video camera was used connected to a computer or video printer.
To snap pictures of games, they usually did that using a camera with film. The German 64’er magazine even printed an article how to do that. Which monitor works best, which distance and setting for a 35mm camera, etc.
I have a board similar to that SCAN CAP, the Truevision Targa+. Yes, it's a full frame grabber for video. I got mine for a few bucks when a local news station offloaded a bunch of the things back in the 90s. I had the software for it at one point.
The cache is working correctly on both systems. The 120MHz system even does L1 write-back caching, as observed by "move" line in L1 being so high. The straight line in the write test is expected on any 486 system, as they don't use write allocation. I wrote a detailed post for that on VOGONS. I will post the link in a separate comment to prvent this comment from being "spam filtered" by UA-cam.
46:48 The Orchid PGC replacement this is talking about is almost certainly the Orchid TurboPGA, which is pretty well known, and is a totally different card than the one you have there
Hi Adrian! Regarding the MPU X16(?) MIDI card, the RCA jacks are likely for SMPTE input / output, which is an audible FSK time-code for synchronizing to, or from a multi-track tape recorder. The 3rd RCA jack, could be a "click" output that is used as a metronome, during recording, It looks like there is an opto-isolator on that card (the 6-pin DIP), that would be used for MIDI input. There should be 2 signals on the DB9 that connect to the LED in the isolator through 220 ohm resistors. For MIDI output, positive is typically 220 ohms to 5V, and negative is usually 220 ohms to a couple of inverters in series, as a buffer, that connect to a UART. MIDI UART spec is 31.25Kbaud, no parity, 8-bit, 1 stop bit. It may work as a generic mpu-401, perhaps? Good luck!
Lost to the ages is why I'm glad you do this UA-cam channel to at least document what you can.
The intro gave me goosebumps, haven't listened to chiptunes for years, really took me back than you
your sound card works perfectly warcraft setup
I've got boxes of old Cards including Graphics, Sound, Modem and Network Cards plus a big box of Voodoo Graphics & Accelerator Cards which includes a range of the different iterations etc... :)
It’s wild how much has been lost, and how soon it was forgotten. One of my first tinkering computers growing up was a Compaq Deskpro 386 that I rescued from somewhere. Those machines required a setup disk to change BIOS parameters, and when I pulled out the battery I lost those settings. I never was able to get them back because the standard BIOS software didn’t work on my machine because it had EISA slots and required a special version. Never did find it. Sucked too cause I lost the configuration for the 16MB of RAM on an expansion card in the machine. After that it would only ever see 2MB.
These days the community would build something to fix it but in the late 90s this workstation class machine that was only 7-8 years old was a doorstop.
@9:41
I could be wrong but there looks to be a surface mount resistor oddly positioned near the dip switches ??
I have a vague memory that the old Cad cards sometimes used a jumper cable between themselves and regular video cards capable of it, to pass video (similar to the newer SLI). The Cad cards were more for special processing, and didn't work like a regular video card, even thought they had the external connector. They were some what hardware/software specific. I never encountered one, so I'm not for certain, as I said, it's vague memory. I also remember using FCC ID's to try to get some idea what blank cards were, with mixed success.
enjoyed the adapter sluething. I remember PGA/PGC from when I worked at IBM and the Orchid cards as well. Matrix also had a PGA card back in '87. PC Mag explained PGA in their May 26, 1987 edition (Petzold n Rosch) if you're tired of reading old IBM manuals.
I think that 1991 Scan-Cap board can not only capture video but probably supported Video in a Window. Hauppauge had a adapter board in 1992 with almost the same external jacks. Was called Win/TV or something.
Just started watching your stuff, didn't know you were in my hometown. Cheers!
I work as a volunteer in a computer museum and we are very familiar with the problems. We have tons of machines, cards and software in storage for which you can no longer find any documentation. Which is a shame because we want to keep such rare things alive.
I have a bunch of cards. Some are large scale database programs, some are office programs. Mainframe stuff. All I know about the mainframes is that their cases were light grey with bold royal blue accents. I once knew the names but it's too long ago.
2:44 I just visit a sporting good store and use the electric mattress blower which puts out tons of air
Hi Adrian. It’s likely that Compaq card only works (in MDA mode) on the machine it came out of, which was likely an all-in-one with a monochrome monitor, like the TRS-80 Level 3, but labeled Compaq.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. I have de-constructed some old computers from the 1980s, that had some weird cards installed. I regret that I tossed them, because I would have enjoyed sending them to you just for the information you would have been able to glean from just having the card in front of you. I do have a box of old motherboards, and will have a look through them to see if there is anything interesting.
