"I'll try to do things a little shorter" understand Adrian, we like long videos, at least I love seeing a long and instructive video of yours. Keep good work!
The great thing is he keeps saying this and then the next video using the same format will nevertheless end up being 45 minutes long anyway. At this rate he's going to wind up doing a telethon. :B
I think he’s trying to also limit the workload. I don’t think he wants them to be too long. * for his own sanity. And we as followers don’t want him to get burned out.
@@Inject0r I remember that as well! You'd get a tall and short A and B. The tall ones in the middle two slots, short ones on the outer slots. It stood as a "tower" of chips and let you keep your RAM without having to pay ridiculous prices. The most we ever paid for a single computer part was $300ish for a single 8MB 72-pin SIMM for the Performa 476 we had, all because 1 game wouldn't work with the 4MB it already had and needed 8MB. I convinced my parents we should get the 8MB instead of just a 4MB since there was only 1 slot and it would extend the life of the machine. I was absolutely right in doing so.
I remember Aztech cards as being relatively decent Soundblaster clones back in the day. I think they went as far as copying the Soundblaster 16 standard before they dissapeared from the market. While I'm not sure about this I think they had a range of low cost PC add-ons a bit like StarTech has today. I think we had one such card in our family PC which was a Tiny branded 486 DX2 66Mhz. My stepfather added a Roland GS wavetable card to it which made it a really awesome sound card for the time. Unfortunately with it being an ISA card it was not compatible with the PCI based system that we replaced that computer with.
I had one, a Aztech SG16 iirc, and it was a PRO compatible, with something more (it could do 44000k stereo, but only in Windows Sound System mode). It was sometimes PRO compatible and sometimes 16 (if it didn't require the roland MPU)
Starlan was a network product line from AT&T and used CAT-3 twisted pair wire. Originally it was a 1Mbs network and later updated to 10Mbs. The caveat with this pre-standard gear was it didn't implement link status pulses, so you couldn't use them with standard 10Base-T hubs. However there were 10Base-T cards from other manufactures that would allow you to disable link status so they would work with legacy Starlan hubs.
There were 4 models of SIMMverters, back in the day. Left and right low versions, and left and right tall versions. With the four versions you could populate all four DIMM slots in a typical motherboard. Back when memory wasn't cheap as chips.
I didn't read all the comments so this might already have been said, but one of the last chips you looked at was a Z80B CTC (Cluster Terminal Controller) and the last one was a 4K (4096)x8bit QSRAM which is a Quasi-Static RAM. This very interesting piece is a 4Kx8 dynamic ram array with a built-in refresh system to make it act like a static ram. It does assert a wait-state if it's in the middle of a refresh when a memory access is requested but it was a creative way of building an 8-bit computer with cheaper dynamic memory but without having to build a refresh logic circuit. It deserved a little more "respect" than the gloss-over it got. It was designed as a companion to the Zilog Z8 processor and both have an interesting history.
The NE558 are four NE555s with slightly reduced connections. The NE556 are two complete NE555s. With the joystick, an impulse is set and then the time is counted until an RC element is charged. An NE555 is required for each channel, but only in one circuit variant, therefore, pins can be internally connected.
Another excellent video Adrian! Very nostalgic when you were talking NE1000/2000 and those sound blaster cards with CDROM connectors, that was around the time I first worked with PCs building machines and working for a small company installing Novell networks around London. Always carried a ne2000 driver floppy with us to set up new machines!
@Adrian's Digital Basement, if any, extract the 30-pin RAM slots from the 72-pin adapters to replace the stock ones on the Mac SE and SE/30 logic boards. Throw away the rest. Then you've got a board that has metal tabs and not plastic ones.
That telephony sound card with the Rockwell chips looks like the one in my AST P133. Sound Galaxy is Aztech's brand of sound cards. Feature-wise, they were pretty decent. The 16-bit ones gave you proper OPL3 FM, SB Pro compatibility, and Windows Sound System for 16-bit 44.1KHz audio. For games, definitely some of the more-compatible cards out there. The one you showed, is the Sound Galaxy Washington 16. According to the cutely-named site "I Love Paws", this card has no WaveBlaster header. So any MPU-401 usage will have to be via the joystick port (which the VOGONS thread confirms that card does have MPU-401 UART support). Furthermore, Adrian, Aztech actually was VERY prolific in terms of their soundcards being so plentiful. You are right about one card being a Packard Bell OEM version (as they were the ones who supplied Packard Bell and probably other OEMs their cards), and even companies like Reveal used them in their multimedia kits (I still have one from such, complete with a Panasonic 2x CD drive that was the same model used for Creative's 3D0 Blaster).
I think that one of the unknown ethernet cards is an Accton EN1640 with their own EN50903 ethernet controller. Trade name for the card could be EtherCombo-16. It's NE2000 (and NE1000 backwards) compatible.
