That is a TIGA graphics card with a TMS340-Series GPU. Pretty high end CAD stuff. The standard TIGA-Software/Driver might work with it. TIGA was Texas Instruments attempt to offer a high performance standard for graphic workstations. Texas Instruments used the TIGA architecture to demonstrate the first 3D accelerated graphics card for the PC in 1987. The TMS340 GPU had to be programmed on startup. The program could be reuploaded by the current application to optimise the card for certain tasks. The TIGA-architecture was very flexible and expensive 😃 And Windows 3 has support for TIGA graphics. I successfully tried a 1280x1024 resolution. It was still very usable and not laggy at all.
TIGA was really far ahead of its time, with all sorts of 2D acceleration features you just couldn't find on the typical dumb framebuffers of the era. That's probably why it was selected for the first Amiga graphics expansion card as the OS came with a 2D accelerated graphics API from the start (albeit one that later suffered from not being easy to expand to raw color graphics modes).
Further looking seems to indicate that the support in MAME/MESS is a skeleton, mostly, added from references from bitsavers and possibly used by a few NeoGeo games. I've found, possibly, a few references that seem to indicate it was capable of VGA output, as well, but... Finding data is rather difficult. However... the main chip is the TMS34010 (as noted by others) - it was, apparently, the first programmable "Graphics Processor" - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010 - and that card uses the BT451 RAMDAC -- the BT451 is relatively easy to find references for, but it appears that MAME does not have the TMS34010 or the EX1280... I've done some other looking but can't find any more real data, outside a datasheet for the chip itself.
Is that essentially (electronically) the same board Hercules hawked as a the Hercules Graphics Station card back in the day? I think I vaguely lusted after this at some point, but all I really knew was that it "had its own CPU" and that it was $$$.
@@ropersonline From the data on Wikipedia about various Hercules Graphics Company products, it does not appear to be such. From the data I've been able to find, it does not appear that they ever produced a card based on the TMS34010 or its successor, the TMS34020
7:59 niiiiice. :) I'm for not unmodding it, I never care for changing a case on a computer or keycaps (I mean, they didn't look yellow when I was young), but mods like this have some real history.
Unless you have a need to switch it back, I'd leave it as is. It's not hurting anything, preserves the history of the card, and might give you more options should you ever need a card that doesn't sit on the standard IRQ/DMA.
I'd say MOD IT FURTHER ... add the ability to configure the dma and irq by setting a jumper ... there's plenty of room on the circuit board to add a tiny piece of prototyping board with some jumpers on it and you can route wires to your own mod board.
@@mariushmedias Oh, switchable address is pretty neat. I'm glad I can switch my sound card between IRQ5 and 7 pretty much in the time a restart takes. I've repaired hard drives with missing master/slave jumper connectors by simply attaching a set of standard 1/10'' pins and soldering in a cable to the pads. Should be possible with this card. I even have an idea of how to connect jumper pins or dip switches for DMA/IRQ change.
@@mariushmedias Or just drill holes through the blank part of the extension to add a pin header. He'll need to run bodge wires no matter where it goes, and this stands a chance of looking like the original mod. Or possibly better. I agree that the best answer is to mod the mod. The 16 bit connector should be able to dangle on XT motherboards and not do anything. Even on the small chance one of the contacts touches something, it's not connected to anything else -- except the IRQ10 line, but that should only go as far as the jumper block being added. If used on a 16-bit ISA machine, I'd want to use a 16 bit slot anyhow just for mechanical strength.
That's one nasty mod. Don't remove it. Save it as it is. Cheap 8 bit controller modded to 16 bit. Could be super early attempt to provide an AT controller. Original board looks to be Taiwanese and the mod board looks to be USA.
I would keep the weird mod. It is part of the history of this card. I take the "museum approach" to vintage tech: unless it is broken or there is risk of further damage, minimal changes should be done. That is also why I don't retrobrite.
The CompatiCard I was designed as a replacement for the stock IBM floppy controller in the original 5150 and 5160 machines. The card included a diskette with drivers in order to use it. I've got the disk & docs for that card if you need them (and they're not online already). Their other card, the CompatiCard IV has a ROM on it and will work in pretty much any machine with an ISA bus. I'm currently using one in a new-build imaging machine that's got a Pentium MMX in it. The CompatiCard I and IV are desirable for imaging because they will both correctly read & write single density tracks. This is an important feature when imaging older, non-IBM PC diskettes.
I expect it's an ideal card to use with 22-DISK. I lucked out many years ago that the freeware version of that supported the Xerox 820-II format, and I had an old ISA floppy controller I'd modded to support single density.
The Compaq Deskpro 486/25 these two cards came out of was released at the tail end of 1989 (it does have basic VGA built into the system board - 640x480 @ 16 colors). The system was chock full of cards, sadly all ISA (since this was the first EISA system Compaq released). Sophis had it outfitted with two 3.5"/1.44MB floppy drives (one connected to the card I sent you) and one 5.25"/1.2MB (all OE Compaq drives) as well as a 16-bit ESDI controller with the original ~320MB 1/2 height 5.25 ESDI drive (still works with no bad sectors!). The system alone (with just 4MB/RAM, one floppy drive and the ESDI drive/controller had a price tag of nearly around $17,500 in 1989 (almost $39k in 2021)!! Depending on hard drives and other options they ranged from $14k to $20.5k - $31k to $45k in 2021 dollars!!!). And that is all before it received another 8MB of RAM, and had the Vectrix card/additional floppy drives/controller/other I/O cards installed! The system had some very vintage version of Unix on it and upon startup it was trying to receive a response from something (presumably plugged into one of the I/O cards) and kept failing and wouldn't go any further. Not that there was probably anything confidential on the system, but I opted to wipe the drive as I was more interested in the first EISA system Compaq brought to market rather than what it did in its prior life.
