Okay, here's a note that made my head hurt: When I pulled the CPU, I thought "huh, that sure doesn't SAY 1500 on it," but I assumed AMD was just using weird nomenclature. I've since been informed that it's a much higher end chip, and that the BIOS is simply _calling it by a completely incorrect name._ Unlike Intel boards which identify the chip by reading a string out of a ROM, AMD boards _guess the model number based on the speed, I guess?_ I'm now hearing stories about Athlon XPs being misdetected as Athlons. What on earth was AMD thinking? I've also been informed that the MS-5 was a common MSI chip that provided freq/temp monitoring.
@@henryokeeffe5835 If I remember correctly (I used to work in a computer store around this time, but memory is hazy) the "1500+" meant "This is as good as an Intel 1500 MHz system or more" because at the time AMD's IPC was waaaaay better than Intel's, so you'd get an Athlon at 900MHz outperforming an Intel CPU at 1500 MHz (or something like that, I don't remember the exact delta) I remember from the time that before AMD started using this nomenclature that quite a few customers wanted the Intel with the higher number. So it did work, as I recall. At any rate, I don't really have an answer to the "misidentified CPU" thing, I don't recall that happening at all. Perhaps that did happen but I don't think I've ever seen it. And I must've built dozens and dozens of PCs at the time.
@@hein-pietervanbraam3312 Two reasons I've seen for a misidentification like that: a) the BIOS version is older than the CPU, or b) the CPU is being underclocked for some reason
After some pixel peeping it says AXDA2100DUT3C which makes it a Athlon XP 2100+ which should run at 1733MHz. Specifically, it would be the 130nm Thoroughbred core variant (Wikipedia lists 5! different Athlon 2100+, and not at the same frequency). But with the BIOS misidentifying the CPU I wouldn't trust that it's running at the correct speed and multiplier! I guess it shouldn't be too hard to compare with what it should be from Wikipedia's list.
Hey, the next time you run into a "I have the software but not a serial" problem, recall that you know at least one hacker. I'd be happy to get you a serial!
It was really common for the "local mom and pop" computer store to buy bare bones systems in bulk, and finish building them and selling them in their shops, so that's likely where a lot of these were sold on to consumers.
Right, when he said "wait, VCRs don't show 0, a clock can't show 0" I was super confused as every VCR I've seen here (and oven, etc) does indeed flash 0:00 (tho one curiously shows 24:00)
@@kaitlyn__L Strangely have a microwave that resets to 12:00 but in 24 hour mode, like it wanted it to be midnight in the code but was also turning on 24 hour mode.
1:11:12 - That little MS-5 chip is a voltage and frequency monitor/controller, usually marketed as "MSI CoreCell". MSI wanted people to believe that it made their computers run quieter and longer. In reality, all it did was be an indecipherable blackbox that turns your PC into a pumpkin when it dies (which it did, often). MSI kept making and using chips like this (MS-6, MS-7) for a few more years before they gave up and admitted that the SuperIO chip that was already on the board does the same job perfectly well.
Do a Google Images for "CoreCell-Extreme chip you've ever needed" for a good laugh. They were so proud of it they plastered this nonsensical slogan on the boot splash of probably millions of motherboards. I own an MSI Pentium 4 (socket 478) motherboard with it, plus a bonus brushed metal MSI CoreCell-branded heatsink on top of the chip. Pretty sure it barely gets warm. My school's computer lab also all had that boot logo, and they were Core 2 machines. So they were really sure this was going to work for a good few years.
This really goes back to CRD mentioning the difficult spot of motherboard vendors are in where they are absolutely interchangeable middleman trying to provide more value than other brands
Well, to be fair, this was the beginning of the era where the BIOS had anything to do with fans at all. Until the Pentium II, it was almost always wired directly into the supply rails and had no tach monitoring. Starting with the P-II, and continuing through the P-III, you would at least get to see your fan speed, but most boards didn't have any control over them. The P4 and Athlon XP era finally brought some rudimentary fan speed control... sometimes. But that wasn't a given. So an in-house chip that had thermal monitoring, fan speed monitoring, and fan speed control made _some_ kind of sense, given the limited options of chipsets before that. They just all had the idea about the same time, which suggests that MSI might've held on to that project a little longer than they should, because sunk-cost fallacy.
@@nickwallette6201 My other comment here seems to have been absorbed by the Albert Gore Rithm, but I definitely saw this CoreCell thing on MSI boards from Pentium 4 to Core 2. I guess custom silicon will do that. Not cheap to design or get manufactured! I also have a Gigabyte Pentium II workstation/server board I’m pretty sure just has fan control in the Super IO though. Maybe those chips at the time were pricier than CoreCell worked out to per unit?
Schematics for the MS-6796 motherboard are out there, and while the Bluebird implementation is very similar to the Clevo, it still answers questions. The AC97 codec is indeed shared, through the H_ pins on the right side that the Clevo doesn't use. I2C port 1 is connected to SMBus (so it must be the control method) and port 2 to the tuner module (which runs on 8V), a small EEPROM and the front panel. USB and SD remain unused. There's an interrupt line going from the Bluebird to a GPIO on the nForce, and an SMI line from the front panel to the nForce for some reason.
Had a friend in the military that had one of these. He had the silver and brown one. He had a PlayStation for gaming and he was happy with that and he only used a computer to type up things he needed in the classes he was taking on the side. With the little space you have in the military barracks this worked great for him. It was a stereo about 80% of the time.
I bought the Intel version of this device on release, put in a 3 GHz Pentium 4 (Prescott) and was really happy, I replaced the fans with silent ones and had a cool little gaming cube. In the beginning I used a spare Geforce 2 MX and actually found out that the iGPU was faster than the Geforce. The FX5900 of a friend ran like a charm, I used long-term a Radeon 9600 256MB. It was one of the first barebone cubes which could handle dual-slot GPUs. I think it was my first PC with Wi-fi and an SATA connector. The Hi-Fi mode played MP3 like a charm and the dark-red color looked cool.
I wonder how many people, watch this channel and go shopping? I’ve looked, but haven’t bought. Could be an interesting way to clear a pallet of new-old stock, get CRD or LGR or someone to do a video. Of course that video could be months or years later, or never. Still…
Haha, I assumed (correctly) what that meant, but immediately wondered... "then what's controlling the drive?" I haven't looked at the IDE interface in enough detail, but I hope nothing else on that ribbon cable (HDD?) minds having signals present while the power rails are absent.
The behavior of the S-Video port would be consistent with the following issue: It's not reliably detecting that you connected something by S-Video. When you first booted it up you could see the dot-crawl from the chroma signal, so it was colour. In fact it probably was colour all the time. However when it appeared monochrome on the monitor, the PC sent a composite signal via the luma channel. When it appeared colour on the monitor, the PC sent the chroma correctly via the chroma channel. Combining S-Video into composite is not completely trivial, at least not if you want to do it correctly. (you can short it, but that's not a good way to do it) It could be that it came with a cable that connected the S-Video Luma signal to whatever composite video input the TV had, leaving the Chroma connection open. This is something that can be detected fairly easily on the output chip by putting on a small DC-voltage and measuring the current. If it's open it should not have any current, if it's connected it should be terminated by 75Ohm, causing some current to flow. Now it could be that you either didn't turn on the luma termination on your monitor or the monitor has a DC-blocking capacitor before the terminating resistor. That way the chroma termination wouldn't work reliably and it would switch to composite mode. BTW there's another one of those oddball combinations out there, and it's a PC/TV combination made by Siemens Nixdorf. I don't know the model number, but it was an all-in-one PC, I think a Pentium 133 MMX or something combined with a 15 inch TV. The TV was fairly fancy for that time, being stereo and it had a high resolution CRT for stunning images. It either took VGA from the PC or usual video inputs. The PC had a built-in TV tuner so you could also watch TV in a window.
@@CathodeRayDude I had a few svideo adapters and a few video cards that droped out in a bunch of modes that would kill color like this. There's supposed to be a key combo to manually flip this. This was setup to kill color in 80Colem mode so you could read the text better. Then Flip if the sync shifted so a grafix program could be colorfull. There should of been some options someplae keycombo or bios or jumper to set the mode yourself. The B/W mode is alot sharper and color kill with Svideo can make a giant bost in clarity. heck makes a big bost in composet to. As for the chroma channel being on or off i gots nothen. no reson for it to be cut compleatly just dont send no data down it Alltho that might explain a few buggy laptops i had when forcing monochrome on svid would desynk Any way to get more info on the idea behind that mode look up Apple Color Killer for the old ii //e and so on.
I think you're probably right -- it could be trying to detect S-Video via the chroma signal's termination and that's just not working for some reason. But I don't think it's because of a cap. It's really really common to have AC-coupled inputs and do your own DC clamping. I would also expect that 75R termination to be before the input coupling cap.
@@nickwallette6201 Well yes, but maybe the designers of the device expected the termination to be DC-coupled as that's probably a bit more common on consumer equipment. Of course the equipment itself is virtually always AC coupled.