Some of those are pretty rare/expensive now, like IBM 8514 (keep away from 8 bit guy).
26:20 Those "move" throughput differences are extreme -- is that possibly a write-back vs. write-through cache setting difference between the CPU tests? I would expect if the cache strategy is write-through, the CPU might be delayed on making its next read until the write is complete, which would constrain the move speed to be no more than the base memory write speed, which is kind of what we see in the 2nd graph.
Washing in water works fine, but remember to always remove any batteries like 'coin' cells used as backup power for RTC's and CMOS RAM configuration.
Adrian - have you done a dedicated video talking about your OSSC? I own one, and I love it, but I'd be interested to see where you get your profiles and how you set them up.
In the early 80s-90s a lot of companies had their own bbs you could log into to them and download documents and drivers.
Cubic player will also load the samples into the sound card RAM as long as they have enough RAM to do so, I did that many many a time with my AWE32 so I could program in Turbo Pascal 7 with Mods playing in the background without being stopped due to not enough free "low ram" back in the day
Good to see working cache on these 486 boards. As it was well known that many 486 boards had fake cache. Where the cache sockets would be would be populated and the board register as having the cache chips installed even though the chips were just blank and did nothing. There are DOS utilities you can use to test if your motherboard has fake cache.
I had one of those Trident video cards. Software that came with it included an image editor that allowed you to create a 3D spinning text object using any font and colors. It could extrude the font by a specified amount, create a linear or radial gradient colored background behind the text, and other effects. It would save the animation as a sequence of images which you would then have to combine to create an animated GIF or other video format.
The Vectrix card(s) look to be an expansion card for either their VX workstatikn graphics or the Pepe card -- VX workstations ran analog video over 3 bnc connectiins (one per color)
rinsing in *distilled* water is a good cleaning method, however beware large surface-mount chips, especially BGAs. Water tends to get sucked in there by capillary (surface tension) forces and may stay there for literal years because it cannot escape, slowly corroding everything. It may seem fine for a few days or weeks of active use and then start failing for seemingly no reason. DIPs don't exhibit this problem, and small non-BGA chips don't seem matter much.
Not sure about larger chips...
Blowing water from the boards is most definitely NOT enough drying. They need at least a full day of drying before being used. Older DIP boards are more tolerant, newer with 0.1mm traces are much less so, modern laptops and smartphones are probably not washable outside specialized labs.
Sometimes I find that putting a card in the freezer for 5-15 mins does wonders for drying them. Longer than that and they might actually freeze, and that is death for many components.
Interware cards are kind of problematic these days if you don't get the software with them, since there's no repository for most of their drivers anymore (I can't use my PicPom PC Card or NuBus MPEG card, for example, because I don't have drivers). One of my more interesting mysteries is an IBM 12" PCI card with a 68EC040 and a 2032 button cell battery on it. I have no idea what it does based on cursory searches that have turned up nothing. I haven't tried to plug it in to see if it does a POST screen.
I was curious about that Vectrix EX1280 and other than the bitsavers pictures you found, it looks like there is support for it in MAME oddly enough. Or at least support was started there, not sure how complete it is. But you might be able to do some testing using MAME to at least see if it works at all. Or maybe even try contacting the dev who committed the code - I think the commit was just from 2020 so relatively recent. He must have some pretty in-depth info to implement the driver.
Oh man yes, great to see all these old but not crazy old components on here- bringing me back in time. Made me think of the AdLib sound cards. I remember my friend showing me one way back, and how his computer could make 'music' - I was amazed. It was an ISA with volume knob on the card- I'm amazed to see some selling for $300+ on eBay these days!
The TOPS cards! My very first job was in an office that had half macs, half PCs. The PCs had TOPS cards and ran a TSR program that shared out directories as AppleShare servers, and you could print from the PCs to LaserWriters and ImageWriters that were on the AppleTalk network. I still have a TOPS card in a box somewhere, but now I wonder if I still have a floppy somewhere with the software on it.
Just stumbled on your channel... I like your content but I cant get past the Les Grossman vibes..I think its the glasses.... LOL.... Awesome content though, brings back memories!
EDO is supported by 85C496 rev. PR only.
At least no one reported of EDO memory working on SiS 496/497 chipset other than rev. PR.
There was a theatrical lightboard called the Status Que that came with a MQX-16 MIDI card preinstalled in it's desktop computer. It could do midi and SMPTE.
It did require drivers to work.
How long before we start talking about digital archaeology? Excellent video!!!
