Fantastic to hear this from the actual designer of the upgrades I pored over in the pages of _Acorn User_ as a teenager. Would love to hear more about designing four-layer boards on your own software in the late eighties, and the process of pitching designs and manufacturability back then. Just getting hold of a datasheet in those days was an achievement for me.
Great memories. No pun intended. We were contemporaries in the industry. I designed vision boards at Applied Scanning Technology in the late 80s and then video processor boards for Prime Image in the early 90s. I used a lot of PALS and GALS, hid boot code in the EPROM on the Oak VGA boards, and suffered memory starvation because management refused to purchase the six memory ZIPs that I requested and forced me to fit my video in four (.5Megabyte). This forced my component NTSC to be 512x488 and totally incapable of supporting PAL. Who remembers Brooktree? Ah, good times. Thanks for the nostalgia!
I would like to think we are of similar age (50 ish) and at the time time you were doing this work me and my mates were learning electronics going down to the local Maplin store and building various circuits outlined in their catalogues, self teaching etc. Although I understand most of what you are talking about now, back then it would have been impossible and am amazed you were doing this work when I was still building flashing LED circuits (not quite that simple but not much more) It has taken me 30 years to get to where you were 40 years ago. Love your videos and the way you explain your thoughts. keep up the good work.
I was writing video games in those days, and digitizing was very early. It made a huge difference in how we built the graphics: our artists began using lego figures and models to digitize, and then “tidy up” after. So cool to understand how the early units worked.
I love the videos where you show off your different projects, and especially when you talk about genius tricks in the projects. Please make more videos! 🙂
My father worked for a PC manufacturer in the late 80s and 90s, and designed a Winchester drive podule for the Archimedes that they sold. I don't know whether it was an original design or a clone, but he at least did the PCB layout. We rediscovered the original CAD files (Cadstar!) on an old floppy, and I managed to convert them to gerbers that were readable in modern software. 😀
Still brings back memories as I used to buy all my components from Watford Electronics and knew the owner quite well in the end, as I’d be sitting in his living room most Saturdays while he got the bits I wanted. My “first clock I built” video was built from parts from a visit to that living room in 1975. My dad would drive me over as I was 15 at the time.
I used to work for Castle Technology. We manufactured the Acorn range after Acorn went kaput. We also did our own SCSI card, the "Storm DMA32" SCSI card :-)
Hi Mike, Loved the video, a real blast from the past. LM1881, now that really was a legendary IC! Those were the days....Best regards Pete (Wild Vision)
Absolutely fascinating, and impressive how much detail you can recall! I was one of those kids exposed to these machines back in the early 90s at school, though it was here in NZ and most of the machines were fairly standard, one machine per class with no networking or fancy expansions such as these. Great machines for the time to which I probably owe my career in computing. Thanks for bringing up some fond memories :)
Wow.. I had no idea you'd done these. We had one of the video digitisers at school, and that got me a bit obsessed with how that worked at the time. I recall Maplin also made a kit which could be used with the Amstrad CPC (which is what I had). Great to see all this. The Archimedes was fantastic for anyone interested in how computers worked and could be used - and the Acorn !Draw software has had a lasting impact on me. I designed PCBs by hand with that - and the trick was to use a laser printer then drench the printout in WD40 to make it transparent enough to expose the board in the lightbox...
Another great video Mike. Nice to hear from the original desiger of this stuff and on you own time also. I still have most of my Acorn machines includeing my A440 with the 20MB St506 HDD. The first time I knew you were involved in Watford Electronics was the print buffer video for the BBC. We used one of these in school and it was such a time saver.
I must have seen you at some of the exhibitions I went to around this time, PCW, Breadboard etc. No educational / Acorn ones though. After School, uni for me was mostly Sun machines and sometimes PCs. I'm so glad the ARM found the success that it has, such an elegant well engineered thing. I find it frustrating that the computer world has moved on so much that we can't make stuff like this any more. I mean, we can in theory, whacking on a Rasp Pi Zero and designing a whizbang-doodah-whatever with amazing PCB from JLC or whoever, but chances are that it already exists on Aliexpress and costs 75p including shipping!