Almost certainly this was either an EDA system for board design and schematic capture, or even IC design, or it had a vertical format monitor and was used for publishing. Given that it was a Vectrix card I'm opting for an EDA system. It was probably looking for either a license dongle or a fancy mouse/trackball with a lot of buttons.
Returning the floppy controller to stock would go against what some of us in the retro/vintage computer community are here for: preserve history. By undoing the mod, you would be committing heresy. You wanted opinions, Adrian, so you got mine here. By the way please check your email. I sent you a message a few days ago...
@@Okurka. Shielding is usually more of a hassle than it's worth, and if you really want to, you can always order a press cut piece of steel to replace it. Also afaik most of the shields he did throw out were already rusted, thus a risk to the machine.
@@Okurka. That's literally what electronics shielding is. A press cut piece of sheetmetal. And that's why it tends to rust and put the rest of the machine in danger when the rusted off pieces of it start rattling inside the box. If you know the exact thickness and layout of the shielding, ordering it freshly cut and replacing it is the same as restoring a historic piece of machinery, since the part is made to be of equal spec as the original. If you wanna continue using a shield that's falling apart and might short your board, by all means, do, but don't complain if it starts having issues.
Another vote for leaving the floppy card as-is. If you DO decide to un-modify it, then at least install the modded card in a system with another normal card, just to test how well it actually functioned before you undo the mods.
Be nice to see that video card back in action again. Back in the late 80s I got to use an AutoCAD system with something like this with a huge 21" monitor. It also had a Hercules card and a monochrome monitor as the main PC/DOS display. AutoCAD uses that for all the menus and commands. The big screen was just for rendering the drawing. It was a pretty neat set up and very easy to use.
Why would you want to convert back that floppy controller card? Do you really need another one? Or is it difficult to use it in this state? It looks like a relic now.
I'd say leave the modded card as it is, as it was done for a reason, whether sold that way I don't know, but it makes it different and unusual to what is the norm... :) And as an aside, it's a Micro Solutions product, the creators of the "Backpack" series of external drives, of which I have one, a parallel CD-ROM with built-in sound, which is neat... :D
How does the videos being split out over 2 channels help that? I don't get why 2 channels help, I guess it's a thing where it helps due to TH-cam's crappy algorhithm because it sure doesn't make any logical sense.
Regarding all the seeming unnecessary soldering to the ground pins on that floppy controller card, my guess would be that it's for mechanical stability for the extension piece, and not for the actual ground connection itself.
It actually only handles 2 floppy drives. But because of the mods that move the IRQ, DMA, and suchlike, it will work in conjunction with a standard floppy controller that controls the standard 2 drives, for a total of 4 drives. If he pulls the mods off, all he will have is a hacked up and useless standard floppy controller that WILL NOT allow four drives.
Yeah sadly nothing really properly supports 4 floppies ..... (DOS, Windows, etc.) There are ways with drivers to do it -- but I found the floppy preservation tools like IMD don't support anything more than 2 floppies anyway.
Adrian, you don't know how interesting this all is. I was pretty good at setting up computers and resolving problems but I didn't know jack shizz about how all those chips worked :) I am learning tons! I always wanted to learn digital electronics but never got around to studying it. You make me want to get some books and learn!
Oooh! Fresh video! I hope you're keeping tabs on your Twitter account, Adrian. Tweeted photos (and a Thiniverse link!) for a dead parts bin I was going to send to you, but so many other people beat me to the punch I decided to just keep it.
I remember selling computers for autocad use, and the video cards were absolutely massive. The ones we sold a lot of had 4 BNC connectors on the back for analog RGB and sync. So not only did you have to buy a video card that was as expensive as the entire XT or AT, then you had to but the custom monitor that could use that video output. So, for a microcomputer for professional cad use was super expensive. But it was better than having to own a mini or mainframe to do CAD.
Keep the modded floppy controller as-is, you can always change it later if necessary. At work back in the day, I inherited custody of my old department's IBM PC/AT. It was spec'd out as a "workstation", with the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter and matching required PGA monitor, which cost thousands of dollars at the time. Someone had needed to run Oracle 5.x for DOS on it, so we bought a 128K RAM card to add to the 512K piggyback mainboard RAM, and I actually had both a 20MB _and_ 30MB full height 5.25-inch hard drives along with the 1.2MB floppy. We had a DEC Ethernet card (AUI port) and ran DECnet-DOS on it. Oh, and I'd swapped the crystal to speed it up from 6 MHz to 8 MHz clock. Eventually newer machines took its place, but I kept it around for the infrequent tasks that only it could do. The second time the PGA card or monitor died, the repair tech took my advice and swapped them out for something supportable, an EGA or original VGA. I eventually had to give it up due to lack of space in my office cubicle. ( _Good bye, old friend!_ )
The "Professional Graphics Adapter" is actually called the "Professional Graphics Controller". IBM's reasoning behind this is that the PGC does not just adapt the computer to the high resolution display, the PGC is actually a full blown 8088 system on a card. It will execute graphics routines independently of the main CPU, therefore making it a graphics "controller".
I bought my first VGA card, a ATI VGA Wonder in later 1989 or earlier 1990 as a college sophomore. I had to special order it and it took forever to come in. My girlfriend at the time completely didn't understand why I would be spending so much money on a computer part. That was an amazing video card for the time.