18:25 Seeing that startup screen was like a gut punch of nostalgia. My first computer was (IIRC) a pentium running at 133MHz with Win 98SE. Can't recall how much RAM it had, probably 32 or 64 MB.
What's needed is a repository that encourages good organization of all these old pieces of tech documentation. It's so frustrating relying on old magazine snippets when whole manuals and disks are available in attics. They're probably already scanned by eager folks, but not cataloged anywhere - so they sit and rot on a SSD or cloud storage somewhere, never to be found.
Internet Archive goes some distance, but there's no organization to it, just a billion artifacts in a lump digital pile with a search index -- and no common formatting to encourage visibility. It's halfway there, but it's not up to the full task.
You think we'll ever get a purpose-built repository for old hardware documentation?
10:51 I’ve encountered this in automotive parts as well! I first noticed it when I got a MAF sensor from the company that supplies the part to the OEM. It was identical save for the (rather crude) removal of the automaker specific part number and logo.
The card at 9:07 looks to have a resistor knocked out of place on the top right of the card, that might be an issue @Adrian's Digital Basement .
I also noticed that :) R50 near SW1 in the top right corner is definitely out of place. While zooming in at 9:28 it's pretty obvious....
I upgraded my 386 in late 1993 early 1994 and i remember the prices for comparison in AUD australian dollars.... 486 dx4-100 cpu $179 486 motherboard $149 double speed cdrom $110 1 meg memory $50 per dim Sound blaster 16 value $220 then later in early 1996 33kbps internal modem $280 ( there were so expensive, internet was only just becoming popular when win 95 released when netscape navigator version 3 was the number 1 browser) . so you can see in about 1993 a computer still cost $2000 plus AUD about $5000 in todays dollars ( 3700 USD) .... a desktop computer now would cost $700 USD for most people for home use
If we want to be really pedantic here, the 386SX had a 16-bit data bus (which was fine for just using with 16-bit ISA slots) but the 386DX is fully 32-bit.
I checked out the pgc card and it does require a 3rd full size cga board sandwich together with smaller board in middle and all together looks to plug into 2 isa slots lol
8:05 would supplying negative 5V eliminate the noise?
At 09:48. Is there a component loose top right corner around R5?
it's possible that SNR of the audio op/amp could be affecting the background noise due to age.
That mod file you're playing when testing the soundcards, Surfing on a Sine Wave, has an 8-bit AY version that I always use for testing ZX Spectrums and other AY computers. I've always thought of it as my version of "8-bit Dance Party", so that's a really nice coincidence 😊
8:10 - any chance the internal amplifier is enabled? Those cards have an on-board speaker amplifier which allows it to drive unpowered speakers directly. It's set via jumpers - and it seriously increases the noise floor.
It is sad that information about so many things has been lost purely because "it's old and we're not interested", and now that we're interested in learning about the tech of yesteryear,the documents, specifications and funcions are long lost to history, and unless someone is sitting on a repository (also known as a garage, attic or shed filled with old paperwork), it's not likely that we'll find out about a ot of things that we now no longer know anything about... :(
59:52 look right above the taped wire, there's a short wire stub there?
.. If I remember correctly the main difference between AWE32 and AWE64 was that it had two opl-4 chips instead of one.. which means you could play up to 64 notes simultaneously instead of 32.. Just to say; I am fairly sure that the FM-synthesizer logic on the OL4 IS the same as on OPL2, so there is no actual.. "emulation" going on.. It is native sound blaster, just with more things. . I have an AWE54-gold card that I sooner or later will put in a retro computer for dos-gaming (I need ISA ports, so the fastest I can use would be a pentium-3, and.. In addition to the awe-64 I also have a Yamaha-keyboard with those XS/XG sounds, AND Roland Sound canvas 55, revision B, which can be put in to a MT-32 c compatible mode.. (Only thing is that the MT-32 had two drum channels, channel 10 and 16, whereas the sound-canvas standard setting is that only channel 10 is one, and it doesn't change channel 16 to a drum channel automatically, so IF a game either uses BOTH, OR just the 16th channel.. I will have to do some extra setting up to make it sound right.. sometimes I don't even initially realize this is what is going on, just that the music sounds a bit.. "Sour"..
R50 near "Patent pending R5" is that SMD resistor supposed to be in that location? (when suspecting the bad RamDAC) @9:44 ? (S3 isa video card /Orchid II)
I suspect this card was a way to extend the life of old machines that couldn't normally support VGA. It runs really poorly but that may have been for compatibility with 8086 era machines.