If memory serves the Z8 contained Basic so it was used on my college course for easy access to Microcontroller programming, we built many variations of a black/white ping pong ball sorting system with the Z8 at its heart to learn IO and electronics interfacing. Probably would have be circa 1982-85
The family of microcontrollers the 8048 belongs to is the predecessor to the 8051 microcontroller series. Both have an External Enable (EA) pin allowing the internal ROM to be bypassed. With the addition of some external components (most notably an EPROM or EEPROM) it can execute code from external storage rather than the internal factory programmed ROM. It only has 64 bytes of internal RAM, so compared to a modern Arduino it's a bit weak. However there are microcontrollers currently manufactured that are very limited as well. An example would be the PIC10F200 with 256 Flash Words of program storage, 16 bytes of RAM, 4 I/O points, and one timer. I've repurposed some 8051 microcontrollers for projects this way years ago - long before Arduino boards existed. The instruction set for both microcontrollers is similar.
Your 3270 cards allow a PC, with appropriate software, to act as IBM 3270 dumb terminals. They would connect via a coax cable to something like a 3274 terminal controller to access (for example) a System/360 mainframe. Lots of fun!
If you don't need the "simverters", maybe you can take the sockets off and use as replacement for plastic ones. And perhaps the OPL chips can be taken off also, to be used on more useful/modern cards. So much old hardware... what to do with it all!?
Also some other notes: Z80BCTC is a Z80-CTC, the Zilog version of an 8-bit clock/timer chip (roughly similar in features to the Intel 8253/8254). Intel 8251 is an USART, the big-brother of the 8250 UART used for serial ports.
You should dive down into recreating some old networks. Get the wiring / equipment and configure 2-3 computers to communicate with token ring, IPX/SPX, thick/thinnet, and I just looked up that "StarLAN" thing... also kinda neat to have a retrospective series or something.
The ch game card was used for when a joystick, throttle and rudders needed to be connected. You could hook up just joystick and throttle to the sound card, but a single game port could not support a rudder. Also, there were joystick timing issues if the gameport was on a pci sound card but playing an early dos game. This card prevented that issue. Only pro flight sim players had these installed as it became a niche product.
I worked for a local mom and pop computer store from about 1992 to 1999 when I jumped ship to corporate IT. Watching your videos just reminds me of how much I've forgotten like simverters. Did a lot of Netware back then so NE2000 NICs definitely hit the nostalgia bone as well. I still have nightmares about crawling around under desks at local businesses troubleshooting 10Base2 cabling. Didn't do much with MFM/RLL since IDE was king by that time but I had a few customers with them still.
Seen those sound/modem combo cards In the packard bell pc’s. Funniest part, you can have the same exact model packard bell side by side, and the combo cards could be different in each. I think they just used whatever they could get the cheapest at the time.
People complained about those winmodem Rockwell chipsets, but if your ISP had Rockwell based modems on the call-in lines and you disabled error correction and compression in your connect string those things were great. That error correction (on by default) was a real performance killer. I was getting ~100-130ms pings when other modem users were getting ~200-250ms pings when I used to play Quake 2 CTF competitively. People thought I was playing on ISDN (cable modems and DSL weren't quite a thing yet).
I had AZT2316 sound card in my IBM PC 330 466DX2. It was configured by jumpers, not the driver command line/did not require any TSRs like newer ISA PnP cards, and I had absolutely no compatibility issues with it.
I loved it because of that, it didn't need drivers that consume ram, everything worked perfectly both in DOS and Windows, I never had compatibility problems.
Back in the 80's UK Amstrad PC1512 there was a shortage of HDD's and there was a spate of hardcards delivered with MFM drives and RLL controllers to give you 30MB instead of the native 20MB. They were fairly reliable but not to be trusted without backups!
I have no complaints about the length of your videos, Adrian, but if it helps make better use of your free time, that’s perfectly understandable. Either way, it’s good content for some of us to get reacquainted with vintage technology or just get answers for those thoughts rattling around in the back of our minds. Oh, and the 6800 series equivalent of the 8253 timer IC is the MC6840.
So on the Aztech cards, they did support 16 bit audio but via the Windows Sound System standard. So in windows everything was good and there were some DOS games that supported WSS and could do 16 bit everything on these cards.
Here is a little more information on the Aztech cards. The gold one with FCC ID I38-MMSN834 is a Sound Galaxy Washington 16 with the Aztech AZT2316 Chipset. The more green one with FCC ID I38-MMSN834 is just known as the Packard Bell 030101. It has the Aztech AZT2316R chipset. I actually have an Aztech card in my 5170 and the OPL chip sounds amazing. The Sound blaster compatibility with mine seem to be pretty good but mine have the crystal audio chips instead of the rockwell so these ones may be different. Either way, I have found them to be perfect cards for 286 machines. I am also pretty sure the 16 bit address lines are just for the CD controller so it's possible they may work in an XT class machine as well since the sound blaster 2.0 and adlib are both 8 bit cards. For drivers, there is a massive dump of Aztech drivers on Vogons but you may have to resort to a Packard Bell recovery CD to get the driver for the second one.
I had many of the Aztechs that had the 14.4k modem (with the riser board and MKE interface) they were amazing. Never had problems with any DOS games I played on it + OPL3 was nice too. I have a bunch of Packard Bells hehe. Common on the late 486/Pentium socket 4/5 systems.
I think we need to find a old IBM S/390 and send for a mail call so the 3270 cards come to use, may be a bit hard to fit in the basement 😀 The network card is not token ring..