I may still have an example of NEC's first Multi-Sync monitor. It doesn't even have a model number, it's just NEC Multi-Sync. It supports TTL mono and color modes, VGA and SVGA. It even has a built in cooling fan. When I quit using it, the CRT had become extremely dim so it'd need a transplant to get working, and turn down the flyback control so it wouldn't fry the replacement. The electron gun and/or phosphors are pretty much dead. Would cost a small fortune to ship. It would look very nice in the Digital Basement, very space saving when it can be used with MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA systems. Don't know if it can support "Super EGA" resolutions. Long ago I had a Western Digital 286 motherboard, one of the first boards with integrated I/O and video. The video supported up to 800x600 16 color on a TTL monitor but try finding a monitor that can do that. Every bit of the built in stuff could be disabled except for the video, so there was no way to get anything but an MDA card to work in one of the ISA slots due to the built in video using the resources a VGA card required. So that board went buh-bye when I got my first VGA card.
I had a PC that had a superVGA card and a Hercules monochrome card. I did CAD on that. The Hercules output was very crisp and I used it to drive a good quality orange phosphor monitor.
Adrian, The question that seems most appropriate is whether or not the utility of the mod out weighs the functionality that would be gained from from undoing it. Of course, if you're careful, document everything and save the parts you can always redo the mod later.
That's really interesting. Someone was saying that much of the software that could work with that card might include drivers. Looks like Adrian might just need 3.1 and some period-appropriate drawing/CAD software package.
If I had to guess, I'd imagine that that modded floppy controller was used to drive an external floppy interface tape drive. There is probably some benefit (interrupt priority possibly) by placing it on one of the 16 bit buss IRQs/etc. Probably to improve streaming and reduce shoe-shining the tape.
If anything you should mod the card even more. Add a selector switch to toggle between the old and the new lines. I'm tempted to say it shouldn't be very difficult... but that rarely turns out to be a smart thing to say. ;)
That vetrix video card reminds me of my 1989 nubus card with 4 megs of ram, it is really powerful for vector based software. It has it's own monitor too. I think the card was about $20,000 in 1989 and only $10,000 for the 1991 or 1992 model. I have it in a beast of a Mac II ci.
I used to have a Mac IIci with 128 megs RAM and a 60 Mhz Daystar PPC601 upgrade. A curious thing about it was it could be forced into 24 bit address mode running Mac OS 7.6. Do a PRAM zap and a 24-32 bit switch would appear on the memory control panel. Flip that, reboot, and the switch would vanish. I never tried running any software that required 24 bit mode. I just wanted to get back to using the PPC CPU. Apple's own 601 upgrade control panel could *disable* the Daystar 601 but could not *enable* it.
@@greggv8 that is pretty curious. I run os 6.x and apple unix, those work great out of the box. I have another drive with 7.x too 🤣. I love my diagnostic card too as it gives the iici red blinking lights, which as a vintage pc it needs.
@@hicknopunk I just thought it odd that Mac OS 7.6 that supposedly had no 24 bit mode support could apparently be forced into it, on a fully 32 bit Mac. It would be interesting to see someone try it and when/if the memory control panel gets the 24-32 bit switch, check About this Mac, run software that reports on the memory, and try running software that requires 24 bit mode.
Unless you are in desperate need of an extra floppy controller, leave it as is. It would be interesting to put it in a machine with another normal floppy controller to ensure they don't conflict with one another, then try to find disk copy software that can work multiple drives at once. I would expect it was probably used in some sort of disk duplicator system.
The card (the hacked one) looks like its for the expansion unit for the ibm xt. It was a second case with expansion drives. Maybe this card was designed to talk to the original ibm floppy controller. So you could make your own.
huh, I have a similar cardset from Everexx which uses the TMS34020 and has 2 daugher cards and 2 companion ISA boards. The accelerator itself has no actual monitor hookup on the back but does have a db9 connector for a light pen. It has what it calls a Logic expansion daughter board and then a Pallet expansion daughter board, then 2 fat ribbon cables that connect out, one cable directly to a host a VGA host card which has two RGB outputs on it and is also full length, and the second cable daisy chains it and another card which acts as a frame grabber. Then there is a 3rd fat ribbon cable that goes directly from the VGA host to the frame grabber board directly. And the VGA host also has a daughter card that acts as some sort of motion jpeg accelerator but I have never gotten that part to work. It supposedly allows for both full motion video capture and playback. The entire cardset is from 1988 and uses up 4 total slots due to one of the daughter cards on the VGA host being a tandem. All 3 peices are full length and crammed full. I have counted a total of about 8.75mb of ram on the whole works. And best I can peg it at, was a price of about $22,000 as an option in the deskside workstation it came in.
On the video card: I did some research to refresh my memory, but I believe this card would likely be used with AutoCAD (or possibly other CAD) running in DOS. AutoCAD didn’t go to Windows for a while and I think only after Windows NT.
The sticker on the ‘floppy controller’ reads ‘SOPHIS SYSTEMS N.V.’ which happens to be a now defunct company (I can see activity until 2013) in my home town of Wevelgem, Belgium. They were active in the CAD/CAM industry for the textile market. Perhaps this ‘floppy controller’ was modified to interface with something else? I will see if I can get in touch with some former employees for more information. Hang on…
Very interesting! As I noted above, the floppy controller (at least internally) was connected to a 3rd floppy drive, although I have no way of knowing if anything was plugged into the external connector. The system these came out of was littered with Sophis stickers; each component inside the Compaq had somewhat sequential Sophis serial number stickers applied to the cards, drives, just about anything they could have applied a sticker to (most of them were sitting on the system board/in the bottom of the chassis as the adhesive had let go). Hopefully you can shed some more light on what a system like this would have specifically been used for!
the top row of RAM looks like it could be earlier Dual Ported RAM -> VRAM which could read/write at the same time. Its not common though S3 911 chips used it for example.