I used to drool over the Archimedes but I already had an Amiga. One of the highlights way back then was going to Watford by train and buying chips and parts. Years later and thousands of miles away I still have many of the chips I bought back then, 68008, Eproms, TTL chips, Pals, etc. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Argh, I really wish I had been an adult during this time. I was a kid, and we didn't get our first computer until 1998 or so, if I remember correctly? So I was born like a decade too late to really enjoy all this stuff. Mike, your bona fides are simply off the chart. The breadth and quality of the stuff you've done over your lifetime is seriously astounding. I genuinely hope you write a memoir at some point, even if it's fairly brief. I do writing professionally and would be happy to help out with editing, proofreading, etc. for free.
I believe we had one of your video digitisers on our A440/1 back in the early nineties! My dad used to take it to school fetes with his massive 80s camcorder. For 10p he'd take your picture and print out a western-style "wanted: dead or alive" poster on our Epson dot matrix printer. This is long before the days of consumer digital cameras, obviously, so it proved quite popular. Thought you might like to hear a story of how it was used by the home consumer. If you're still after one then I can dig around my parents' loft next time I'm back, assuming my brother hasn't nicked it.
Also, I've been subbed to you for years and only just discovered we probably had a fair bit of stuff you personally designed on our Arc. We might have had your SCSI card too. Small world!
Mike. Really interesting stuff. Youv'e nade Super rare video. That era's electronics not only physically present and in existence, but full description and history by the designer themselves. Thanks for creating and sharing this. I shall do what i can to try to locate the missing 'podule'. cheers man. keep safe and healthy. Rob
It was on an Archimedes that I first saw computer based video capture being done. My school had a video camera plugged into the back of one. I remember being blown away wondering how on earth it worked
Anyone remember the jump vectors that RiscOS used everywhere (both low memory addresses for the ARM and the "modules" that would be embedded in the podules)? I ended up using that idea for a fast SMS router for fast/flexible decoding that back in the 2000s - all the Teen Idol voting traffic in the US went through those tables :D (and most of the SMS traffic world wide). I learn that on the Acorn Archimedes!
Quite apart from the clever innovations and novel products, I'm amazed at Mike's output during that time period. Part way through the video I was already thinking OK, nice, Mike must have been working with someone else doing the 4-layer board design with professional PCB software (which I remember was $$$$$ at the time), when Mike casually drops in that he did the board design oh by the way with the software he wrote. !!!!! All on the side while having a full-time job! Is "Mike" actually an amalgam of several clones?
I had one of your teletext cards! Sadly it was given to me after analogue TV was switched off so I was never able to use it properly, but from memory I got some corrupted data from old VHS tapes. I gave it to a chap setting up a computing history museum in the end.
Back in those days I was also around the edges of this world. Some of my friends designed most of the Archimedes addons that were sold through HCCS. I have good memories from those years. I remember helping debug an archie SCSI interface that had some issues with its PAL… :)
27:30 - I do recall that. In the pre-standard packet switched network that linked Strathclyde, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities some student in Edinburgh put up a Teletext server you could call up from your async terminal. It mapped the graphics characters as best as it could so you could vaguely see the block graphics as well as the text on your terminal! Thanks Mike!
This video really took me back.....I was the technical services manager of Orion Computers and a component level Archimedes service engineer. I designed a multi podule interface and memory expansions for the A3000 but mainly dealt with repairs and complicated customers. I must have sold a good few of your boards :-). We did an IDE podule but it was VERY dependant on drives and worked with some and not with others. We also had a TV output convertor which was used with the A3000 to hook it up to TV sets that didn't have scart or video in. Out of absolutely everything the only one thing I still have is one of the Orion IDE boards and I didn't even design that. It was designed by a lad called Dave who did quite a bit of Acorn design work although I can't remember his surname.
I also bought from Sendz, using a bank cheque that was posted to them. Issuing bank for London was actually Barclays Bank London, even though I was using my local bank, which had an account with them for this. First few cheques were hand written, stamped by the issuing bank for validity, but the last few were machine printed, and actually a really nice looking bearer instrument, more because they normally were used for massive money transfers. I was getting ones for a few pounds only.