Speaking of high-voltage capacitors, when I was in middle school in the mid-90's, disposable cameras with flashes were all the rage. If you took them apart, they had a nice 330V capacitor and you could make it charge up whenever you wanted. I had a lot of fun walking around with the flash from one of these cameras charged up and touching people with the capacitor. In particular on this trip to Florida with a bunch of kids from school to see the various NASA related sites in Florida, as well as Disney and Busch Gardens and Universal, was when I discovered this capacitor magic. Eventually, some of the other kids also figured this out and we ended up having a running stealth battle, shocking each other when we least expected it. First, you'd hear the whine of flash charger, and then you'd feel 330V on your arm. We also figured out that bridging the capacitor with a piece of mechanical pencil lead would make an explosion with a flash brighter than the actual flashbulb. It was great fun. Especially when we flew back home and I had my disassembled flash sitting on top of a six pack of Coke in my carryon. Fortunately for me, this was pre-9/11, so I just got searched and let go, but it was still a bit scary.
From radio? Mmm... I suspect not. People have been taping from the radio for decades, and if anyone were going to try and enforce a technical impediment, they wouldn't likely start with niche software solutions that 18 people own, and zero used in anger. I know we're all cynical these days, but don't ascribe to malice something adequately explained by incompetence. ;-)
The 5&12Vsb lines probably have their own ground because of how current loops work. The return current will flow back to the source along the shortest path available to it, if this path is large, it transmits quite a lot of EMI and can end up making charge differences weirder in unrelated but connected places. By including a ground wire right next to the voltage wire you give it the shortest possible current loop and preventing a lot of headaches. Chassis Ground, such as in cars, is one of the few places you see solo voltage wires, and I'm pretty sure cars are moving away from it as they become more computers, and in electronics using Chassis Ground is frowned upon, it's there for safety and EMI shielding, just like the ground on an electrical outlet, it's generally not good when current flows there.
Huh! That makes perfect sense, I guess I just didn't consider it because, well, everything *else* on the board shares a common ground through the ATX plug, right?
@@CathodeRayDude Yea but, that's also where everything else is getting it's power from, like you said the ATX plug doesn't have 12Vsb. the 5Vsb+ground does seem redundant, maybe they didn't want to have a two wire cable, like they had lots of 4 pin headers laying around or something. Or maybe that section of the motherboard is isolated and only gets power through this wire? Come to think of it, this is a custom power supply, this is a custom motherboard, why should allow for use with other equipment? Again probably "we had ATX sockets on hand" but that's never stopped Dell or HP
@@CathodeRayDude The ground is the same in the end, the point is keeping the distance between forward and return paths minimal. A sole grounding screw somewhere in the corner might be fine for direct current that sometimes is on, and sometimes is off, but the higher the frequency, the more important are actual transitions between states, and interference through which usable energy is wasted. Lonely power wire in the air is effectively a transmission tower for power oscillations for all the circuit city below (on the “ground”, right). And boards do have interconnected ground planes and extra return traces not just to decrease resistance, but also to make electromagnetic field spread as narrow as possible. Rick Hartley's presentations are a great introduction: th-cam.com/video/ySuUZEjARPY/w-d-xo.html It is also nice to see that experiments with momentary transients are popular: th-cam.com/video/2AXv49dDQJw/w-d-xo.html With high frequencies, everything is about transients, and unused traces or chip legs hanging in the air can really hurt.
Radio is controlled over I2C, as after all that communication method came from TV sets, where it was the Intermettal bus, used to control integrated TV sets, and later on as tuners went digital, the IM bus was used to control it, and this directly became I2C as it was expanded out into the PC world for low speed peripherals on the mainboard, as it is both robust and cheap, plus there are lots of software and firmware libraries for it for many processors, plus a whole lot of IC's that sport I2C bus as interface as well. In radios it is common, so that things like the front display, actual radio, CD player, tape deck are all controlled from a separate microcontroller, using only a 1 wire connection, and sub processors in each unit. Means various models can use the same basic blocks, and only use a small EEprom, again via I2C, to have setup bitmasks for features, and also that security coding that was so prelevant to have. Modern PC's use it for Vrm control, and for processor features as well, along with the things like temperature and voltages. Also used for getting memory data during initial boot, as the separately powered I2C chip can give all the details to set up voltage, speed, access type and termination, before the memory controller turns on the memory voltage controller, so it powers up with the correct parameters to make it work.
Nvidia nForce story: I owned exactly one of those which, on a new install, would corrupt all my downloads. ZIPs mostly back in those days. Of course I suspected some kind of virus infections first, then failing mass storage media. But no, it was the gamery ethernet drivers that came with the mainboard
I have one on a gigabit board from 2005 with AMD athlon 64 and it surprisingly still functions fine. This board has the bad capacitors too, they’ve been bulging for a decade but still seem to work.
I had a Siemens OEM PC with an Athlon 64 and a 32GB SSD as my first HTPC as a teen. The SATA controller was arse. It had an on-board "Ge-Force" graphics chip which crashed pretty often, so i had to install a low profile card, a real one.
@@LonelySpaceDetective and they amazingly still exist! They claim to have less jitter or better QOS for games. The results are usually worse than good old Intel Ethernets.
PAL-M and N are the weird ones: N is 50Hz but with the chroma sub carrier in a different frequency because the Americas use 6MHz TV channels. PAL-M is the really odd one: it's pretty much NTSC but using a PAL chroma sub carrier. A PAL-M signal will show perfectly but in black and white in NTSC-only TVs and vice versa. But most Brazilian made TVs (where PAL-M is used) from the 90s onwards are capable of NTSC and PAL-M and N (because they also are sold in Argentina and Chile).
@CantankerousDave As german engineer, i agree. We do all that DIN stuff almost all countries have as standard, but the japanese always make their own weird stuff, because their trust issues.
Even weirder thing is "PAL-Nc", even though it arguably isn't a thing at all. This term pops up here and there, but nobody seems to really know what it really is. It stands for "Combination N" but it just seems to be another name for PAL-N that stemmed from confusing wording in some CCIR/ITU documents. I'd be very curious to know whether the signal output by this thing differs in any way between the "PAL-N" and "PAL-Nc" settings.
@@CantankerousDave NTSC-J only differs from regular NTSC by not having a "pedestal", i.e. the black and blanking levels are the same, like in PAL but unlike regular NTSC. In practice, the only difference is that you need to set the brightness knob differently to properly calibrate a display for either standard.
I dug a little bit deeper about the PAL-Nc thing, and the datasheets for some composite video encoder chips (Crystal CS4954/CS4955, Sunplus SPCA711A, Global Unichip UECD-0001) suggest that "PAL-N" is a variant of PAL that uses the standard ~4.43 MHz chroma subcarrier, but *somehow* squeezes that signal into a 6 MHz channel and is used in Paraguay and Uruguay, while 'PAL-Nc" or "PAL-CN" (Combination N) is the Argentinian variant with the chroma subcarrier moved to ~3.58 MHz. Other sources don't confirm the existence of "PAL-N" as implied by those datasheets, and to my best knowledge, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay all used the variant with ~3.58 MHz chroma subcarrier. I guess the unclear wording in those CCIR/ITU documents made some chip vendors implement a standard that never existed 😅
Alright, 2 things I know about the MSI Mega Cache: 1: My grandfather had a few, from what I understand they were popular for mass data transit by couriers back in the day when sneaker was still faster than data. 2. They were also sold as accessories at GameStop for the Xbox 360 to transfer saves and other game data, which is how a lot of people from category one got their hands on them.
24:26 the fact that it loses time and presets is even more ridiculous given that it can literally be controlled by the PC. Seems like it could just write all that back on boot. Edit: oops, should have waited...
That was my hack, the internal fan was a custom part that cost more then I paid for the computer. Well, that and the fact that a sticker on the power supply clearly said that I am a liar.
A custom part? What made it custom? You rarely see a fan that isn't a totally ordinary frame size and thickness. I'm curious what made this one so special? (Or, like me, were you just unaware of where to source a fan that wasn't already on the shelf at CompUSA?)
If I remember correctly, what they call the Non-PnP drivers on NT based OS is just a service. Under DOS it would be just a resident program (like a sound or mouse driver). Radio app probably makes calls directly to the service running and that does some direct IRQ calls or something similarly low level and interfaces with devices without any other driver. This gives high compatibility across old OSs, but any failure can bring the whole OS down (see things like recent CrowdStrike Falcon that used a similar type of pseudo driver).
Interesting that you find the huge book with a few pages in each of many languages odd - in Europe that is super, super common for all sorts of devices. Guess North America is a big enough english language market that they don't bother doing that there.
It's extremely common here. What I was saying is that it's odd that it has the glossy look and heft of an actual user guide while actually just being a simple assembly pamphlet.