That Vextrix card looks like a real monster of a graphics card, especially for 1989. Whenever I see a card like that with multiple expansion points I always start wondering what it would be like with all the add-ons and how it would enhance its performance. As far as un-modding the floppy controller goes, I am pretty ambivalent about it. On one hand it does tell a bit of a story about how someone might get things modified to work with extra devices but on the other hand I can see that card being a lot more useful in a period correct machine when taken back to stock. Frankly, those mods look terrible and I suspect it wouldn't be very far out of the realms of possibility for them to make using the card problematic.
@@Okurka. ?? Multi Arcade Machine Emulator? I knew modern day Arcade games are just glorified PC's, but that's a whole different program to run them on regular computers. Older arcade games were their own standalone systems as far as I know. Some games used the same hardware internally so game boards could be switch around into different cabinets, but I dont thing most stuff MAME Emulates would really be called a PC.
Personally I'm mostly a hard no to trying to return interesting mods to old computers to stock. Any decent antique dealer will tell you it's the patina that counts, and beyond that if a machine has been modified that modification tells you a specific story about how that item was used. Undo it and you'll just have a beat-up 4-drive floppy controller (which, really, who actually *needs* that?) with a notch cut out of the PCB. It's more... interesting, the way it is, certainly. But it is just a floppy controller so... *shrug*. If it brings you more joy to axe the 16 bit extender by all means go for it. I would probably check the manual to see if the card edge and internal pin connector are just wired in parallel, though, you may not actually get any functionality out of removing it that you won't get from just using the external connector. (If you really need it running at standard IRQ and DMA that could be undone/made switchable easily enough.)
I want to see that special floppy controller in action. Why would you want to turn it into a boring beaten up standard controller of which houndred thousends exists? I come for the interesting special stuff, not the boring standard stuff.
Hmmm everyone here wants to leave the controller as is, but here’s my take: if you can’t use it as is, change it if you have a machine that needs it. A part on a shelf is a sad part.
I seem to be in the minority being OK with you undoing the IRQ and DMA swaps on the card, but whatever you do, please DON'T remove the expansion board. Keeping it attached preserves its history and lets you easily reapply the modification.
![Adrian's Digital Basement ][](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_k7CrQRe71qN6c0Ua7A1P_I8KkxjqLa70u0zYeCvdvnKw=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
The consensus is to leave the floppy controller as it, which I will do. Thanks for all the feedback!
Don't listen to people on the Internet. Go with your first impression. Which is coincidentally what I thought. Unbodge that card!
@@1pcfred so, destroy a unique piece of retro equipment?
@@kaliban4758 I'd say it was destroyed when he got it.
wikipedia doesn't actually mention the ex-1280 board.
Voting to NOT un-mod the floppy controller. It's a piece of history and should be left as is.
100% agree. It's entirely possible that it may be the only one in existence.
100% agree, and also, never know if that would work better in some situations.
Exactly, its unique and a rare solution for it, in fact so interesting that it made its own video.
Why change it... no one will ever see it again this way if unmod'd
why un-mod it unless you actually need that type of floppy controller ? Leave it as it already is
I vote to leave the floppy controller as is. It is a rare piece of history. Save it for the future.
I wonder if it was used in a disc duplicator.
That is a TIGA graphics card with a TMS340-Series GPU. Pretty high end CAD stuff. The standard TIGA-Software/Driver might work with it. TIGA was Texas Instruments attempt to offer a high performance standard for graphic workstations. Texas Instruments used the TIGA architecture to demonstrate the first 3D accelerated graphics card for the PC in 1987. The TMS340 GPU had to be programmed on startup. The program could be reuploaded by the current application to optimise the card for certain tasks. The TIGA-architecture was very flexible and expensive 😃
And Windows 3 has support for TIGA graphics. I successfully tried a 1280x1024 resolution. It was still very usable and not laggy at all.
TIGA was really far ahead of its time, with all sorts of 2D acceleration features you just couldn't find on the typical dumb framebuffers of the era. That's probably why it was selected for the first Amiga graphics expansion card as the OS came with a 2D accelerated graphics API from the start (albeit one that later suffered from not being easy to expand to raw color graphics modes).
Further looking seems to indicate that the support in MAME/MESS is a skeleton, mostly, added from references from bitsavers and possibly used by a few NeoGeo games. I've found, possibly, a few references that seem to indicate it was capable of VGA output, as well, but... Finding data is rather difficult.
However... the main chip is the TMS34010 (as noted by others) - it was, apparently, the first programmable "Graphics Processor" - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010 - and that card uses the BT451 RAMDAC -- the BT451 is relatively easy to find references for, but it appears that MAME does not have the TMS34010 or the EX1280...
I've done some other looking but can't find any more real data, outside a datasheet for the chip itself.
Is that essentially (electronically) the same board Hercules hawked as a the Hercules Graphics Station card back in the day?
I think I vaguely lusted after this at some point, but all I really knew was that it "had its own CPU" and that it was $$$.
@@ropersonline From the data on Wikipedia about various Hercules Graphics Company products, it does not appear to be such. From the data I've been able to find, it does not appear that they ever produced a card based on the TMS34010 or its successor, the TMS34020
@@DShadowWolf WinUAE has an emulation of the TMS34010 in its implementation of the A2410 video card.
7:59 niiiiice. :) I'm for not unmodding it, I never care for changing a case on a computer or keycaps (I mean, they didn't look yellow when I was young), but mods like this have some real history.
Unless you have a need to switch it back, I'd leave it as is. It's not hurting anything, preserves the history of the card, and might give you more options should you ever need a card that doesn't sit on the standard IRQ/DMA.