I remember a fair number of 16-bit RLL cards in the period before IDE took off. Because the difference between RLL and MFM is the disk format not the interface protocol it is possible to use any ST-506 drive with either controller. However RLL requires a more accurate drive mechanism so using an MFM rated drive with an RLL controller is hit or miss at best.
Accton ETHERCOAX-16 EN1642 10 Mbps Ethernet card with RG-58A/U 50 Ohm coax and AUI ports. I posted a comment earlier with a link, but it was removed... Maybe YT doesn't allow links? I don't know. The link does mention NE1000 as well.
The pink foam is not Anti static. That is why IC go bad all the time when handling them. The black ones or Anti Static foams, you can look it up online if you need more foams or not. up to you. Only an observation and advice.
Man, I wish I had known about you a few years back when I moved. I finally had to get rid of components and games I had carried with me for decades like a Asus Black Pearl MB, two Diamond 3DFX (when they were first released) I used in SLI back when it first came out and had about 2 games that could use it, and a ton of other cool boards and games, as I said.
Whoa Accton network card! These guys were big in the 90s as a cheaper small network hardware company. I recall installing a 24 port 10mbs ethernet switch with a 100mbs fibre port in about 1996. They were way cheaper than 3com etc.
In ‘92, my mom gave me a computer for my birthday. Packard bell pb8810 8088, 640k ram and an 80mb ide hdd, with an 8 bit IDE card. I can’t imagine what that cost way back then. 😳
Wow I live like 30 mins from Oakbank MB! I had one of these soundcards/modem it was washington sound galaxy 16, never worked properly ever. I had the OEM for packard bell. The one I had showed up as seperate devices modem and soundcard but most of the time the Sound card portion would "disappear" and multiple reboots to get it back. Seems when we used the modem it would kill off the sound card from device mangler.
I had an AZTech card back in the days. It was indeed soundblaster pro compatible, but It was noisy as F compared to the real one. It was pretty compatible though, no problems with it.
Back then i was wondering why no one came up with idea of using soundcard as modem to save money. When "winmodem" became a thing it became even more strange. Was surprised to know someone indeed was thinking in that direction but with different intentions.
We had SIM-verters. My brother used to get free memory from upgrading work computers so we ended up with 32MB, ie, very expensive/desirable at the time.
I had one in a Windows 95 Packard Bell PC. I was new to sound cards at that time, but I remember it didn't always wanted to play right in DOS. I don't remember DOS drivers (like sb16.sys) for it.
in my experience it always worked great, and it didn't need drivers, i mean no TSR, no loading stuff on config sys, only SET BLASTER and a path in autoexec.bat. the port and irq were set with jumpers. I loved that card, everything worked great both in DOS and windows. never had compatibility problems. maybe it depends on the model?. I know there are some plug and play models out there, maybe those don't have jumpers and need drivers?.
And just because I'm a pedantic a$$: 8035 = This is a 8048 without a mask ROM. It's therefore re-usable but the challenge is to find a device with it... Z80BCTC = Z80-family "CTC" = "counter/timer circuit". It's similar to the 8253 but not compatible. 8251 = "communication interface" = standard serial I/O chip from Intel since the 8080/8085 Z6132-5 = 4Kx8 = true 4 KByte(!) of RAM. It's speciality is that it is dynamic RAM that does an internal(!) refresh. So from the outside it behaves like static RAM. + as others have mentioned the 8088 stash contains an 8085 and an 8086...
That is really spooky. Just before watching this I had finished setting up a CT2940 on my DECpc 433 (486dx33) together with an external Philips CDD 462 CD drive using it's proprietary 8bit serial card with audio coming in on the line-in. That thing is so slow, would be quicker transferring stuff using it's 2.88mb floppy drive (if I had a second one that is).
I have a Vibra16 with OPL3 chip on it. It has the absolute best bass punch and rich sound. What it in return lacks, are variable bass and treble. And it lacks mixer, except for volume controll. It is silent, so it will filther out drive read/write noises from harddisks. Normally you can hear it, when there is no sound on older creative cards. I will say that it is much like the SB16 Value Edition CT2770 model. However the value have mixer and bass/treble controll yet you can hear static noise and drive activity. Not all Vibra cards are lacking OPL3. Just the same with AWE32 models. 3 AWE32 models have OPL3 chips, yet they are highly in demand. One is the CT3900 model. The other is the CT2760 model. (Or was it CT2670?) The third is something with CT39XX.
I think I had that 16bit Western Digital RLL card! I had upgraded from an "10mhz TURBO XT" to a 386-25, and I couldn't afford new drives at the time. I remember being really bummed that I had to set a 1:3 interleave because the old 8bit RLL controller was too slow. I still remember the happy day I was able to buy the 16bit card, fire up 'debug' and low-level format with a 1:1 interleave. I had 2 RLL drives, my original 32MB Seagate ST-238R from 1987 and my "newer" Mitsubishi MR-535 (60?MB) hard drive iirc.
Does nobody wonder where the Stop button is on that Walkman on his shirt at the beginning? Also from the settings of the volume controls, either the head is dirty or the recording is borked! (actually I find the fact I'm nagging at something that minor hilarious)
I used to have have an SB16MCD card on my Windows 95 machine that supported three different CD ROM drives but the last version of the drives stopped supporting the Panasonic drive. I had to roll back to get my CD ROM going again. Can’t recall the Soundblaster card on my Windows 98 machine.