Hmmm that “radio module” at 59:49 looks a lot like the radio module on a similar vintage Panasonic front loading CD player / car radio that I took apart recently. Down to the shielding, it looks very very similar. Incidentally, the Panasonic still works perfectly as well. Just gave it a clean, lubricated the CD mechanism, new heat paste for the amp chip and it’s good for another couple of decades I’m sure.
The rolling effect you got with UT... is something that happened to me whenever a game tried to set a refresh rate that my old monitor couldn't handle. I'm guessing that the chip was trying its best to send a signal that would work on both a TV and the monitor CRT, got confused, and puked that out instead. The missing textures in FarCry and Doom 3 Demo happened to me with my own GeForce 4 MX 440 card, but in other games. I had a horrifying screenshot of a Sam and Max game where Max's face was mostly missing.
I'm not surprised at what appear to be top quality capacitors on that board. In 2004-2005 MSI, along with other Taiwanese board makers like Abit, were in midst of mostly losing lawsuits related to the capacitor plague era. So a number of manufacturers (but not all) switched to using only Japanese made caps for a while since it was Taiwanese made ones that failed like crazy.
Radio is probably controlled via I2C. Phillips developed this bus specifically for this purpose. And bluebird can probably talk and/or pass through I2C from south brigde.
Nerds living in places where electricity actually costs money do turn their PCs off. Here in Germany, most people would as everything else is too expensive. And with most homes being significantly smaller, you don't want the noise of the fans (and back then the spinning harddrives) at night. The only "somewhat" close thing I do is putting my laptop to suspend mode instead of turning it off. But that thing can stay in that state without being plugged in for a long time.
Part of why your BIOS is confused is that the processor was configured to run at a 100MHz front-side bus (not correct for that CPU), which is giving a 1300MHz effective clock with its 13x multiplier. This is nearly equal to the 1333 MHz stock speed of an Athlon XP 1500+ at its stock 133MHz x 10.0 multiplier, hence the guess by the motherboard that it's a 1500+. Based on the die shape, the processor you have there is definitely a Thoroughbred (not a Palomino like the 1500+, and not a later Barton which is longer) and with a 13x multiplier, it probably has to be a 2100+ (I didn't see a clear enough shot of the label to confirm, although it looked like 2100 on there). Running at its rated 133MHz front-side bus, you'd be getting just over 1.7GHz instead and you'd likely see a very noticeable performance uplift. Wouldn't surprise me if it would run at 166/333MHz bus too, possibly with a slight voltage bump. AMD seemingly had very limited processor ID information (basically just the overall generation/family) that was provided back to the host system at this point in time, so the boards were left somewhat guessing as to exactly which chip was installed. I'm not sure _why_ this was the case, but you got all sorts of wonky detections depending on the settings you used. The actual processor type was largely configured by a set of "golden bridges" on the CPU _package_ and the die itself was not meaningfully fused between models, so it was often possible to trick the board into thinking you had a different/better processor by cutting (or more commonly, reconnecting) those laser-cut bridges with graphite or conductive ink. I can confirm nForce2 chipsets were pretty decent for Athlon XP era chips, reasonable stock performance and good overclocking. Other miscellaneous notes: The RAM in that system is DDR400 (PC3200) but is running at 333MHz (as noted in the quickstart guide). This is presumably a base nForce2 rather than the refreshed nForce2 Ultra 400 that supported 200MHz front-side bus and DDR400 out of the box without overclocking, although most base nForce2 chipsets could hit 200/400 without much issue. Listed timings for those sticks are 2.5-3-3-7 and configured in BIOS is 2-3-3-7 (despite the lower speed they're being run at). If you didn't want to change the memory clocks, it wouldn't surprise me if it would run at 2-2-2-5 or so with that reduced clockspeed, which should provide a small performance boost. It would also be possible to boost the front-side bus to the correct 133/266 MHz for the installed processor while changing the memory ratio to maintain the board's rated DDR333, and you could combine this with tighter timings (which Athlon XP chips benefited quite a bit from) for optimum performance overall without any overclock. At this time, AMD sold and marketed a variety of "mobile" processors but they didn't _actually_ have any dedicated fabrication lines for mobile-specific chips, so "low-power" Athlon XP chips are just the regular desktop chips that run at lower voltage (and usually lower front-side bus with higher multipliers for additional power savings). Since the same desktop chips had to run stably at reduced voltage to work in mobile applications, these chips are often highly binned and were quite sought-after as they're typically very good quality silicon and will overclock quite well. Combined with the high multipliers (desirable when you wanted to achieve high clock speeds by boosting the front-side bus) these chips were excellent to use in desktop boards for maximum performance, especially because they often weren't sold at much of a premium (because they needed to fit into the tight profit margins of laptop OEMs). Also, as somebody who lived through this era, it very much stressed me out having you remove the processor heatsink _first_ and then proceed to do the rest of the disassembly with the bare die just flapping in the breeze while you slung the rest of the (pointy metal) components around. Nowadays the instinct is to leave the processor in the socket to protect the very delicate LGA socket, but I'd have immediately pulled the processor out and set it aside for a PGA-based bare-die unit like that.
You mentioned that this unit would be nice with an amplifier in it - I actually have a Class-D amplifier board that is designed to fit within a standard PCI slot - it is molex powered and can either be connected to the internal audio header on a mobo or with a 3.5mm audio jack, and then has 4 banana plug sockets for speaker output. As I recall, I purchased it from Aliexpress many years ago, but it appears to no longer be sold. Neat, unique little product, and not bad quality, considering.
With s-video I'm sure that people probably had a blast at the time, loading up emulators and running NES, SNES, PS1, and even early N64 emulation (like Ultra-HLE) on their TV. It's common today thanks to HDMI, but back then this would have been such a party PC for that sorta thing. Of course, it came out around the Wii and after the Xbox, so if you were savvy and home brewed them, those pretty capable for the same things. But still, cool stuff.
+5Vsb on a modern supply actually usually does supply a more decent amount of power. My Corsair HX750 supplies 3 amps on the vsb rail, which is good for me because I used it to power a PiKVM.
Tried to find the full "idling" track you're playing in the quick start series every time and surprised to see that it's nowhere to find! I would like to hear the full version somewhere!
"That is like two pounds of copper, I don't know how much that is in kilograms" Well, I don't know either. Let's see... Almost a kilo?! That is one hell of a heatsink.
5v and 3.3v were much more heavily loaded back then The mcp-t variant of the nforce 2 had real time hardware Dolby Digital encoding. Used it to generate a digital surround signal to feed my av receiver, along with component video out to a 1080i crt Procter TV
This is absolutely one of the coolest computers you've ever featured on this channel. Teenage me would have done some diabolical shit to get hands on this thing in 03'. God I want one of these now. Incredible video as always. Oh yeah, I once smashed the die of a Sempron processor by dropping the heatsink right on top of it. It was going into a computer I was upgrading for my mom’s boss back when I tried to run a custom computer business out of my bedroom. Wasn’t the biggest loss, but buying another CPU cut a nice $50 hole into my already thin margins.
I'm unclear if you burned your theme song to that CD you played in the intro, or just brought in the audio later -- but dang, that got a 'sensible chuckle' out of me. You're killing it w/these 'Little Guys'/''Quick Start' videos. Thank you for your service😆
Does Seattle really have an AM radio station that just so happens to serendipitously broadcast Foreigner's "I Wanna Know What Love Is?" at all your best recording times?
I remember this era well. We'd overclock by using car window defroster repair stuff you painted on some of the contacts on the top of the chip with a brush. A tiny amount would do. Chipped cores were almost required. It did not seem to affect performance at all unless it went right through the middle. Things are so much simpler now because of this era of computing. It is weird to go to a store and not really have to question if a mixture of parts will work or not, they mostly do now.
I remember working on one of these before, we put a DVD burner in it if I recall correctly, may have been a different model, but they were pretty basic... Once we actually put a Computer (Motherboard and all) into a Home HIFI system we made a Metal Case underneath with the MotherBoard inside so we could play MP3's - before MP3 was adopted as "The Standard" then we built one for my car, basically it was an Old Laptop board that we set up an MP3 Software Library that could be controlled by Hot Keys and we used a USB numpad to control it, so it would boot right into the MP3 Software (no monitor) and start playing to the Radio by hooking a FM modulator to the Audio Outputs... anyway, about 4 months later - Portable MP3 players were a thing - so it was cool for 4 months...
I love this machine. High end parts, Wifi, radio and a knob that *just turns the media sounds lower* instead of the whole PC. I mean, that's exactly what you want if you use it to play some music content next to your normal work. Would have bought it back in the day if 1. I had any money, 2. I had ever heard of it and 3. if I'd thought it would have been any good.
The company I worked for sold one of them on German Shopping TV to jump on the nascent HTPC train, but that was arguably a bit too early because it was still awkward. Might still have the video clip somewhere, but those were GREAT machines within their limitations. I still have the older (much blockier looking) Mega PC 400 somewhere as a Retro Gaming PC, pretty sure with an AMD Duron and Geforce MX 400 or something of that line.