I'd say MOD IT FURTHER ... add the ability to configure the dma and irq by setting a jumper ... there's plenty of room on the circuit board to add a tiny piece of prototyping board with some jumpers on it and you can route wires to your own mod board.
@@mariushmedias Oh, switchable address is pretty neat. I'm glad I can switch my sound card between IRQ5 and 7 pretty much in the time a restart takes.
I've repaired hard drives with missing master/slave jumper connectors by simply attaching a set of standard 1/10'' pins and soldering in a cable to the pads. Should be possible with this card. I even have an idea of how to connect jumper pins or dip switches for DMA/IRQ change.
@@mariushmedias Or just drill holes through the blank part of the extension to add a pin header. He'll need to run bodge wires no matter where it goes, and this stands a chance of looking like the original mod. Or possibly better. I agree that the best answer is to mod the mod. The 16 bit connector should be able to dangle on XT motherboards and not do anything. Even on the small chance one of the contacts touches something, it's not connected to anything else -- except the IRQ10 line, but that should only go as far as the jumper block being added. If used on a 16-bit ISA machine, I'd want to use a 16 bit slot anyhow just for mechanical strength.
@@mariushmedias You know... that's not a bad idea.
The old IRQ hack! First time I’ve seen it used on a 16 bit IRQ. Mostly it was for multiple modems.
That's one nasty mod. Don't remove it. Save it as it is. Cheap 8 bit controller modded to 16 bit. Could be super early attempt to provide an AT controller. Original board looks to be Taiwanese and the mod board looks to be USA.
I would keep the weird mod. It is part of the history of this card. I take the "museum approach" to vintage tech: unless it is broken or there is risk of further damage, minimal changes should be done. That is also why I don't retrobrite.
Don't reverse the mod. You have a rare card that can add extra controller and more drives.
would windows/dos see it as a 3rd diskette drive, which letter would it get ?
@@jyvben1520 Last system I had with 4 Disk drives, it assigned the next available letters to them.
@@jyvben1520 No don't think it will work without specific drivers.
The CompatiCard I was designed as a replacement for the stock IBM floppy controller in the original 5150 and 5160 machines. The card included a diskette with drivers in order to use it. I've got the disk & docs for that card if you need them (and they're not online already). Their other card, the CompatiCard IV has a ROM on it and will work in pretty much any machine with an ISA bus. I'm currently using one in a new-build imaging machine that's got a Pentium MMX in it. The CompatiCard I and IV are desirable for imaging because they will both correctly read & write single density tracks. This is an important feature when imaging older, non-IBM PC diskettes.
I expect it's an ideal card to use with 22-DISK. I lucked out many years ago that the freeware version of that supported the Xerox 820-II format, and I had an old ISA floppy controller I'd modded to support single density.
The Compaq Deskpro 486/25 these two cards came out of was released at the tail end of 1989 (it does have basic VGA built into the system board - 640x480 @ 16 colors). The system was chock full of cards, sadly all ISA (since this was the first EISA system Compaq released). Sophis had it outfitted with two 3.5"/1.44MB floppy drives (one connected to the card I sent you) and one 5.25"/1.2MB (all OE Compaq drives) as well as a 16-bit ESDI controller with the original ~320MB 1/2 height 5.25 ESDI drive (still works with no bad sectors!). The system alone (with just 4MB/RAM, one floppy drive and the ESDI drive/controller had a price tag of nearly around $17,500 in 1989 (almost $39k in 2021)!! Depending on hard drives and other options they ranged from $14k to $20.5k - $31k to $45k in 2021 dollars!!!). And that is all before it received another 8MB of RAM, and had the Vectrix card/additional floppy drives/controller/other I/O cards installed!
The system had some very vintage version of Unix on it and upon startup it was trying to receive a response from something (presumably plugged into one of the I/O cards) and kept failing and wouldn't go any further. Not that there was probably anything confidential on the system, but I opted to wipe the drive as I was more interested in the first EISA system Compaq brought to market rather than what it did in its prior life.
Almost certainly this was either an EDA system for board design and schematic capture, or even IC design, or it had a vertical format monitor and was used for publishing. Given that it was a Vectrix card I'm opting for an EDA system. It was probably looking for either a license dongle or a fancy mouse/trackball with a lot of buttons.
Returning the floppy controller to stock would go against what some of us in the retro/vintage computer community are here for: preserve history. By undoing the mod, you would be committing heresy. You wanted opinions, Adrian, so you got mine here. By the way please check your email. I sent you a message a few days ago...
Adrian has several videos where he throws out the shielding of retro computers; he doesn't care about preserving history.
@@Okurka.
Shielding is usually more of a hassle than it's worth, and if you really want to, you can always order a press cut piece of steel to replace it. Also afaik most of the shields he did throw out were already rusted, thus a risk to the machine.
@@rockytom5889 Right, using a press cut piece of steel isn't preserving history.
@@Okurka.
That's literally what electronics shielding is. A press cut piece of sheetmetal. And that's why it tends to rust and put the rest of the machine in danger when the rusted off pieces of it start rattling inside the box. If you know the exact thickness and layout of the shielding, ordering it freshly cut and replacing it is the same as restoring a historic piece of machinery, since the part is made to be of equal spec as the original. If you wanna continue using a shield that's falling apart and might short your board, by all means, do, but don't complain if it starts having issues.
@@rockytom5889 Almost none of the shields Adrian throws away contain rust.
Another vote for leaving the floppy card as-is.
If you DO decide to un-modify it, then at least install the modded card in a system with another normal card, just to test how well it actually functioned before you undo the mods.