V20s are a bit more common than they used to be thanks to some good eBay sellers. I bought one a while back for less than $20. I saw one 8085, an LSI chip which combines the 8080 and a few of its support chips into one package and is considerably faster than a regular 8080.
Back in the days we would swap out the Aztecs in favor of an Sound Blaster and a stand alone Winmodem. In the shop I worked at we never seen one that worked well.
They must have got worse by the time they started integrating modems then. I had an earlier Sound Galaxy in my first PC and it worked pretty well. I eventually upgraded it to an AWE 64 but for anything that just used Adlib and SoundBlaster it sounded pretty good. The soundtracks to DooM, Privateer and Ultima Underworld all still ring in my ears.
@@jdpiper IIRC the cards worked ok with the drivers from the OEM install, however the drivers provided on the CD that came with the PC were different in some way. I worked with an engineer that used a Pentium 166 with one of those cards as an answering machine for several years.
I had a AZTECH Sound Galaxy card that came with no modem, but it had an OPL4 chip and could emulate SB16. Even in Real Mode DOS. So I was rather happy with it. In Windows it had a SoftSynth WaveTable with the ability to load custom soundfonts in SF2-format, with a maximum of 4MB (not that large, I know).
Nice video, as always. I would love to see you use a vintage dec vt100 or vt220 terminal, or a decwriter. Should still interface with any linux, modern or vintage. I was still using this type of equipment in the early 90s, albeit connected to a honywell 48bit mini computer/mainframe.
Star... May reference a type of token ring which used an improved "star" configuration. I think the idea was that single designated machine would be the central "node" in the network, and other devices could be connected, or even disconnected, from the network, at any time, since they where automatically assigned/removed from the network's known connections, as needed. Basically, the one PC functioned like a modern day router, or switch. Prior to that there was a clear, expected, path that tokens had to follow along the network, and attempting to add a PC, or remove one, from the network caused all sorts of issues, since the network couldn't automatically assign IDs to each machine, as they where added and removed, you had to assign them a fixed ID, and if you didn't know what IDs where available on the network you could mess up the entire thing, and cause the whole thing to stop working, or something. Mind, this is from half assed understanding, a failed course in such networks (due to issues I was having at the time, and my lab partner dropping out on me, along with the teacher just not giving a F, apparently, about finding a way to have someone who had lost their partner to proceed), and what little I did learn on the subject. (More and more I realize that the so called "college" I went to only wanted my money, not to educate anyone... sigh...)
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"I'll try to do things a little shorter" understand Adrian, we like long videos, at least I love seeing a long and instructive video of yours. Keep good work!
I cringed the other day when some complained about long videos 👍
The great thing is he keeps saying this and then the next video using the same format will nevertheless end up being 45 minutes long anyway. At this rate he's going to wind up doing a telethon. :B
I think he’s trying to also limit the workload. I don’t think he wants them to be too long.
* for his own sanity. And we as followers don’t want him to get burned out.
I came here to say this. Also, weren't the "mini mail calls" an attempt to make things a little shorter? :D
@@mikeuk666 if too long for them they can run it at 2x speed haha
You could make a 3 hour special and I’d still watch it.
Regarding the IBM 3270 cards. You could ask curiousmarc if he needs those. He's on an IBM binge lately.
Love simverters. Saved me a fortune back in the 90s
@@Inject0r I remember that as well! You'd get a tall and short A and B. The tall ones in the middle two slots, short ones on the outer slots. It stood as a "tower" of chips and let you keep your RAM without having to pay ridiculous prices.
The most we ever paid for a single computer part was $300ish for a single 8MB 72-pin SIMM for the Performa 476 we had, all because 1 game wouldn't work with the 4MB it already had and needed 8MB. I convinced my parents we should get the 8MB instead of just a 4MB since there was only 1 slot and it would extend the life of the machine. I was absolutely right in doing so.
Those dance moves really gave me a huge smile❤️
I remember Aztech cards as being relatively decent Soundblaster clones back in the day. I think they went as far as copying the Soundblaster 16 standard before they dissapeared from the market. While I'm not sure about this I think they had a range of low cost PC add-ons a bit like StarTech has today. I think we had one such card in our family PC which was a Tiny branded 486 DX2 66Mhz. My stepfather added a Roland GS wavetable card to it which made it a really awesome sound card for the time. Unfortunately with it being an ISA card it was not compatible with the PCI based system that we replaced that computer with.
I had one, a Aztech SG16 iirc, and it was a PRO compatible, with something more (it could do 44000k stereo, but only in Windows Sound System mode). It was sometimes PRO compatible and sometimes 16 (if it didn't require the roland MPU)
Starlan was a network product line from AT&T and used CAT-3 twisted pair wire. Originally it was a 1Mbs network and later updated to 10Mbs. The caveat with this pre-standard gear was it didn't implement link status pulses, so you couldn't use them with standard 10Base-T hubs. However there were 10Base-T cards from other manufactures that would allow you to disable link status so they would work with legacy Starlan hubs.
There were 4 models of SIMMverters, back in the day. Left and right low versions, and left and right tall versions. With the four versions you could populate all four DIMM slots in a typical motherboard. Back when memory wasn't cheap as chips.