>front SPDIF IN I remember seeing a radio in a thrift store that had SPDIF IN and AUX IN on the front panel which mentioned Mini-Disc, perhaps that's what it's for?
Interesting that is completely fascinating. I've seen a couple laptops where you could do direct city playing without intermediate never seen a small form factor I guess stereo receiver! That might be neat, Guess I'll have to Peru's my thrift stores.
I was going to guess USB HID, feels like it would have been less trouble and you wouldn't need a dedicated driver for that, but I guess they wanted to make it tricky.
Not gonna lie, I think this might be one of the coolest machines I've seen in years. This feels VERY targeted at the singular goal of making a teenager the coolest kid in school. from a time when "cool factor" was so important they could have easily half a$$ed it like those fake VU meters or non-functionally sleek curves. This is just brilliant though. Imagining how cool I'd feel with that sitting next to my 26 inch RCA tv that was so dark that any game that wasn't basically fullbright was unplayable. underneath a halo 2 poster. It may not have a VFD display but the one it does have seems to do the trick just fine. I wonder, From the picture showing the remote, I see what looks like a full number pad... I wonder if that offered direct channel tuning . And I also wonder, if since you can control the computer with the front panel buttons, if the remote would be able to control the PC in any way.
SPDIF in has to be for like looping your existing hifi in to that unit as a pass thru. The sort of folks who bought this likely had turntables and the such and despite the CD player functionality they wouldn't want to abandon the rest of their audio stack. Edit: Also, that thing is suprisingly clear through svid; I used to play f.e.a.r on my TV using my PC back in the day and despite feeling like the coolest kid on the block compared to my peers, it was still jank af and looked like trash.
Oh, the days when high-end GPUs drew sub-50W. Meanwhile, my 3080 draws 375W when under full load and watching this video while I have some work applications open is drawing 87W.
Ooh, DNA Lounge/jwz ftw! Cute little quickstart/little guy box too -- is the name meant to suggest that you see it and do a "Mega 180" and walk away? 😂😅 EDIT -- oh wow CoolEdit, that's a blast from the past.
Was just about to give a virtual high five for the DNA sticker, but I'm glad folks have beat me to it. I like the green sticker theme that's goin' on here. 👀
I find that awesome, personally. I use an old GE transistor radio, a bluetooth speaker if I get so bold, and I just got a new tv/monitor from Goodwill for %15 for the DVD player, mostly. Slap some Linux on that MSI and she'd hunt!
I wonder if maybe the colour was intentionally messed up in that way so you’d get black and white on initial boot up, in order to get a sharper luma signal in the text interface which doesn’t matter, only for it to go to colour when you launched a game and the resolution changed.
Around 26:30 you're wondering why the radio is recorded in such a low bit rate. I'm willing to bet it's to placate the recording industry who were very worried about digital recording at the time.
the Chieftec Mesh Pro Cube CI-02B-OP is also worth looking at, horizontal micro atx cases are kinda rare, and micro atx boards are usually cheaper than mini itx
On the topic of the Bluebird chip, many years ago I had an ancient Thinkpad that also offered CDROM playback when powered off - I used it regularly on road trips, since the battery could only give about an hour of Windows runtime but could play CDs for ages.
Man, I miss the days of Windows XP! This machine also has the same processor my second ever computer had, an AMD Athlon XP 1500+. Though, mine was overclocked from 1.33GHz to 1.5GHz. My next system I jumped into a (mostly) brand new 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 Prescott that I could not, and did not want to overclock.... And then that summer proved why I did not want to overclock the Prescott, the thing ran as hot as my first PC's 1GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird did. I "downgraded" to a 2.5GHz Northwood core Pentium 4, it ran MUCH cooler, and then blew my mind by overclocking to 3.45GHz with only a very minor voltage bump. Sorry for the tangent, just, I truly enjoyed this era of computers, it was when I got in to them lol.
16:16 WHAT!?! No SECAM? I guess those in France and Russia are not gaming on their TVs. I still SECAM should stand for System Exceptionally Contrary to Any [other] Method.
Soviet Union did not have game consoles. At least not ones that were widely adopted. My parents were from SSR Lithuania and there was no games console.
It looked to me like all your issues with 1024x768 were happening while the TV output was enabled - did you try disabling that? I wonder if there was something weird going on with the scaling/syncing to the TV output while games were running fullscreen.
Shuttle still makes PCs and from what I can tell they still are the ones OEMing them since I can't see any other PC with the same chassis, ofc I could be wrong but it seems that way.
I had the brushed aluminium version with the amber display here in the UK. I had to do a similar hack, shoehorning an amber fan against the side vents. It used to crash a fair bit, I think from overheating. It was fine afterwards 🙂
This thing was high on my want list when it came out. It was rare as and like the name suggests mega $$$ in our market (especially as a jobless teenager at the time). Crazy seeing it and now I want one again haha!
A very interesting video, though I couldn't help but feel sympathetic dread the entire time at the prospect of putting that thing back together after the video was over.
Okay, here's a note that made my head hurt: When I pulled the CPU, I thought "huh, that sure doesn't SAY 1500 on it," but I assumed AMD was just using weird nomenclature. I've since been informed that it's a much higher end chip, and that the BIOS is simply _calling it by a completely incorrect name._ Unlike Intel boards which identify the chip by reading a string out of a ROM, AMD boards _guess the model number based on the speed, I guess?_ I'm now hearing stories about Athlon XPs being misdetected as Athlons. What on earth was AMD thinking?
I've also been informed that the MS-5 was a common MSI chip that provided freq/temp monitoring.
Maybe that's what the + is for after the 1500 on the boot screen. The BIOS is like "well it's a 1500 or better".
@@henryokeeffe5835 If I remember correctly (I used to work in a computer store around this time, but memory is hazy) the "1500+" meant "This is as good as an Intel 1500 MHz system or more" because at the time AMD's IPC was waaaaay better than Intel's, so you'd get an Athlon at 900MHz outperforming an Intel CPU at 1500 MHz (or something like that, I don't remember the exact delta)
I remember from the time that before AMD started using this nomenclature that quite a few customers wanted the Intel with the higher number. So it did work, as I recall.
At any rate, I don't really have an answer to the "misidentified CPU" thing, I don't recall that happening at all. Perhaps that did happen but I don't think I've ever seen it. And I must've built dozens and dozens of PCs at the time.
@@hein-pietervanbraam3312 Two reasons I've seen for a misidentification like that: a) the BIOS version is older than the CPU, or b) the CPU is being underclocked for some reason
I recall having a desktop in that era where overclocking (or underclocking) the CPU would actually change what the BIOS thought it was.
After some pixel peeping it says AXDA2100DUT3C which makes it a Athlon XP 2100+ which should run at 1733MHz. Specifically, it would be the 130nm Thoroughbred core variant (Wikipedia lists 5! different Athlon 2100+, and not at the same frequency). But with the BIOS misidentifying the CPU I wouldn't trust that it's running at the correct speed and multiplier! I guess it shouldn't be too hard to compare with what it should be from Wikipedia's list.
Hey, the next time you run into a "I have the software but not a serial" problem, recall that you know at least one hacker. I'd be happy to get you a serial!
Can you imagine, it's 2003, you're playing Halo, and listening to Creed playing on the radio, both from your MSI mega. life will never be better.
It was really common for the "local mom and pop" computer store to buy bare bones systems in bulk, and finish building them and selling them in their shops, so that's likely where a lot of these were sold on to consumers.
That's a fair point, I often forget that market existed.
shoutout to the clock for insisting on the Objectively Better 24 hour format. always good to see an ally.
😂😅😂😂😂😂😂😅😅😅
Right, when he said "wait, VCRs don't show 0, a clock can't show 0" I was super confused as every VCR I've seen here (and oven, etc) does indeed flash 0:00 (tho one curiously shows 24:00)
Nooooooo, not 24 hour tiiiiiiiiiimeeee…. *fetches stakes and garlic*
@@kaitlyn__L Strangely have a microwave that resets to 12:00 but in 24 hour mode, like it wanted it to be midnight in the code but was also turning on 24 hour mode.
@@davidmcgill1000 12:00 is technically the correct time to set a clock (an analog clock) to when it's stopped
This is almost a little guy as well tbh
Crossover episode!
A Little Quick Guy, perhaps
it's so efficient 👍
Little Guys × Quick Start: Gaiden
yeah i got very confused when this episode started in a way other than i was expecting and then i went OH it's the OTHER gravis computers series okay
1:11:12 - That little MS-5 chip is a voltage and frequency monitor/controller, usually marketed as "MSI CoreCell". MSI wanted people to believe that it made their computers run quieter and longer. In reality, all it did was be an indecipherable blackbox that turns your PC into a pumpkin when it dies (which it did, often).
MSI kept making and using chips like this (MS-6, MS-7) for a few more years before they gave up and admitted that the SuperIO chip that was already on the board does the same job perfectly well.