LDMFD R13!,{r0-r12,pc} This brings back memories. at home we had an acorn electron then a A310. I remember updating the memory to 4MB with a plugin board - the MEMC1A needed to transferred into the draught board. Also the ARM2 was upgraded with an ARM3. I wrote an app to poke the MEMC1A to increase the speed of the machine too. One module slot was taken up by a Oak SCSI controller + HD. Later at uni I upgraded to a RISCPC with ARM610, ARM710 and then StrongARM. At that point it had an IDE controller in IIRC. I had the RISCPC 486 daughter card too to run PC based development tools for university. I was looking at Hydra to allow multiple StrongARMs to be run in parallel but moved away from the scene. I shared my university house with "Berty" Tom Cooper and in the time I wrote an ultra fast screen plotter for Wavelength over summer, Tom had written a playable game. In the same house was Rob that wrote a 3D editor for a magazine, I ended up rewriting his BASIC in ARM + FP assembler for 13x speed increase :)
@@speedsterh I remember designing that in a Uni lecture, with the lightning etc. IIRC sat with Tom at Moocow's house (I can't remember his real name) and playing the pre-release. Another one of the students did the great music. Tom wrote DarkWood in his final year at uni (well finished it) on his A3020 (I can't remember the precise model), I test it out on the RiscPC.
@@factorylad5071 At the time the direct memory access and fast RISC chip wasn't too bad - it could have done with more registers for faster memory transfers but that's the price you get for having 16 registers addressable in each 32bit conditionally executable opcode. The 6502 was more an embedded controller and wasn't developed specifically for PCs. If you look at pole position back in the day, the arcade games had 3 CPUs and custom chips. The BBC and Archimedes suffered that their chipset couldn't move memory in a block or really play sound without help from the CPU.
Ah, happy days. I was doing some very similar stuff back in the late 1970s. It was so much easier to knock up hardware and software back then but the market was pretty small.
21:17 "i don't know the exact details...." wow there's enough detail in this video to blow the pants off most today. You Know your stuff, and still do. Way above most pal, excellent work to be proud of. :-)
Awesome. Thanks for sharing your knowledge on the development of these. Never owned an acorn computer back then but always find the old hardware interesting 😀👍
I also made video capture cards, and I remember using a 74S124 to generate the recovered pixel clock just as you say- feed the sync into the enable pin. It worked great. I got that trick from a company that made character generators for the broadcast industry, they used it for generating video genlocked to some other source.
Harwin pins in that first prototype from the look of it. I spent too much of the mid-'80s working for a couple of cheapskates, who paid me a pittance to solder hundreds of them into production boards because they were too miserly to pay for through-hole-plated vias.
Regarding the teletext board, the original Acorn "cheese wedge" teletext adapter takes a similar approach to yours: it just does the data slicing and has some minimal discrete logic to capture the packets, which the Beeb then reads immediately down the 1MHz bus. It can't store more than one line of data, so the Beeb has to be running in real-time. The later Morley and Acorn Advanced Teletext systems use the SAA5243 chip which downloads whole pages in to its own RAM, which is then read at leisure by the Beeb over the I2C bus.
Fascinating history lesson... the Archimedes was one machine to which had little exposure. I remember it appearing in the news occasionally but by the time it was current ai would have been using the equipment which work supplied (Fujitsu C/CPM luggables I suspect). Fingers crossed someone unearths a board or two to let you restock 😀👍
9:35 The A305 came with 512k RAM soldered on the board, and empty sockets for another 512k. In practice, the machine was not usable with only half a meg, so after a couple of weeks I filled up the empty sockets, but even with 1024k memory remained tight. Later, I had the onboard RAM and the original sockets removed and replaced by new sockets with 4 megs on the main board, which was plenty at the time.
I remember designing PCB's using XCad on the Amiga, would have been around the same time, I had a plotter I got cheap from a kitchen design place that closed down and spent a fortune on specialist latex ink plotter drafting pens and polyester film, I made my own prototypes and for high res stuff used a local printer to do reductions onto film, bizarrely a local small hardware/garden shop also had a full PCD production line in the basement, I got friendly with them and he'd run my boards through cheap with other larger orders.