Be nice to see that video card back in action again. Back in the late 80s I got to use an AutoCAD system with something like this with a huge 21" monitor. It also had a Hercules card and a monochrome monitor as the main PC/DOS display. AutoCAD uses that for all the menus and commands. The big screen was just for rendering the drawing. It was a pretty neat set up and very easy to use.
Don't unmod the floppy card. It is so rare that it would be destroying history.
That "professionally" modified card is what some french canadians would call a "homemarde" modification.
ya dont reverse that card back.. that is something special for the era. its so unique
Happy to see there is 9993 SMMC episodes to go! Keep you busy for years Adrian! 😁👍
Haha! There are several more in the pipline -- the increased speed of production really helps!
that floppy controller is pretty unique, maybe leave the bord like that
Keep everythign as it is; removing mods are NOT the reasons we watch...
Why would you want to convert back that floppy controller card? Do you really need another one? Or is it difficult to use it in this state? It looks like a relic now.
I'd say leave the modded card as it is, as it was done for a reason, whether sold that way I don't know, but it makes it different and unusual to what is the norm... :)
And as an aside, it's a Micro Solutions product, the creators of the "Backpack" series of external drives, of which I have one, a parallel CD-ROM with built-in sound, which is neat... :D
man id love to see that graphics card in action and what it could display in a time appropriate machine
Me too! I'll wear my "Images du Futur '89" t-shirt! That was a public expo for computer graphics at the time.
I'll be trying to get this and the other one I have working with some actual programs soon -- hopefully the TIGA drivers are interchangeable.
I'm so glad there's two channels! Makes getting my daily retro-fix a lot easier, and I very much appreciate the variety available!
@Mike HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! Oh man, that's funny!
How does the videos being split out over 2 channels help that?
I don't get why 2 channels help, I guess it's a thing where it helps due to TH-cam's crappy algorhithm because it sure doesn't make any logical sense.
@Mike Who shit in your bed? Speak properly to others.
And that doesn't make sense when both channels feature the same kinda content like here.
@@Nukle0n One is the "production" channel, the second is the "let's experiment & try this" channel.
I like the number of leading zeros in 0007!
Also suggesting to keep it that way. Floppy controllers aren't that rare, but this version is.
Regarding all the seeming unnecessary soldering to the ground pins on that floppy controller card, my guess would be that it's for mechanical stability for the extension piece, and not for the actual ground connection itself.
I'd LOVE to have a floppy controller that could handle 4 drives. Would make software preservation in a single machine much easier.
It actually only handles 2 floppy drives. But because of the mods that move the IRQ, DMA, and suchlike, it will work in conjunction with a standard floppy controller that controls the standard 2 drives, for a total of 4 drives. If he pulls the mods off, all he will have is a hacked up and useless standard floppy controller that WILL NOT allow four drives.
Yeah sadly nothing really properly supports 4 floppies ..... (DOS, Windows, etc.) There are ways with drivers to do it -- but I found the floppy preservation tools like IMD don't support anything more than 2 floppies anyway.
When I saw this card was called “Vectrix”, I had visions of playing wireframe games on the pc.. :)
Adrian, you don't know how interesting this all is. I was pretty good at setting up computers and resolving problems but I didn't know jack shizz about how all those chips worked :) I am learning tons! I always wanted to learn digital electronics but never got around to studying it. You make me want to get some books and learn!
Oooh! Fresh video! I hope you're keeping tabs on your Twitter account, Adrian. Tweeted photos (and a Thiniverse link!) for a dead parts bin I was going to send to you, but so many other people beat me to the punch I decided to just keep it.
Cool mod? Hehe. Whatever you decide to do, you have now documented it, which is the most important thing, I think.
9:30 WOW! Now THAT is a video card! So many ICs! Its absolutely crammed full of chips.
I remember selling computers for autocad use, and the video cards were absolutely massive. The ones we sold a lot of had 4 BNC connectors on the back for analog RGB and sync. So not only did you have to buy a video card that was as expensive as the entire XT or AT, then you had to but the custom monitor that could use that video output. So, for a microcomputer for professional cad use was super expensive. But it was better than having to own a mini or mainframe to do CAD.
Don't revert the mod! It won't be special anymore if you revert it.
Keep the modded floppy controller as-is, you can always change it later if necessary.
At work back in the day, I inherited custody of my old department's IBM PC/AT. It was spec'd out as a "workstation", with the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter and matching required PGA monitor, which cost thousands of dollars at the time. Someone had needed to run Oracle 5.x for DOS on it, so we bought a 128K RAM card to add to the 512K piggyback mainboard RAM, and I actually had both a 20MB _and_ 30MB full height 5.25-inch hard drives along with the 1.2MB floppy. We had a DEC Ethernet card (AUI port) and ran DECnet-DOS on it. Oh, and I'd swapped the crystal to speed it up from 6 MHz to 8 MHz clock.
Eventually newer machines took its place, but I kept it around for the infrequent tasks that only it could do. The second time the PGA card or monitor died, the repair tech took my advice and swapped them out for something supportable, an EGA or original VGA. I eventually had to give it up due to lack of space in my office cubicle. ( _Good bye, old friend!_ )
The "Professional Graphics Adapter" is actually called the "Professional Graphics Controller". IBM's reasoning behind this is that the PGC does not just adapt the computer to the high resolution display, the PGC is actually a full blown 8088 system on a card. It will execute graphics routines independently of the main CPU, therefore making it a graphics "controller".
I bought my first VGA card, a ATI VGA Wonder in later 1989 or earlier 1990 as a college sophomore. I had to special order it and it took forever to come in. My girlfriend at the time completely didn't understand why I would be spending so much money on a computer part. That was an amazing video card for the time.