@@TechLeftBehind wow, that's incredibly pointless! Thank you for identifying it, that makes me feel better about my functional theories
Do a Google Images for "CoreCell-Extreme chip you've ever needed" for a good laugh. They were so proud of it they plastered this nonsensical slogan on the boot splash of probably millions of motherboards. I own an MSI Pentium 4 (socket 478) motherboard with it, plus a bonus brushed metal MSI CoreCell-branded heatsink on top of the chip. Pretty sure it barely gets warm. My school's computer lab also all had that boot logo, and they were Core 2 machines. So they were really sure this was going to work for a good few years.
This really goes back to CRD mentioning the difficult spot of motherboard vendors are in where they are absolutely interchangeable middleman trying to provide more value than other brands
Well, to be fair, this was the beginning of the era where the BIOS had anything to do with fans at all. Until the Pentium II, it was almost always wired directly into the supply rails and had no tach monitoring. Starting with the P-II, and continuing through the P-III, you would at least get to see your fan speed, but most boards didn't have any control over them. The P4 and Athlon XP era finally brought some rudimentary fan speed control... sometimes. But that wasn't a given.
So an in-house chip that had thermal monitoring, fan speed monitoring, and fan speed control made _some_ kind of sense, given the limited options of chipsets before that. They just all had the idea about the same time, which suggests that MSI might've held on to that project a little longer than they should, because sunk-cost fallacy.
@@nickwallette6201 My other comment here seems to have been absorbed by the Albert Gore Rithm, but I definitely saw this CoreCell thing on MSI boards from Pentium 4 to Core 2. I guess custom silicon will do that. Not cheap to design or get manufactured! I also have a Gigabyte Pentium II workstation/server board I’m pretty sure just has fan control in the Super IO though. Maybe those chips at the time were pricier than CoreCell worked out to per unit?
Schematics for the MS-6796 motherboard are out there, and while the Bluebird implementation is very similar to the Clevo, it still answers questions. The AC97 codec is indeed shared, through the H_ pins on the right side that the Clevo doesn't use. I2C port 1 is connected to SMBus (so it must be the control method) and port 2 to the tuner module (which runs on 8V), a small EEPROM and the front panel. USB and SD remain unused. There's an interrupt line going from the Bluebird to a GPIO on the nForce, and an SMI line from the front panel to the nForce for some reason.
underrated comment fr, thank you for answering the last few questions I had about his!
Had a friend in the military that had one of these. He had the silver and brown one. He had a PlayStation for gaming and he was happy with that and he only used a computer to type up things he needed in the classes he was taking on the side. With the little space you have in the military barracks this worked great for him. It was a stereo about 80% of the time.
I bought the Intel version of this device on release, put in a 3 GHz Pentium 4 (Prescott) and was really happy, I replaced the fans with silent ones and had a cool little gaming cube. In the beginning I used a spare Geforce 2 MX and actually found out that the iGPU was faster than the Geforce. The FX5900 of a friend ran like a charm, I used long-term a Radeon 9600 256MB. It was one of the first barebone cubes which could handle dual-slot GPUs. I think it was my first PC with Wi-fi and an SATA connector. The Hi-Fi mode played MP3 like a charm and the dark-red color looked cool.
oh hell yes the quick start theme song
edit: There are a few of these up on ebay for decent prices. I DO NOT need another retro PC, and yettttt
Aaaaaand they’re gone.
I wonder how many people, watch this channel and go shopping? I’ve looked, but haven’t bought. Could be an interesting way to clear a pallet of new-old stock, get CRD or LGR or someone to do a video.
Of course that video could be months or years later, or never. Still…
During the teardown i saw those purple/brown molex wires and speedran the seven stages of grief. This whole video was a rollercoaster
Haha, I assumed (correctly) what that meant, but immediately wondered... "then what's controlling the drive?" I haven't looked at the IDE interface in enough detail, but I hope nothing else on that ribbon cable (HDD?) minds having signals present while the power rails are absent.
The behavior of the S-Video port would be consistent with the following issue: It's not reliably detecting that you connected something by S-Video.
When you first booted it up you could see the dot-crawl from the chroma signal, so it was colour. In fact it probably was colour all the time. However when it appeared monochrome on the monitor, the PC sent a composite signal via the luma channel. When it appeared colour on the monitor, the PC sent the chroma correctly via the chroma channel. Combining S-Video into composite is not completely trivial, at least not if you want to do it correctly. (you can short it, but that's not a good way to do it) It could be that it came with a cable that connected the S-Video Luma signal to whatever composite video input the TV had, leaving the Chroma connection open. This is something that can be detected fairly easily on the output chip by putting on a small DC-voltage and measuring the current. If it's open it should not have any current, if it's connected it should be terminated by 75Ohm, causing some current to flow.
Now it could be that you either didn't turn on the luma termination on your monitor or the monitor has a DC-blocking capacitor before the terminating resistor. That way the chroma termination wouldn't work reliably and it would switch to composite mode.
BTW there's another one of those oddball combinations out there, and it's a PC/TV combination made by Siemens Nixdorf. I don't know the model number, but it was an all-in-one PC, I think a Pentium 133 MMX or something combined with a 15 inch TV. The TV was fairly fancy for that time, being stereo and it had a high resolution CRT for stunning images. It either took VGA from the PC or usual video inputs. The PC had a built-in TV tuner so you could also watch TV in a window.
Oh man, you're right! That's a really good point and I could have figured it out if I'd used a composite adapter I bet.
@@CathodeRayDude I had a few svideo adapters and a few video cards that droped out in a bunch of modes that would kill color like this.
There's supposed to be a key combo to manually flip this.
This was setup to kill color in 80Colem mode so you could read the text better.
Then Flip if the sync shifted so a grafix program could be colorfull.
There should of been some options someplae keycombo or bios or jumper to set the mode yourself.
The B/W mode is alot sharper and color kill with Svideo can make a giant bost in clarity. heck makes a big bost in composet to.
As for the chroma channel being on or off i gots nothen. no reson for it to be cut compleatly just dont send no data down it
Alltho that might explain a few buggy laptops i had when forcing monochrome on svid would desynk
Any way to get more info on the idea behind that mode look up Apple Color Killer for the old ii //e and so on.
I think you're probably right -- it could be trying to detect S-Video via the chroma signal's termination and that's just not working for some reason. But I don't think it's because of a cap. It's really really common to have AC-coupled inputs and do your own DC clamping. I would also expect that 75R termination to be before the input coupling cap.
@@nickwallette6201 Well yes, but maybe the designers of the device expected the termination to be DC-coupled as that's probably a bit more common on consumer equipment. Of course the equipment itself is virtually always AC coupled.
Speaking of high-voltage capacitors, when I was in middle school in the mid-90's, disposable cameras with flashes were all the rage. If you took them apart, they had a nice 330V capacitor and you could make it charge up whenever you wanted. I had a lot of fun walking around with the flash from one of these cameras charged up and touching people with the capacitor. In particular on this trip to Florida with a bunch of kids from school to see the various NASA related sites in Florida, as well as Disney and Busch Gardens and Universal, was when I discovered this capacitor magic. Eventually, some of the other kids also figured this out and we ended up having a running stealth battle, shocking each other when we least expected it. First, you'd hear the whine of flash charger, and then you'd feel 330V on your arm. We also figured out that bridging the capacitor with a piece of mechanical pencil lead would make an explosion with a flash brighter than the actual flashbulb. It was great fun. Especially when we flew back home and I had my disassembled flash sitting on top of a six pack of Coke in my carryon. Fortunately for me, this was pre-9/11, so I just got searched and let go, but it was still a bit scary.
this sounds like u made a good portion of it up
@@ProtoMan0451 nope, all true
It's a reverse mullet: party in the front, business in the back.
Perhaps the bad recording quality was a deliberate "anti-piracy" measure?
it's the most plausible but sad explanation.
very efficient, it doubles as an "anti-usage" measure too!
@@joethemanager1they always do...
Very likely indeed, that stupid paranoia that never achieved anything but hatred from everyone inconvenienced by it (so... everyone)
From radio? Mmm... I suspect not. People have been taping from the radio for decades, and if anyone were going to try and enforce a technical impediment, they wouldn't likely start with niche software solutions that 18 people own, and zero used in anger.
I know we're all cynical these days, but don't ascribe to malice something adequately explained by incompetence. ;-)
The 5&12Vsb lines probably have their own ground because of how current loops work. The return current will flow back to the source along the shortest path available to it, if this path is large, it transmits quite a lot of EMI and can end up making charge differences weirder in unrelated but connected places. By including a ground wire right next to the voltage wire you give it the shortest possible current loop and preventing a lot of headaches. Chassis Ground, such as in cars, is one of the few places you see solo voltage wires, and I'm pretty sure cars are moving away from it as they become more computers, and in electronics using Chassis Ground is frowned upon, it's there for safety and EMI shielding, just like the ground on an electrical outlet, it's generally not good when current flows there.