SOUNDBLASTER: One of my favorite single-guy t-shirts was my SoundBlaster t-shirt that read "I'm Compatible".
Between you and LGR I have learnt more about the soundcards I had back in the day than I ever knew XD Great video!
My first hard drive was a 30MB RLL drive. A Christmas gift from my dad in 1988. He got one for himself, too.
I didn't read all the comments so this might already have been said, but one of the last chips you looked at was a Z80B CTC (Cluster Terminal Controller) and the last one was a 4K (4096)x8bit QSRAM which is a Quasi-Static RAM. This very interesting piece is a 4Kx8 dynamic ram array with a built-in refresh system to make it act like a static ram. It does assert a wait-state if it's in the middle of a refresh when a memory access is requested but it was a creative way of building an 8-bit computer with cheaper dynamic memory but without having to build a refresh logic circuit. It deserved a little more "respect" than the gloss-over it got. It was designed as a companion to the Zilog Z8 processor and both have an interesting history.
The NE558 are four NE555s with slightly reduced connections. The NE556 are two complete NE555s.
With the joystick, an impulse is set and then the time is counted until an RC element is charged. An NE555 is required for each channel, but only in one circuit variant, therefore, pins can be internally connected.
Another excellent video Adrian! Very nostalgic when you were talking NE1000/2000 and those sound blaster cards with CDROM connectors, that was around the time I first worked with PCs building machines and working for a small company installing Novell networks around London. Always carried a ne2000 driver floppy with us to set up new machines!
Bro. I always watch your videos before I go to sleep. Best bedtime story ever. Thank you.
@Adrian's Digital Basement, if any, extract the 30-pin RAM slots from the 72-pin adapters to replace the stock ones on the Mac SE and SE/30 logic boards. Throw away the rest. Then you've got a board that has metal tabs and not plastic ones.
How funny as soon as I heard "8 bit testing" I thought OMG I have completely forgotten about that only to hear Adrian say "who remembers that!"
Those ram card converter boards have quality slots would be useful for replace bad Sim slots on old pc
That telephony sound card with the Rockwell chips looks like the one in my AST P133. Sound Galaxy is Aztech's brand of sound cards. Feature-wise, they were pretty decent. The 16-bit ones gave you proper OPL3 FM, SB Pro compatibility, and Windows Sound System for 16-bit 44.1KHz audio. For games, definitely some of the more-compatible cards out there. The one you showed, is the Sound Galaxy Washington 16. According to the cutely-named site "I Love Paws", this card has no WaveBlaster header. So any MPU-401 usage will have to be via the joystick port (which the VOGONS thread confirms that card does have MPU-401 UART support).
Furthermore, Adrian, Aztech actually was VERY prolific in terms of their soundcards being so plentiful. You are right about one card being a Packard Bell OEM version (as they were the ones who supplied Packard Bell and probably other OEMs their cards), and even companies like Reveal used them in their multimedia kits (I still have one from such, complete with a Panasonic 2x CD drive that was the same model used for Creative's 3D0 Blaster).
I think one of the AMD processors is actually an 8086
I think that one of the unknown ethernet cards is an Accton EN1640 with their own EN50903 ethernet controller. Trade name for the card could be EtherCombo-16. It's NE2000 (and NE1000 backwards) compatible.
That one ZiLOG chip is a Counter/Timer Controller (CTC) usually for Z80 chips, but works fine for Intel. It's part is Z8430 (above the Z80BCTC label).
Greetings from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
I grew up in Winnipeg and other places around the province (living in Calgary now), so it's cool to see some some fellow Manitobans around.
@@CanuckGod yes indeed
Rick puts "the man" back in Manitoba! ^-^
If memory serves the Z8 contained Basic so it was used on my college course for easy access to Microcontroller programming, we built many variations of a black/white ping pong ball sorting system with the Z8 at its heart to learn IO and electronics interfacing. Probably would have be circa 1982-85
The family of microcontrollers the 8048 belongs to is the predecessor to the 8051 microcontroller series. Both have an External Enable (EA) pin allowing the internal ROM to be bypassed. With the addition of some external components (most notably an EPROM or EEPROM) it can execute code from external storage rather than the internal factory programmed ROM. It only has 64 bytes of internal RAM, so compared to a modern Arduino it's a bit weak. However there are microcontrollers currently manufactured that are very limited as well. An example would be the PIC10F200 with 256 Flash Words of program storage, 16 bytes of RAM, 4 I/O points, and one timer. I've repurposed some 8051 microcontrollers for projects this way years ago - long before Arduino boards existed. The instruction set for both microcontrollers is similar.
Your 3270 cards allow a PC, with appropriate software, to act as IBM 3270 dumb terminals. They would connect via a coax cable to something like a 3274 terminal controller to access (for example) a System/360 mainframe. Lots of fun!
Sim converters would be a good source of replacement 30 pin simm slots for boards with broken plastic clips
If you don't need the "simverters", maybe you can take the sockets off and use as replacement for plastic ones. And perhaps the OPL chips can be taken off also, to be used on more useful/modern cards. So much old hardware... what to do with it all!?
One of the chips you called 8088 was marked 8086. Fancy 16 bit stuff.