I think Mike has freelanced for most of his career, so just start designing stuff for problems ;) I can give you some ideas to boot if you are interested ;)
I had an early Oak SCSI card, and it worked great with its 45MB Seagate drive. However, when I upgraded to a 200MB Maxtor, it would give me ~1b error every 1MB read. Oak couldn't find a fault with it, so I sold it and splashed out on the Acorn SCSI card, which fixed the problem. But I can't complain, since the investigations I had to do to convince myself there even was a problem set my career in motion! (If you've never suffered occasional data corruption, it's really quite insidious.)
In the early 2000's I bought a load of Archimedes stuff, there was a lot of it on eBay (Probably because schools were selling it off at that time?) and I was looking for something more interesting than PCs to play with. I got one machine working, the second refused to boot. They came with loads of cards and floppy drives though, and I spent a good while trying them out, seeing which bits fitted. I think some of it was for other machines than the 2 I had. Most of the stuff got sold on eBay a few years later where there seemed to be an enthusiastic market for it. My one working machine worked as a file server for me for quite a while until someone offered me more cash for it than I could resist! They were nice machines, although I never really got deeply into them from a software point of view, you could tell they were much better engineered and more like the minicomputers I used at work than PCs.
Econet was seriously slow. It could take several seconds for me to send a message to my mate across the classroom asking about "Inflatable Ingrid", and for him to call me a smeghead back... Those were the days!
The A540 didn't stop at 8meg, it could have 16 - 4meg + MEMC1A on board, and 3 expansion cards with 4meg + MEMC1a on board.. if you had the money. IIRC, adding the 3 cards to get to the max memory cost almost as much as the base A540!
@@mikeselectricstuff Yes, but the A540 was (annoyingly) a long way out... You were a bit bemused as to the early date on the A480 memory card... We'd been asked to help get the M4 prototype board booting (which was to develop into the A680) so put support for a second MEMC into a deviant Arthur build. That worked OK. I think as we got wind that the A680 was going to be produced, we dropped that code back into RISC OS 2, possibly without informing manglement (who wanted a clear distinction between their professional Unix systems and the lower-end products), so that we'd be able to surprise folk by having it running on that too. The A480 card would have taken advantage of that I surmise. We didn't know at the time I left Acorn (Dec 1988) of any plans to do the quad MEMC systems, so if you look at the RISC OS 2.01 memory map from the A540, it has two separate areas for the CAM soft copies, one for each MEMC pair.
The multiple MEMCs had to be speed-selected to match propagation delay : in the 540 it was further adjusted by changing Vcc of a buffer. Did the add-on boards do this too ?
Back in the day I only added the holes for the 64-way edge connector screws (M2.5) if I remembered also....:) Seriously, great to see a review of these old cards......please keep this sort of stuff coming. PS. I remember Watford Electronics well, two page spread in electronics magazines. My goto place for components back in the day.
Wow, I remember reading about some of these cards in Acorn User in the early 90s. I got an Archie A3000 around 1992, and it was my main machine for quite a long time. I only have about four disks left now, and donated my A3020 recently. I remember Dad buying me the RiscOS 3.1 ROMs, installing them, and thinking "This is a future!". lol I first saw a digitizer card used on the BBC Master at school in the late 80s. It was very low resolution, ofc, and B&W capture. The guy demonstrating it applied different colour palettes to the captured image. I think the printer was only a 9-pin dot matrix (B&W), but it was still impressive to see video capture back then.
And yep, I do recall the BBC Micro digitizer being very slow. You had to sit perfectly still in front of the camera. The Sega Mega Drive / Genesis uses similar DRAMs with the internal shift reg. And I think VDP1 on the Sega Saturn, which have a "SAM" output pin for shifting out 4-bits of pixel data per chip.
23:00 - Haven't seen an AUI connector in quite a few years. I forgot they were a thing. By the 90s, I very rarely saw the modules that used to plug into that port, as most stuff had the 10base2 BNC on by then.
27:06 - I recall we had a system for the Amstrad CPC with a photosensor that stuck onto the corner of the TV. There were a few broadcasts back then, which sent computer programs via TV, and also a few that were broadcast directly via the radio. I think the TV version must have had it's own "bootstrap" disk or BASIC program to load in first, so it could cope with the blanking periods etc. I'd be interested to track down that system again, as I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining it. lol We had a modem for the CPC 6128, and it was used it to book the flight for my first ever holiday abroad (Mallorca, around 1988). Strange to think how booking stuff online is taken so much for granted now.