Huh! That makes perfect sense, I guess I just didn't consider it because, well, everything *else* on the board shares a common ground through the ATX plug, right?
@@CathodeRayDude Yea but, that's also where everything else is getting it's power from, like you said the ATX plug doesn't have 12Vsb. the 5Vsb+ground does seem redundant, maybe they didn't want to have a two wire cable, like they had lots of 4 pin headers laying around or something. Or maybe that section of the motherboard is isolated and only gets power through this wire? Come to think of it, this is a custom power supply, this is a custom motherboard, why should allow for use with other equipment? Again probably "we had ATX sockets on hand" but that's never stopped Dell or HP
@@CathodeRayDude The ground is the same in the end, the point is keeping the distance between forward and return paths minimal. A sole grounding screw somewhere in the corner might be fine for direct current that sometimes is on, and sometimes is off, but the higher the frequency, the more important are actual transitions between states, and interference through which usable energy is wasted. Lonely power wire in the air is effectively a transmission tower for power oscillations for all the circuit city below (on the “ground”, right). And boards do have interconnected ground planes and extra return traces not just to decrease resistance, but also to make electromagnetic field spread as narrow as possible.
Rick Hartley's presentations are a great introduction:
th-cam.com/video/ySuUZEjARPY/w-d-xo.html
It is also nice to see that experiments with momentary transients are popular:
th-cam.com/video/2AXv49dDQJw/w-d-xo.html
With high frequencies, everything is about transients, and unused traces or chip legs hanging in the air can really hurt.
Radio is controlled over I2C, as after all that communication method came from TV sets, where it was the Intermettal bus, used to control integrated TV sets, and later on as tuners went digital, the IM bus was used to control it, and this directly became I2C as it was expanded out into the PC world for low speed peripherals on the mainboard, as it is both robust and cheap, plus there are lots of software and firmware libraries for it for many processors, plus a whole lot of IC's that sport I2C bus as interface as well. In radios it is common, so that things like the front display, actual radio, CD player, tape deck are all controlled from a separate microcontroller, using only a 1 wire connection, and sub processors in each unit. Means various models can use the same basic blocks, and only use a small EEprom, again via I2C, to have setup bitmasks for features, and also that security coding that was so prelevant to have.
Modern PC's use it for Vrm control, and for processor features as well, along with the things like temperature and voltages. Also used for getting memory data during initial boot, as the separately powered I2C chip can give all the details to set up voltage, speed, access type and termination, before the memory controller turns on the memory voltage controller, so it powers up with the correct parameters to make it work.
Ow my brain
i2c is also used for control of muxes and reading your monitor resolution (and if proper drivers are installed, controlling its backlight/brightness)
I2C is great! It's rare that I design a PCB without at least one I2C peripheral though these days I keep looking longingly at I3C.
@@oliverer3 inter- INTER- integrated circuit bus!?
@@gabotron94 Improved-inter-integrated circuit bus! :D
or "I cubed C"
Nvidia nForce story: I owned exactly one of those which, on a new install, would corrupt all my downloads. ZIPs mostly back in those days.
Of course I suspected some kind of virus infections first, then failing mass storage media. But no, it was the gamery ethernet drivers that came with the mainboard
I have one on a gigabit board from 2005 with AMD athlon 64 and it surprisingly still functions fine. This board has the bad capacitors too, they’ve been bulging for a decade but still seem to work.
I had a Siemens OEM PC with an Athlon 64 and a 32GB SSD as my first HTPC as a teen.
The SATA controller was arse. It had an on-board "Ge-Force" graphics chip which crashed pretty often, so i had to install a low profile card, a real one.
"gamer ethernet drivers" is an incredibly cursed set of words.
@@LonelySpaceDetective and they amazingly still exist! They claim to have less jitter or better QOS for games. The results are usually worse than good old Intel Ethernets.
PAL-M and N are the weird ones: N is 50Hz but with the chroma sub carrier in a different frequency because the Americas use 6MHz TV channels.
PAL-M is the really odd one: it's pretty much NTSC but using a PAL chroma sub carrier. A PAL-M signal will show perfectly but in black and white in NTSC-only TVs and vice versa. But most Brazilian made TVs (where PAL-M is used) from the 90s onwards are capable of NTSC and PAL-M and N (because they also are sold in Argentina and Chile).
There’s also NTSC-M and NTSC-M-J because Japan always has to be special.
@CantankerousDave
As german engineer, i agree. We do all that DIN stuff almost all countries have as standard, but the japanese always make their own weird stuff, because their trust issues.
Even weirder thing is "PAL-Nc", even though it arguably isn't a thing at all. This term pops up here and there, but nobody seems to really know what it really is. It stands for "Combination N" but it just seems to be another name for PAL-N that stemmed from confusing wording in some CCIR/ITU documents. I'd be very curious to know whether the signal output by this thing differs in any way between the "PAL-N" and "PAL-Nc" settings.
@@CantankerousDave NTSC-J only differs from regular NTSC by not having a "pedestal", i.e. the black and blanking levels are the same, like in PAL but unlike regular NTSC. In practice, the only difference is that you need to set the brightness knob differently to properly calibrate a display for either standard.
I dug a little bit deeper about the PAL-Nc thing, and the datasheets for some composite video encoder chips (Crystal CS4954/CS4955, Sunplus SPCA711A, Global Unichip UECD-0001) suggest that "PAL-N" is a variant of PAL that uses the standard ~4.43 MHz chroma subcarrier, but *somehow* squeezes that signal into a 6 MHz channel and is used in Paraguay and Uruguay, while 'PAL-Nc" or "PAL-CN" (Combination N) is the Argentinian variant with the chroma subcarrier moved to ~3.58 MHz.
Other sources don't confirm the existence of "PAL-N" as implied by those datasheets, and to my best knowledge, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay all used the variant with ~3.58 MHz chroma subcarrier. I guess the unclear wording in those CCIR/ITU documents made some chip vendors implement a standard that never existed 😅
Alright, 2 things I know about the MSI Mega Cache:
1: My grandfather had a few, from what I understand they were popular for mass data transit by couriers back in the day when sneaker was still faster than data.
2. They were also sold as accessories at GameStop for the Xbox 360 to transfer saves and other game data, which is how a lot of people from category one got their hands on them.
Sneaker is still faster than cable/wireless for large amounts of data, although that amount has increased since ye old days
24:26 the fact that it loses time and presets is even more ridiculous given that it can literally be controlled by the PC. Seems like it could just write all that back on boot. Edit: oops, should have waited...
Oops. Should have waited… 😂 been there.
SPDIF IN could be use for digital copying from devices like MiniDiscs because they didn't always have USB
It's technically a new Quick Start! Yay!
That was my hack, the internal fan was a custom part that cost more then I paid for the computer. Well, that and the fact that a sticker on the power supply clearly said that I am a liar.
Pin this guy
It was beautiful, you have contributed to a culture that nobody understands!
@@gtdgabriste1 I'm not sure if you're actually saying this was yours or if this is a joke, because I don't get the second sentence, heh.
"No user replacement parts inside"?
A custom part? What made it custom? You rarely see a fan that isn't a totally ordinary frame size and thickness. I'm curious what made this one so special? (Or, like me, were you just unaware of where to source a fan that wasn't already on the shelf at CompUSA?)
20 years ago I would be capable of murder for this device if I knew it existed. I love the concept so much.
It would be perfect as the garage pc / radio
If I remember correctly, what they call the Non-PnP drivers on NT based OS is just a service. Under DOS it would be just a resident program (like a sound or mouse driver). Radio app probably makes calls directly to the service running and that does some direct IRQ calls or something similarly low level and interfaces with devices without any other driver.
This gives high compatibility across old OSs, but any failure can bring the whole OS down (see things like recent CrowdStrike Falcon that used a similar type of pseudo driver).
Interesting that you find the huge book with a few pages in each of many languages odd - in Europe that is super, super common for all sorts of devices. Guess North America is a big enough english language market that they don't bother doing that there.
It's extremely common here. What I was saying is that it's odd that it has the glossy look and heft of an actual user guide while actually just being a simple assembly pamphlet.
@@CathodeRayDude That's also pretty common in Europe. Such a bait-and-switch. And I get baited every time.
@@CathodeRayDude ahh, that makes sense, that is a bit odd
previous owner hacks fan on the back, with circular metal cutout and power pass through
but still doesn't remove peel on front 🙃
well what if they wanna sell it later you kno'?
That bluebird chip is almost like having a raspberry pi baked in, really cool concept.
I love the "Being in trouble is a fake idea" - I had that as my Facebook blurb for a few years. Achewood FTW.
Hmmm that “radio module” at 59:49 looks a lot like the radio module on a similar vintage Panasonic front loading CD player / car radio that I took apart recently. Down to the shielding, it looks very very similar.
Incidentally, the Panasonic still works perfectly as well. Just gave it a clean, lubricated the CD mechanism, new heat paste for the amp chip and it’s good for another couple of decades I’m sure.