I may still have an example of NEC's first Multi-Sync monitor. It doesn't even have a model number, it's just NEC Multi-Sync. It supports TTL mono and color modes, VGA and SVGA. It even has a built in cooling fan. When I quit using it, the CRT had become extremely dim so it'd need a transplant to get working, and turn down the flyback control so it wouldn't fry the replacement. The electron gun and/or phosphors are pretty much dead. Would cost a small fortune to ship. It would look very nice in the Digital Basement, very space saving when it can be used with MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA systems.
Don't know if it can support "Super EGA" resolutions. Long ago I had a Western Digital 286 motherboard, one of the first boards with integrated I/O and video. The video supported up to 800x600 16 color on a TTL monitor but try finding a monitor that can do that. Every bit of the built in stuff could be disabled except for the video, so there was no way to get anything but an MDA card to work in one of the ISA slots due to the built in video using the resources a VGA card required. So that board went buh-bye when I got my first VGA card.
I had a PC that had a superVGA card and a Hercules monochrome card. I did CAD on that. The Hercules output was very crisp and I used it to drive a good quality orange phosphor monitor.
7:59 Burp... all that gummy bear stuff...
Adrian, The question that seems most appropriate is whether or not the utility of the mod out weighs the functionality that would be gained from from undoing it. Of course, if you're careful, document everything and save the parts you can always redo the mod later.
Note that Windows 3.1 (3.0???) worked with TIGA cards. That was the only high res option.
That's really interesting. Someone was saying that much of the software that could work with that card might include drivers. Looks like Adrian might just need 3.1 and some period-appropriate drawing/CAD software package.
They clearly wanted to make extra super-duper sure that it was properly grounded.
Leave the mod alone. It's part of history.
How's this for a challenge: Modify the modified controller so that the IRQ and DMA are selectable. :D
Yep, remember using PS2s while studying to systems analyst in 1987 and thinking that VGA knocked the older PCs into a cocked hat.
My 286 that I got in 1988 had a trident 256kb vga card, so in 1988 other companies than ibm were already making vga cards.
Gets a unique floppy controller; wants to convert it to a regular floppy controller.
I would also opt not to undo the mod. It's interesting to see how people modded stuff at the time
Gotta love a good ol TIGA card.
At least I'm 80% sure it's a TIGA card.
Wow, the video card is really PACKED with chips of all kind. Fault finding on this card must surely be a nightmare....
There is a Sierra Trading Post down at Jantzen beach.
If the mod works then I'd say leave it modded. Despite how messy it looks (or maybe because of it) this is a fascinating device.
If I had to guess, I'd imagine that that modded floppy controller was used to drive an external floppy interface tape drive. There is probably some benefit (interrupt priority possibly) by placing it on one of the 16 bit buss IRQs/etc. Probably to improve streaming and reduce shoe-shining the tape.
Halloween is approaching? Here the Christmas stuff is already out.
I would be soo scared to run that card mod.
If anything you should mod the card even more. Add a selector switch to toggle between the old and the new lines. I'm tempted to say it shouldn't be very difficult... but that rarely turns out to be a smart thing to say. ;)
Would be great to see the Victrix card work.
That vetrix video card reminds me of my 1989 nubus card with 4 megs of ram, it is really powerful for vector based software. It has it's own monitor too. I think the card was about $20,000 in 1989 and only $10,000 for the 1991 or 1992 model. I have it in a beast of a Mac II ci.
I used to have a Mac IIci with 128 megs RAM and a 60 Mhz Daystar PPC601 upgrade. A curious thing about it was it could be forced into 24 bit address mode running Mac OS 7.6. Do a PRAM zap and a 24-32 bit switch would appear on the memory control panel. Flip that, reboot, and the switch would vanish. I never tried running any software that required 24 bit mode. I just wanted to get back to using the PPC CPU. Apple's own 601 upgrade control panel could *disable* the Daystar 601 but could not *enable* it.
@@greggv8 that is pretty curious. I run os 6.x and apple unix, those work great out of the box. I have another drive with 7.x too 🤣.
I love my diagnostic card too as it gives the iici red blinking lights, which as a vintage pc it needs.
@@hicknopunk I just thought it odd that Mac OS 7.6 that supposedly had no 24 bit mode support could apparently be forced into it, on a fully 32 bit Mac. It would be interesting to see someone try it and when/if the memory control panel gets the 24-32 bit switch, check About this Mac, run software that reports on the memory, and try running software that requires 24 bit mode.
Great one, thank you, Sir!
With that floppy card I wonder how many floppy drives could be crammed into a computer at the expense of almost everything else.
I also vote to keep the card as a curiosity
Don't revert the mod!
Loving the content Adrian
I'm wondering if this was used on a duplication machine. someone likely pushed out tons of copied floppies back in the day with it.
12:45 “Doing its business” 🚽 🤣
adrian why undo the mod to the floppy card, unless there is a valid reason?
"Hello everyone, and welcome back to Adrians' Digital Basement II..." . . . the logo needs a "II" to appear just as you say it.
Unless you are in desperate need of an extra floppy controller, leave it as is. It would be interesting to put it in a machine with another normal floppy controller to ensure they don't conflict with one another, then try to find disk copy software that can work multiple drives at once. I would expect it was probably used in some sort of disk duplicator system.