EDIT 23:39 that's the one. AMD made 8086-2
Yes, and he also put an 8085 into his 8088-stash. I guess he will find out if he puts one into a PC/XT...
Also some other notes:
Z80BCTC is a Z80-CTC, the Zilog version of an 8-bit clock/timer chip (roughly similar in features to the Intel 8253/8254).
Intel 8251 is an USART, the big-brother of the 8250 UART used for serial ports.
You could use those SIMMverters as donors for metal-latch SIMM sockets if you ever have a machine where the plastic latches have broken.
You should dive down into recreating some old networks. Get the wiring / equipment and configure 2-3 computers to communicate with token ring, IPX/SPX, thick/thinnet, and I just looked up that "StarLAN" thing... also kinda neat to have a retrospective series or something.
the aztec sound blaster 19.9 k modem isa card was my savior back in the day.
The ch game card was used for when a joystick, throttle and rudders needed to be connected. You could hook up just joystick and throttle to the sound card, but a single game port could not support a rudder. Also, there were joystick timing issues if the gameport was on a pci sound card but playing an early dos game. This card prevented that issue. Only pro flight sim players had these installed as it became a niche product.
I worked for a local mom and pop computer store from about 1992 to 1999 when I jumped ship to corporate IT. Watching your videos just reminds me of how much I've forgotten like simverters. Did a lot of Netware back then so NE2000 NICs definitely hit the nostalgia bone as well. I still have nightmares about crawling around under desks at local businesses troubleshooting 10Base2 cabling. Didn't do much with MFM/RLL since IDE was king by that time but I had a few customers with them still.
This Creative SoundBlaster totally has the place for OPL3 chip, matching Yamaha DAC, and an XTAL on a PCB (empty QFP and SSOP in the middle).
Seen those sound/modem combo cards
In the packard bell pc’s. Funniest part, you can have the same exact model packard bell side by side, and the combo cards could be different in each. I think they just used whatever they could get the cheapest at the time.
People complained about those winmodem Rockwell chipsets, but if your ISP had Rockwell based modems on the call-in lines and you disabled error correction and compression in your connect string those things were great. That error correction (on by default) was a real performance killer.
I was getting ~100-130ms pings when other modem users were getting ~200-250ms pings when I used to play Quake 2 CTF competitively. People thought I was playing on ISDN (cable modems and DSL weren't quite a thing yet).
I had AZT2316 sound card in my IBM PC 330 466DX2. It was configured by jumpers, not the driver command line/did not require any TSRs like newer ISA PnP cards, and I had absolutely no compatibility issues with it.
Yes, these are EXCELLENT SBPro clones. They are actually my card of choice.
I loved it because of that, it didn't need drivers that consume ram, everything worked perfectly both in DOS and Windows, I never had compatibility problems.
Back in the 80's UK Amstrad PC1512 there was a shortage of HDD's and there was a spate of hardcards delivered with MFM drives and RLL controllers to give you 30MB instead of the native 20MB. They were fairly reliable but not to be trusted without backups!
I have no complaints about the length of your videos, Adrian, but if it helps make better use of your free time, that’s perfectly understandable. Either way, it’s good content for some of us to get reacquainted with vintage technology or just get answers for those thoughts rattling around in the back of our minds. Oh, and the 6800 series equivalent of the 8253 timer IC is the MC6840.
So on the Aztech cards, they did support 16 bit audio but via the Windows Sound System standard. So in windows everything was good and there were some DOS games that supported WSS and could do 16 bit everything on these cards.
The song at 9:13 needs to be the new 8-bit dance party - rockin’! 😂
i just didnt feel the same love for the soundblaster that you get with the 8 bit dance party...
Here is a little more information on the Aztech cards.
The gold one with FCC ID I38-MMSN834 is a Sound Galaxy Washington 16 with the Aztech AZT2316 Chipset.
The more green one with FCC ID I38-MMSN834 is just known as the Packard Bell 030101. It has the Aztech AZT2316R chipset.
I actually have an Aztech card in my 5170 and the OPL chip sounds amazing. The Sound blaster compatibility with mine seem to be pretty good but mine have the crystal audio chips instead of the rockwell so these ones may be different. Either way, I have found them to be perfect cards for 286 machines. I am also pretty sure the 16 bit address lines are just for the CD controller so it's possible they may work in an XT class machine as well since the sound blaster 2.0 and adlib are both 8 bit cards.
For drivers, there is a massive dump of Aztech drivers on Vogons but you may have to resort to a Packard Bell recovery CD to get the driver for the second one.
I had many of the Aztechs that had the 14.4k modem (with the riser board and MKE interface) they were amazing. Never had problems with any DOS games I played on it + OPL3 was nice too. I have a bunch of Packard Bells hehe. Common on the late 486/Pentium socket 4/5 systems.
Really loving the crisp background due to the new workbench matt.
I think we need to find a old IBM S/390 and send for a mail call so the 3270 cards come to use, may be a bit hard to fit in the basement 😀 The network card is not token ring..
Possibly an ARCNET card.
I remember a fair number of 16-bit RLL cards in the period before IDE took off. Because the difference between RLL and MFM is the disk format not the interface protocol it is possible to use any ST-506 drive with either controller. However RLL requires a more accurate drive mechanism so using an MFM rated drive with an RLL controller is hit or miss at best.