The rolling effect you got with UT... is something that happened to me whenever a game tried to set a refresh rate that my old monitor couldn't handle. I'm guessing that the chip was trying its best to send a signal that would work on both a TV and the monitor CRT, got confused, and puked that out instead.
The missing textures in FarCry and Doom 3 Demo happened to me with my own GeForce 4 MX 440 card, but in other games. I had a horrifying screenshot of a Sam and Max game where Max's face was mostly missing.
I'm not surprised at what appear to be top quality capacitors on that board. In 2004-2005 MSI, along with other Taiwanese board makers like Abit, were in midst of mostly losing lawsuits related to the capacitor plague era. So a number of manufacturers (but not all) switched to using only Japanese made caps for a while since it was Taiwanese made ones that failed like crazy.
Radio is probably controlled via I2C. Phillips developed this bus specifically for this purpose. And bluebird can probably talk and/or pass through I2C from south brigde.
Thanks! This was indeed a good video.
Nerds living in places where electricity actually costs money do turn their PCs off. Here in Germany, most people would as everything else is too expensive. And with most homes being significantly smaller, you don't want the noise of the fans (and back then the spinning harddrives) at night.
The only "somewhat" close thing I do is putting my laptop to suspend mode instead of turning it off. But that thing can stay in that state without being plugged in for a long time.
My gaming rig is impossible to hear from two meters when it's in idle. No spinning drives though. My two-drive NAS has, and I can't hear that either.
Part of why your BIOS is confused is that the processor was configured to run at a 100MHz front-side bus (not correct for that CPU), which is giving a 1300MHz effective clock with its 13x multiplier. This is nearly equal to the 1333 MHz stock speed of an Athlon XP 1500+ at its stock 133MHz x 10.0 multiplier, hence the guess by the motherboard that it's a 1500+.
Based on the die shape, the processor you have there is definitely a Thoroughbred (not a Palomino like the 1500+, and not a later Barton which is longer) and with a 13x multiplier, it probably has to be a 2100+ (I didn't see a clear enough shot of the label to confirm, although it looked like 2100 on there). Running at its rated 133MHz front-side bus, you'd be getting just over 1.7GHz instead and you'd likely see a very noticeable performance uplift. Wouldn't surprise me if it would run at 166/333MHz bus too, possibly with a slight voltage bump.
AMD seemingly had very limited processor ID information (basically just the overall generation/family) that was provided back to the host system at this point in time, so the boards were left somewhat guessing as to exactly which chip was installed. I'm not sure _why_ this was the case, but you got all sorts of wonky detections depending on the settings you used. The actual processor type was largely configured by a set of "golden bridges" on the CPU _package_ and the die itself was not meaningfully fused between models, so it was often possible to trick the board into thinking you had a different/better processor by cutting (or more commonly, reconnecting) those laser-cut bridges with graphite or conductive ink.
I can confirm nForce2 chipsets were pretty decent for Athlon XP era chips, reasonable stock performance and good overclocking.
Other miscellaneous notes:
The RAM in that system is DDR400 (PC3200) but is running at 333MHz (as noted in the quickstart guide). This is presumably a base nForce2 rather than the refreshed nForce2 Ultra 400 that supported 200MHz front-side bus and DDR400 out of the box without overclocking, although most base nForce2 chipsets could hit 200/400 without much issue.
Listed timings for those sticks are 2.5-3-3-7 and configured in BIOS is 2-3-3-7 (despite the lower speed they're being run at). If you didn't want to change the memory clocks, it wouldn't surprise me if it would run at 2-2-2-5 or so with that reduced clockspeed, which should provide a small performance boost. It would also be possible to boost the front-side bus to the correct 133/266 MHz for the installed processor while changing the memory ratio to maintain the board's rated DDR333, and you could combine this with tighter timings (which Athlon XP chips benefited quite a bit from) for optimum performance overall without any overclock.
At this time, AMD sold and marketed a variety of "mobile" processors but they didn't _actually_ have any dedicated fabrication lines for mobile-specific chips, so "low-power" Athlon XP chips are just the regular desktop chips that run at lower voltage (and usually lower front-side bus with higher multipliers for additional power savings). Since the same desktop chips had to run stably at reduced voltage to work in mobile applications, these chips are often highly binned and were quite sought-after as they're typically very good quality silicon and will overclock quite well. Combined with the high multipliers (desirable when you wanted to achieve high clock speeds by boosting the front-side bus) these chips were excellent to use in desktop boards for maximum performance, especially because they often weren't sold at much of a premium (because they needed to fit into the tight profit margins of laptop OEMs).
Also, as somebody who lived through this era, it very much stressed me out having you remove the processor heatsink _first_ and then proceed to do the rest of the disassembly with the bare die just flapping in the breeze while you slung the rest of the (pointy metal) components around. Nowadays the instinct is to leave the processor in the socket to protect the very delicate LGA socket, but I'd have immediately pulled the processor out and set it aside for a PGA-based bare-die unit like that.
The built in recorder is probably intentionally terrible because of intervention by the RIAA. "Home recording is killing music." and all that jazz.
You mentioned that this unit would be nice with an amplifier in it - I actually have a Class-D amplifier board that is designed to fit within a standard PCI slot - it is molex powered and can either be connected to the internal audio header on a mobo or with a 3.5mm audio jack, and then has 4 banana plug sockets for speaker output. As I recall, I purchased it from Aliexpress many years ago, but it appears to no longer be sold. Neat, unique little product, and not bad quality, considering.
With s-video I'm sure that people probably had a blast at the time, loading up emulators and running NES, SNES, PS1, and even early N64 emulation (like Ultra-HLE) on their TV.
It's common today thanks to HDMI, but back then this would have been such a party PC for that sorta thing. Of course, it came out around the Wii and after the Xbox, so if you were savvy and home brewed them, those pretty capable for the same things. But still, cool stuff.
+5Vsb on a modern supply actually usually does supply a more decent amount of power. My Corsair HX750 supplies 3 amps on the vsb rail, which is good for me because I used it to power a PiKVM.
The quick start music is my jam😂❤
You know.. this entire time… I thought this was Little Guys - I JUST read the title XD
It isn’t not a little guy…
@ It’s as little as some!
Tried to find the full "idling" track you're playing in the quick start series every time and surprised to see that it's nowhere to find! I would like to hear the full version somewhere!
Sounds like the lemmings audio
@@voltare2amstereo kind of, but no
That's a track he made with a midi all in one type setup he put together a while back.
My day gets better when I see a new video notification from you
"That is like two pounds of copper, I don't know how much that is in kilograms"
Well, I don't know either. Let's see...
Almost a kilo?! That is one hell of a heatsink.
This is my new favorite channel. Absolute gold.
5v and 3.3v were much more heavily loaded back then
The mcp-t variant of the nforce 2 had real time hardware Dolby Digital encoding. Used it to generate a digital surround signal to feed my av receiver, along with component video out to a 1080i crt Procter TV
It’s 24 hour because that’s the correct way to display digital time
I was legit like "as opposed to....?" wondering what he wanted to change it to.
This is absolutely one of the coolest computers you've ever featured on this channel. Teenage me would have done some diabolical shit to get hands on this thing in 03'. God I want one of these now. Incredible video as always.
Oh yeah, I once smashed the die of a Sempron processor by dropping the heatsink right on top of it. It was going into a computer I was upgrading for my mom’s boss back when I tried to run a custom computer business out of my bedroom. Wasn’t the biggest loss, but buying another CPU cut a nice $50 hole into my already thin margins.
The "M" is for Matsushita, which is Panasonic. Panasonic is indeed a top tier capacitor.
I'm unclear if you burned your theme song to that CD you played in the intro, or just brought in the audio later -- but dang, that got a 'sensible chuckle' out of me. You're killing it w/these 'Little Guys'/''Quick Start' videos. Thank you for your service😆
I had the silver one and that display was SO beautiful at night.
Thank you so much for taking that nightmare apart fully! It was great to have a look at that enigma board.
Does Seattle really have an AM radio station that just so happens to serendipitously broadcast Foreigner's "I Wanna Know What Love Is?" at all your best recording times?
Warm 106.9
FM
I wanna thank you, you make so detailed still so entertaining videos like noone else, I always cannot wait till the next one
I remember this era well. We'd overclock by using car window defroster repair stuff you painted on some of the contacts on the top of the chip with a brush. A tiny amount would do. Chipped cores were almost required. It did not seem to affect performance at all unless it went right through the middle. Things are so much simpler now because of this era of computing. It is weird to go to a store and not really have to question if a mixture of parts will work or not, they mostly do now.
I remember working on one of these before, we put a DVD burner in it if I recall correctly, may have been a different model, but they were pretty basic... Once we actually put a Computer (Motherboard and all) into a Home HIFI system we made a Metal Case underneath with the MotherBoard inside so we could play MP3's - before MP3 was adopted as "The Standard" then we built one for my car, basically it was an Old Laptop board that we set up an MP3 Software Library that could be controlled by Hot Keys and we used a USB numpad to control it, so it would boot right into the MP3 Software (no monitor) and start playing to the Radio by hooking a FM modulator to the Audio Outputs... anyway, about 4 months later - Portable MP3 players were a thing - so it was cool for 4 months...
