Gateway's Final Destination
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 มิ.ย. 2024
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Hosted and produced by Aaron Ishmael.
Technical work by Joseph William Lewis.
We had this when I was in college. One of our biology professors got one with that giant 31” TV monitor. We had to wheel around to different professors and show them how to use it. When the professors weren’t using it, we would play NBA Hangtime and Need for Speed II on it.
Another blast from the past !!! Very enjoyable offering today !!! The entry level Gateway was our very first computer !!
I never had a gateway, nor knew anyone who could really afford a good one. I liked the idea of them, but most people went with budget ones, or my dad who built his own. When I was 13, I built my own when I eventually saved up enough money from my afterschool job. My mom had a coworker I would go over and help her with things and in return she would give us her old stuff. We ended up with a big projection TV and I got a 32" gateway monitor with VGA. It was really nice, the computer was long since outdated. It had 800x600, no 1024x768 sadly. It was huge, but had really good sound and made for pretty sharp picture for video. I had gotten an ati tv tuner card and had set it up as a DVR with my cable tv and recorded shows onto it. Eventually windows xp media center came out and I now had a remote. It was pretty neat and fun to use for tv. This was when tivo was big, but I had something even better.
I remember back then that DVD players would often cost £250 or more, with prices not budging until the Playstation 2 come out and ended up being the cheapest DVD player you could buy, which launched a race to the bottom by other manufacturers.
With this in mind, I imagine that this machine would've been a decent proposition at the time, being both an expensive computer and DVD player that could plug into a TV.
I had something similar made by IPC in Singapore called MY.G.NiE which ran on Windows 3.11 or Windows 95. Had built-in TV and FM tuners, CD player, IR remote, VFD and perfect for college dorm students.
Unfortunately, after so many years, the unit died and was nearly impossible to source for parts. Plus, IPC already stopped making computers a while back. I hope to find a working donor soon.
Hi Aaron,
I believe that the F connector is an RF input, not output, for a TV tuner. As at the time the tuner was quite a big box it could be possible (just guesswork here) that the actual graphics card was on the tandem board and routed through the tuner card with the wide flat cable.
I remember that there were basically two (or three) concepts with early TV/MPED/3D cards:
Either the card did hardware overlay by some kind of blue screening or other mechanisms to synchronize to the graphics card picture. The graphics card output would then be routed through the tuner oder decoder card - this overlay process leads to a degradation of the graphics card picture. This is what e. g. the Creative Labs DXR3 does which I used as a cheap MPEG decoder for the Linux VDR (together with a budget card).
Another approach was DMA. This is what some TV tuner cards did. I have such a card here for my Atari clone "Hades". There is a driver that does the overlay programming. It mostly works, but on the Atari there is some lagging when moving windows, so the DMA transfer follows the window movement.
A simple approach I have seen with early 3D cards is to simply switch over the whole picture.
So my Uncle bought one of these when they came out. I as working for Gateway at the time at their offices in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. I had mentioned to him in passing that it was "pretty cool". Unbeknownst to me he went to Gateway retail store about 5 minutes away from his home cow pattern store sign) and just bought one... The CRT was crazy big.
I bet he still has it in his basement.
I was at Gateway when they bought Amiga properties and I knew of 2 guys in tech support who applied to Gateway specifically because Gateway bought Amiga, they were hard-core Amiga users. They were so pumped over Gateway acquiring Amiga and would go on and on about how Amiga OS would kill Windows and that Amiga OS would ship out as a Gateway computer's default OS 😂
Welp we all know that never happened
Please tell me he got the Pentium and not the awful Celron processor 🤓 none the less... What a awesome machine!
I had one for Christmas in 98’ 31 inch monitor and 5.1 Boston Acoustics surroundsound. XTV350. 350mhz pentium 3 .
No sound blaster card, but the Creative 1371 chip on the motherboard is kind of a giveaway.
I remember seeing there advertised, wanted one so bad. Parents were like no. Got a packard bell instead LOL
(9:47) From what I could tell watching a recent Nostalgia Mall video, the software isn't just what you mentioned, but it's the actual 'live TV' software for accessing the tuner and A/V inputs! There's supposed to be an OSD. The windowed view (shown at 10:03) would've been basically for watching TV while using another app like (as I imagine) mIRC or Netscape Navigator. If I recall correctly, it also handled DVD-Video playback. Considering that it was used in a school, the TV tuner was probably rarely used.
(11:11) "TV Data Adapter" was probably for WaveTop support.
(12:00) You're correct! The school I attended in the early 2010s had version 4 on their Windows XP systems, along with Graphmatica.
IIRC the tv data adapter was for tv guide data.
We had one in elementary school. It never got used and sat on a cart in the hallway along with the giant 32" monitor. I remember asking "Since when does Gateway make TVs?" lol.
man i'd love one of these. composite and NTSC video hardware just tickles my fancy. i would totally buy one, and swap the motherboard for a more modern one with a PCI slot to make use of the analog hardware.
Nnnnnff what a beautiful machine. Love the looks of older desktops.
Love these multimedia type machines from back in the day. They really tried to go all in and get a place in your home AV setup ))
nah it's an integrated analog tv tuner on the graphics card. of course you would want to watch tv on the destinationTV! according to the bios screen this is an intel mp440bx board with the legendary bx chipset, so this chonker can take a whopping 768 mb of ram.
such timing! I've been thinking about this setup recently. I had to get rid of mine when it was time to move. That 31" was a monster to mover around. Mostly used it for live TV viewing & gaming.
bro if i saw a algebra 1 test on my desktop i would chuck the whole operating system away 😂
Interesting looking computer. I had a look on eBay and there is a Pentium 2 variant with the Gateway 2000 logo on the front. They wanted $540 for it which is a bit much for me especially as I’d have to pay about a quarter of that on top to import it to the UK.
Looks like the ATI ALL in Wonder 128. I had several tuner cards over the years before analog TV was obsolete.
it's only obsolete because the FCC is gay
I've been looking for one of these with matching monitor. Let me know if you ever plan to let them go.
Finally someone did a video on this monster. I`ve had one in storage for Years a Pentium II Model. And it did come from Educational Institution as well. I have Monitor, Wireless Keyboard, Wireless Reciever, and the System. I don't have the remote. I could never get rid of it because it was so odd and unique. Glad to see yall made a video about it
If you ever want to sell it let me know.
One comment. Most DVD drives put out video that exceeded the capabilities of the system bus bandwidth to handle at the time. So extra cabling known as dongles were required to carry the video data directly to the video card, bypassing the system bus. The video card was specially designed for this input and this might account for the mysterious extra cabling that you described.
This would have been cutting edge stuff at the time. Shame you couldn't get the TV tuner working. Im surprised Aaron isnt minesweeper savvy! I spent days on that game!
Gosh i remember when gateway computers were everywhere.
Cowprint boxes 😸
that big monitor is perfect for sega dreamcast new pc for emulator
How noisy was it?
Seems like it was computers like this that were the reason Microsoft came out with the Windows Media Center edition of their OS.
That thing is just yuge! Man, what a system.
LoL that reminded me of SEGA Bass Fishing!
Rare! Finally a Gateway Destination plugged into as of Home Theater System back in the late 90’s to Early 2000’s.