Accton ETHERCOAX-16
EN1642
10 Mbps Ethernet card with RG-58A/U 50 Ohm coax and AUI ports.
I posted a comment earlier with a link, but it was removed... Maybe YT doesn't allow links? I don't know.
The link does mention NE1000 as well.
Good video as always Adrian! Thanks for sharing with us!💖👌👍😎JP
Congrats for making a box full of e-waste fascinating as usual.
The Accton card is nice software configurable WFW 10-base2 card. You could also force it into a NE1000 mode by closing JP1
...can't look at the Rockwell logo without thinking of the Retro Encabulator.
FWIW, 3270 is the model of the terminal, not what you'd be "connecting to".
The pink foam is not Anti static. That is why IC go bad all the time when handling them. The black ones or Anti Static foams, you can look it up online if you need more foams or not. up to you. Only an observation and advice.
Man, I wish I had known about you a few years back when I moved. I finally had to get rid of components and games I had carried with me for decades like a Asus Black Pearl MB, two Diamond 3DFX (when they were first released) I used in SLI back when it first came out and had about 2 games that could use it, and a ton of other cool boards and games, as I said.
9:35 - I didn't know about the Soundblaster program. Maybe i never had a real Soundblaster back in the day.
Whoa Accton network card! These guys were big in the 90s as a cheaper small network hardware company. I recall installing a 24 port 10mbs ethernet switch with a 100mbs fibre port in about 1996. They were way cheaper than 3com etc.
Yay, someone mentioned Manitoba! We exist!
You really want to get your hands on some SMC ultra ISA NICs. It's one of the few ISA cards that can do back to back packets
One of those last CPUs was not an 8088 but an 8085 which is a variant of the 8080 series.
The face tracking is the reason for the existance of Mr Spotty in Vehicor videos
In ‘92, my mom gave me a computer for my birthday. Packard bell pb8810 8088, 640k ram and an 80mb ide hdd, with an 8 bit IDE card. I can’t imagine what that cost way back then. 😳
That aztec sound card modem combo is straight out of a packard bell.
I used to wonder if Packard Bell owned them since that's the only card they ever seemed to use.
Wow I live like 30 mins from Oakbank MB! I had one of these soundcards/modem it was washington sound galaxy 16, never worked properly ever. I had the OEM for packard bell. The one I had showed up as seperate devices modem and soundcard but most of the time the Sound card portion would "disappear" and multiple reboots to get it back. Seems when we used the modem it would kill off the sound card from device mangler.
The 8255 is wildly popular in arcade machines from around 1980 to 1985.
I had an AZTech card back in the days. It was indeed soundblaster pro compatible, but It was noisy as F compared to the real one. It was pretty compatible though, no problems with it.
Back then i was wondering why no one came up with idea of using soundcard as modem to save money.
When "winmodem" became a thing it became even more strange.
Was surprised to know someone indeed was thinking in that direction but with different intentions.
Manitoba REPRESENT!!! Not often I ever hear about my province on TH-cam!
I'm a Winnipegger!
Originally from Winnipeg, living in Calgary now. Go Bombers!
We had SIM-verters. My brother used to get free memory from upgrading work computers so we ended up with 32MB, ie, very expensive/desirable at the time.
I had one in a Windows 95 Packard Bell PC. I was new to sound cards at that time, but I remember it didn't always wanted to play right in DOS. I don't remember DOS drivers (like sb16.sys) for it.
in my experience it always worked great, and it didn't need drivers, i mean no TSR, no loading stuff on config sys, only SET BLASTER and a path in autoexec.bat. the port and irq were set with jumpers. I loved that card, everything worked great both in DOS and windows. never had compatibility problems. maybe it depends on the model?. I know there are some plug and play models out there, maybe those don't have jumpers and need drivers?.
Can you use the sockets on the SIMMverters to replace the crappy plastic clip sockets on a motherboard?
And just because I'm a pedantic a$$:
8035 = This is a 8048 without a mask ROM. It's therefore re-usable but the challenge is to find a device with it...
Z80BCTC = Z80-family "CTC" = "counter/timer circuit". It's similar to the 8253 but not compatible.
8251 = "communication interface" = standard serial I/O chip from Intel since the 8080/8085
Z6132-5 = 4Kx8 = true 4 KByte(!) of RAM. It's speciality is that it is dynamic RAM that does an internal(!) refresh.
So from the outside it behaves like static RAM.
+ as others have mentioned the 8088 stash contains an 8085 and an 8086...
- … we need a Zed Pee Em…
- what?
- Zee Pee Em, he's… Canadian…
That is really spooky. Just before watching this I had finished setting up a CT2940 on my DECpc 433 (486dx33) together with an external Philips CDD 462 CD drive using it's proprietary 8bit serial card with audio coming in on the line-in. That thing is so slow, would be quicker transferring stuff using it's 2.88mb floppy drive (if I had a second one that is).
I still have an old ISA 56k modem and an ISA ES1869 sound card sitting in my parts drawer. Both were in my Windows 95B system a long time ago.