The card (the hacked one) looks like its for the expansion unit for the ibm xt. It was a second case with expansion drives. Maybe this card was designed to talk to the original ibm floppy controller. So you could make your own.
huh, I have a similar cardset from Everexx which uses the TMS34020 and has 2 daugher cards and 2 companion ISA boards. The accelerator itself has no actual monitor hookup on the back but does have a db9 connector for a light pen. It has what it calls a Logic expansion daughter board and then a Pallet expansion daughter board, then 2 fat ribbon cables that connect out, one cable directly to a host a VGA host card which has two RGB outputs on it and is also full length, and the second cable daisy chains it and another card which acts as a frame grabber. Then there is a 3rd fat ribbon cable that goes directly from the VGA host to the frame grabber board directly. And the VGA host also has a daughter card that acts as some sort of motion jpeg accelerator but I have never gotten that part to work. It supposedly allows for both full motion video capture and playback. The entire cardset is from 1988 and uses up 4 total slots due to one of the daughter cards on the VGA host being a tandem. All 3 peices are full length and crammed full. I have counted a total of about 8.75mb of ram on the whole works. And best I can peg it at, was a price of about $22,000 as an option in the deskside workstation it came in.
I spent more than half this video thinking that graphics card was for Vectrex emulation or something.
Yeah I'd say leave the floppy card as is. It's quaint. Reminds me of something my dad would've done to save a buck. 😆
That graphics card was probably crazy expensive in its day!! Howly...
Will the floppy card still function in its current configuration? I'd say leave it unless you really need it unmodded.
On the video card: I did some research to refresh my memory, but I believe this card would likely be used with AutoCAD (or possibly other CAD) running in DOS. AutoCAD didn’t go to Windows for a while and I think only after Windows NT.
The sticker on the ‘floppy controller’ reads ‘SOPHIS SYSTEMS N.V.’ which happens to be a now defunct company (I can see activity until 2013) in my home town of Wevelgem, Belgium. They were active in the CAD/CAM industry for the textile market. Perhaps this ‘floppy controller’ was modified to interface with something else? I will see if I can get in touch with some former employees for more information. Hang on…
Very interesting! As I noted above, the floppy controller (at least internally) was connected to a 3rd floppy drive, although I have no way of knowing if anything was plugged into the external connector. The system these came out of was littered with Sophis stickers; each component inside the Compaq had somewhat sequential Sophis serial number stickers applied to the cards, drives, just about anything they could have applied a sticker to (most of them were sitting on the system board/in the bottom of the chassis as the adhesive had let go). Hopefully you can shed some more light on what a system like this would have specifically been used for!
the top row of RAM looks like it could be earlier Dual Ported RAM -> VRAM which could read/write at the same time.
Its not common though S3 911 chips used it for example.
That Vextrix card looks like a real monster of a graphics card, especially for 1989. Whenever I see a card like that with multiple expansion points I always start wondering what it would be like with all the add-ons and how it would enhance its performance. As far as un-modding the floppy controller goes, I am pretty ambivalent about it. On one hand it does tell a bit of a story about how someone might get things modified to work with extra devices but on the other hand I can see that card being a lot more useful in a period correct machine when taken back to stock. Frankly, those mods look terrible and I suspect it wouldn't be very far out of the realms of possibility for them to make using the card problematic.
DOOD! You need some RasterOps reviews.
since this is 0007 you should do a james bond intro. LMAO
Up next: Adrien's Diabetic Debilitation
I see MAME developers referencing support for this card. You don't suppose it is from an arcade machine do you?
MAME emulates PCs.
@@Okurka.
?? Multi Arcade Machine Emulator?
I knew modern day Arcade games are just glorified PC's, but that's a whole different program to run them on regular computers.
Older arcade games were their own standalone systems as far as I know. Some games used the same hardware internally so game boards could be switch around into different cabinets, but I dont thing most stuff MAME Emulates would really be called a PC.
@@rashira9610 Newer versions of MAME include MESS which emulates many computers of the 70s and 80s, including ibm pc
@@nachoherrera interesting. That would explain possibly having support for this card then.
@@rashira9610 Since 2015 MAME doesn't stand for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator anymore.
JUMPERS!!! As it is just a huge bodge, add more bodge...
Keep the mod, you have with this a very unusual card.
The pink-and-white gummies are supposed to be gums and teeth.
Please do not remove the mod.
Personally I'm mostly a hard no to trying to return interesting mods to old computers to stock. Any decent antique dealer will tell you it's the patina that counts, and beyond that if a machine has been modified that modification tells you a specific story about how that item was used. Undo it and you'll just have a beat-up 4-drive floppy controller (which, really, who actually *needs* that?) with a notch cut out of the PCB. It's more... interesting, the way it is, certainly.
But it is just a floppy controller so... *shrug*. If it brings you more joy to axe the 16 bit extender by all means go for it. I would probably check the manual to see if the card edge and internal pin connector are just wired in parallel, though, you may not actually get any functionality out of removing it that you won't get from just using the external connector.
(If you really need it running at standard IRQ and DMA that could be undone/made switchable easily enough.)
I want to see that special floppy controller in action. Why would you want to turn it into a boring beaten up standard controller of which houndred thousends exists? I come for the interesting special stuff, not the boring standard stuff.
NO, please do not modify the weird floppy controller! Odd things like that are rare enough, and they will only become moreso in the future.
Hmmm everyone here wants to leave the controller as is, but here’s my take: if you can’t use it as is, change it if you have a machine that needs it. A part on a shelf is a sad part.
Do not unmodify the floppy card.
Use it as intended instead. For 3rd and 4th floppy drives.
I think the modded card is a fascinating piece of history and it would be a shame to undo it.
I'd love for someone to reverse engineer one of those dual floppy controllers.
No special "Colorado" gummies? ;)
I seem to be in the minority being OK with you undoing the IRQ and DMA swaps on the card, but whatever you do, please DON'T remove the expansion board. Keeping it attached preserves its history and lets you easily reapply the modification.
Video uploaded 20th September but says withing 1st minute this is September! LoL you should change your name to McFly
I agree with others commenting here...keep the mod for this card.