I love this machine. High end parts, Wifi, radio and a knob that *just turns the media sounds lower* instead of the whole PC. I mean, that's exactly what you want if you use it to play some music content next to your normal work. Would have bought it back in the day if 1. I had any money, 2. I had ever heard of it and 3. if I'd thought it would have been any good.
This video made so many memories flood back. My Grandma had one of these im like 99% sure. That display is so fucking familiar! Great vid as always
0:20 Why does this song make me think of Homestar Runner EVERY time?
What IS the song, I want to play it in humours situations
Search it
I thought it was canyon midi or passport midi, but was wrong. Just listened to a bunch of windows midis and can’t find it 🤔
With that said, passport is a hilariously frenetic song for humorous purposes 😂
@@rhysbaker2595 apparently it's a CRD original and on previous occasions he's been very flattered by the comparison to Homestar Runner. Deservedly.
The company I worked for sold one of them on German Shopping TV to jump on the nascent HTPC train, but that was arguably a bit too early because it was still awkward. Might still have the video clip somewhere, but those were GREAT machines within their limitations. I still have the older (much blockier looking) Mega PC 400 somewhere as a Retro Gaming PC, pretty sure with an AMD Duron and Geforce MX 400 or something of that line.
>front SPDIF IN
I remember seeing a radio in a thrift store that had SPDIF IN and AUX IN on the front panel which mentioned Mini-Disc, perhaps that's what it's for?
Such an interesting video, especially toward the end
“I put them on my belt which was the style at the time…..”
Interesting that is completely fascinating. I've seen a couple laptops where you could do direct city playing without intermediate never seen a small form factor I guess stereo receiver! That might be neat, Guess I'll have to Peru's my thrift stores.
I made it to the end of one of your video's🥳
Great as always, thank you!
A guess on how the radio is connected to the rest of the PC: could be via the Super IO chip's I2C bus?
I was going to guess USB HID, feels like it would have been less trouble and you wouldn't need a dedicated driver for that, but I guess they wanted to make it tricky.
It's definitely connected to both the SuperIO and the Bluebird via I2C, there's really no other sensible option.
This guy made an hour + video about a computer with a radio in it. Basically a saint at this point
Not gonna lie, I think this might be one of the coolest machines I've seen in years. This feels VERY targeted at the singular goal of making a teenager the coolest kid in school. from a time when "cool factor" was so important they could have easily half a$$ed it like those fake VU meters or non-functionally sleek curves. This is just brilliant though.
Imagining how cool I'd feel with that sitting next to my 26 inch RCA tv that was so dark that any game that wasn't basically fullbright was unplayable. underneath a halo 2 poster. It may not have a VFD display but the one it does have seems to do the trick just fine.
I wonder, From the picture showing the remote, I see what looks like a full number pad... I wonder if that offered direct channel tuning . And I also wonder, if since you can control the computer with the front panel buttons, if the remote would be able to control the PC in any way.
SPDIF in has to be for like looping your existing hifi in to that unit as a pass thru. The sort of folks who bought this likely had turntables and the such and despite the CD player functionality they wouldn't want to abandon the rest of their audio stack. Edit: Also, that thing is suprisingly clear through svid; I used to play f.e.a.r on my TV using my PC back in the day and despite feeling like the coolest kid on the block compared to my peers, it was still jank af and looked like trash.
Ha all our VCRs flashed 00:00. It would never occur to me to have 12 hour mode on a device like this
I had one of these, it caught on fire, The Fujitsu Multitainer and Fujitsu ICL PCTV were the best pcs like this
Oh, the days when high-end GPUs drew sub-50W. Meanwhile, my 3080 draws 375W when under full load and watching this video while I have some work applications open is drawing 87W.
Which is why, despite of all the hatred for it, I'm going to spend cash on a 7600. Otherwise I need to buy a new modular and silent PSU :/
Ooh, DNA Lounge/jwz ftw!
Cute little quickstart/little guy box too -- is the name meant to suggest that you see it and do a "Mega 180" and walk away? 😂😅
EDIT -- oh wow CoolEdit, that's a blast from the past.
I was wondering how long the DNA sticker'd been there and my creeping senility had missed it.
Was just about to give a virtual high five for the DNA sticker, but I'm glad folks have beat me to it.
I like the green sticker theme that's goin' on here. 👀
@@BrightLightsTonight don't worry, you're not the only one who wondered "have I seen that before or is it new?" 🤔
I find that awesome, personally. I use an old GE transistor radio, a bluetooth speaker if I get so bold, and I just got a new tv/monitor from Goodwill for %15 for the DVD player, mostly. Slap some Linux on that MSI and she'd hunt!
I wonder if maybe the colour was intentionally messed up in that way so you’d get black and white on initial boot up, in order to get a sharper luma signal in the text interface which doesn’t matter, only for it to go to colour when you launched a game and the resolution changed.
Around 26:30 you're wondering why the radio is recorded in such a low bit rate. I'm willing to bet it's to placate the recording industry who were very worried about digital recording at the time.
waow I've never seen a shuttle pc in my life and i am now in love with the form factor
I can recommend the Silverstone SUGO cases, if you want to DIY build one
the Chieftec Mesh Pro Cube CI-02B-OP is also worth looking at, horizontal micro atx cases are kinda rare, and micro atx boards are usually cheaper than mini itx
On the topic of the Bluebird chip, many years ago I had an ancient Thinkpad that also offered CDROM playback when powered off - I used it regularly on road trips, since the battery could only give about an hour of Windows runtime but could play CDs for ages.
Man, I miss the days of Windows XP! This machine also has the same processor my second ever computer had, an AMD Athlon XP 1500+. Though, mine was overclocked from 1.33GHz to 1.5GHz. My next system I jumped into a (mostly) brand new 2.4GHz Intel Pentium 4 Prescott that I could not, and did not want to overclock.... And then that summer proved why I did not want to overclock the Prescott, the thing ran as hot as my first PC's 1GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird did. I "downgraded" to a 2.5GHz Northwood core Pentium 4, it ran MUCH cooler, and then blew my mind by overclocking to 3.45GHz with only a very minor voltage bump. Sorry for the tangent, just, I truly enjoyed this era of computers, it was when I got in to them lol.
OMG... THIS was the case, that brought me to the barebone/SSF and mediacenter PC scene ages ago... Never went back to full size ATX since then.
the amount of thermal compound looks like the perfect amount for then days standards , just enough to have the imperfections covered
0:33 ah, 106.9, the seattle metro area memories flood back to me
The quick start music is my jam😂❤
But I also want something like this in this form factor!
16:16 WHAT!?! No SECAM? I guess those in France and Russia are not gaming on their TVs. I still SECAM should stand for System Exceptionally Contrary to Any [other] Method.
Soviet Union did not have game consoles. At least not ones that were widely adopted. My parents were from SSR Lithuania and there was no games console.
@@hyperturbotechnomike not even a dendy??
It looked to me like all your issues with 1024x768 were happening while the TV output was enabled - did you try disabling that? I wonder if there was something weird going on with the scaling/syncing to the TV output while games were running fullscreen.
God I love how many videos you uploaded in the last year ❤
Embrace the 24 hour time like the rest of the world
I had one of those but i gave it to my dad many years ago. He still has it.
Shuttle still makes PCs and from what I can tell they still are the ones OEMing them since I can't see any other PC with the same chassis, ofc I could be wrong but it seems that way.
Silverstone makes almost identical clones of the Shuttle cases with their SUGO ITX series.
@@hyperturbotechnomike indeed in person I'd only ever seen Silverstones, never Shuttles.
The "Ball Bearing Fan w/ Noise Killer" sticker makes the custom hack job with the PSU fan even more ironic.
Oh man, that "noise killer" circuit always seems to be installed in PSUs that most badly need as much airflow as they can get.
14:26 "only enthusiasts ever build PCs from parts, and I've never met a nerd who ever turned their PC off.. so"
Lmaooo
I had the brushed aluminium version with the amber display here in the UK. I had to do a similar hack, shoehorning an amber fan against the side vents. It used to crash a fair bit, I think from overheating. It was fine afterwards 🙂
Cool video! Love niche electronics that solve problems people didn't even know they had, because they probably didn't have that specific problem lmao
This thing was high on my want list when it came out. It was rare as and like the name suggests mega $$$ in our market (especially as a jobless teenager at the time). Crazy seeing it and now I want one again haha!
Your bleeps for corrections are such a wonderful idea
A very interesting video, though I couldn't help but feel sympathetic dread the entire time at the prospect of putting that thing back together after the video was over.
26:43 - You saying “buh” was crazy to me because me and my friends have been saying that for years, as kind of an inside joke lol