I have one of the OEM Packard bell sound cards with the modem and I remember it would occasionally crash the sound card when I'd dial up.
nice work - please keep it up
Your 5th chip down was an 8086 with a 16 bit bus, not an 8088 with an 8 bit bus. Some viewers might not know the difference between those.
WDC on that chip probably indicates "Western Design Center", not Western Digital.
Curiousmarc may be able to use the 3270 cards
Using an Optical adapter jack will get you digital sound that feed a sound bar.
Z80BCTC is a Z80B CTC or Counter/Timer Chip
10:47 we need an 8-bit POLKA dance party!
I have a Vibra16 with OPL3 chip on it. It has the absolute best bass punch and rich sound. What it in return lacks, are variable bass and treble. And it lacks mixer, except for volume controll. It is silent, so it will filther out drive read/write noises from harddisks. Normally you can hear it, when there is no sound on older creative cards. I will say that it is much like the SB16 Value Edition CT2770 model. However the value have mixer and bass/treble controll yet you can hear static noise and drive activity.
Not all Vibra cards are lacking OPL3. Just the same with AWE32 models. 3 AWE32 models have OPL3 chips, yet they are highly in demand. One is the CT3900 model. The other is the CT2760 model. (Or was it CT2670?) The third is something with CT39XX.
you are a crazy man!! NIce dance Adrian! :D
I think I had that 16bit Western Digital RLL card! I had upgraded from an "10mhz TURBO XT" to a 386-25, and I couldn't afford new drives at the time. I remember being really bummed that I had to set a 1:3 interleave because the old 8bit RLL controller was too slow. I still remember the happy day I was able to buy the 16bit card, fire up 'debug' and low-level format with a 1:1 interleave. I had 2 RLL drives, my original 32MB Seagate ST-238R from 1987 and my "newer" Mitsubishi MR-535 (60?MB) hard drive iirc.
Sound Blaster cards can be good, or they can be bad: see the possessed Jill of the Jungle experience Clint recently had.
Does nobody wonder where the Stop button is on that Walkman on his shirt at the beginning?
Also from the settings of the volume controls, either the head is dirty or the recording is borked!
(actually I find the fact I'm nagging at something that minor hilarious)
I used to have have an SB16MCD card on my Windows 95 machine that supported three different CD ROM drives but the last version of the drives stopped supporting the Panasonic drive. I had to roll back to get my CD ROM going again. Can’t recall the Soundblaster card on my Windows 98 machine.
V20s are a bit more common than they used to be thanks to some good eBay sellers. I bought one a while back for less than $20.
I saw one 8085, an LSI chip which combines the 8080 and a few of its support chips into one package and is considerably faster than a regular 8080.
Have you considered getting get a silver Sharpie? It would be easier to read on black things like chips.
make the videos you enjoy making my friend. We mostly enjoy the ride regardless. :)
Back in the days we would swap out the Aztecs in favor of an Sound Blaster and a stand alone Winmodem. In the shop I worked at we never seen one that worked well.
They must have got worse by the time they started integrating modems then. I had an earlier Sound Galaxy in my first PC and it worked pretty well. I eventually upgraded it to an AWE 64 but for anything that just used Adlib and SoundBlaster it sounded pretty good. The soundtracks to DooM, Privateer and Ultima Underworld all still ring in my ears.
@@jdpiper The stand-alone cards were great, the combined cards were absolute crap.
@@jdpiper IIRC the cards worked ok with the drivers from the OEM install, however the drivers provided on the CD that came with the PC were different in some way. I worked with an engineer that used a Pentium 166 with one of those cards as an answering machine for several years.
I had a AZTECH Sound Galaxy card that came with no modem, but it had an OPL4 chip and could emulate SB16. Even in Real Mode DOS. So I was rather happy with it. In Windows it had a SoftSynth WaveTable with the ability to load custom soundfonts in SF2-format, with a maximum of 4MB (not that large, I know).
Nice video, as always. I would love to see you use a vintage dec vt100 or vt220 terminal, or a decwriter. Should still interface with any linux, modern or vintage. I was still using this type of equipment in the early 90s, albeit connected to a honywell 48bit mini computer/mainframe.
Beauty eh? Just east of Winnipeg.
The old zilog ram chip isn't just like a main memory thing: it's sram not dram, so more expensive, I think often faster, etc.
Star... May reference a type of token ring which used an improved "star" configuration. I think the idea was that single designated machine would be the central "node" in the network, and other devices could be connected, or even disconnected, from the network, at any time, since they where automatically assigned/removed from the network's known connections, as needed. Basically, the one PC functioned like a modern day router, or switch. Prior to that there was a clear, expected, path that tokens had to follow along the network, and attempting to add a PC, or remove one, from the network caused all sorts of issues, since the network couldn't automatically assign IDs to each machine, as they where added and removed, you had to assign them a fixed ID, and if you didn't know what IDs where available on the network you could mess up the entire thing, and cause the whole thing to stop working, or something.
Mind, this is from half assed understanding, a failed course in such networks (due to issues I was having at the time, and my lab partner dropping out on me, along with the teacher just not giving a F, apparently, about finding a way to have someone who had lost their partner to proceed), and what little I did learn on the subject. (More and more I realize that the so called "college" I went to only wanted my money, not to educate anyone... sigh...)