I've actually got one of the Oak 16 bit Solutions SCSI Interface boards, same issue 2 you have. Never done anything with it, as that requires getting the Archimedes working first (it doesn't like me).
A bit off topic, but I remember seeing a video for a buffer built for a high-speed camera. The board was missing and had to be designed and built from scratch. The image sensor was monochrome. Was that one of your projects?
I guess now is as good a time as any to brag about the hardware interface I created for the Acorn pocket book - it had problems connecting to the serial interface of more modern Macs, so I built a small serial adapter to allow the serial to talk to the Mac. A few schools got the use out of their pocket books and I got a visit from someone from Acorn who offered me a job. I regret to this day that I declined!
The teletext adapter I had was built for the beeb and used only I2C - it also worked on the Arch, which had I2C on the backplane. Very slow compared with Mike's board.
@23:00 64KB of SRAM on that network card, and the same size on original Acorn Lance Ethernet card :o while PC Ethernet cards in similar timeframe shipped with 8 (3com 509B) to 16KB (NE2000) buffers. Mike why not release same products (video grabber, TV tuner with teletext) for PC platform on ISA bus? Surely the market was at least 10x if not 100x bigger in early nineties.
@@SeanBZA Plus the ARM processor, at least in the beginning, was a fair bit more powerful that the Intel processors in PC's and as such were more suited to these kinds of applications.
As soon as Nvidia finish buying arm arm as you know it will be dead. Apple will evolve their arm sub varient with undocumented and incompatible extensions.
I may be wrong, but didn't OAK also made VGA cards for PC's? If it did I installed many of those back in the day when assembling PC's (mostly for business applications) While watching this video I got the impression you could be THE man to help me bring an interesting idea to life based on a Retro architecture. The idea starts by re-implementing that system with new hardware producing a fully compatible system. And I do mean 100% compatible. Though, due to the way I have in mind to achieve this re-implementation the new system will also be able to "morph" into something much much more powerful. If this short description tingles your curiosity please do get in touch!
The VGA cards you mean were made by "Oak Technology, Inc.", a US company based in the Silicon Valley, whereas this stuff here is from "Oak Solutions" which seems to be a British company.
loved my acorn electron every one else has ZX's an c64...think my mum fell for the bunk they said about schools using BBC's. id3 deffo preferred the look of games verses speccy games tho c64 was Better
@@mikeselectricstuff Was that for the mini podule slot? There was a slot on the back for expansion card but I never saw it used. Mine used the Econet socket so I assume it used the Econet upgrade slot. It came with a breakout pigtail for audio in, MIDI in and MIDI out. Sadly it was pre-general midi and the something in the sampler started adding a constant glitchy noise to the recordings.
AFAIK A3000 system had a podule connector on the back which was later dropped for the A3010/3020, not quite sure how you would use it as even if there was an external case it would be a bit of a kludge. Naturally I grew up with Archimedes machines and even at secondary school they had only got their first windows machines two years before I was there (2000) and my junior school was the same. Managed to acquire a few A30x0 and A7000 machines but sadly they are now all long gone, even got given a copy of Fastrax PCB software. The later machines (A7000/RISC PC) had a special connector for a network card as well as the podule(s), though one design flaw was that on the A7000 you could not have a podule and an internal CD-ROM as the case is not deep enough!
@@dglcomputers1498 A mate of mine had a video capture card podule that he used with the A3000 - the card was installed in a metal box and then plugged into the back of the machine - I think there was a slot under the back of the machine that a metal tab went into to stop side to side movement.
Did you ever do a colour capture board? At school we had one of those Canon analog Still Video Cameras which could be "downloaded" by hooking it up to an Archimedes with a video capture card, and it was definitely colour. (Of course no one was ever allowed to use it because it was too precious)
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Fantastic to hear this from the actual designer of the upgrades I pored over in the pages of _Acorn User_ as a teenager. Would love to hear more about designing four-layer boards on your own software in the late eighties, and the process of pitching designs and manufacturability back then. Just getting hold of a datasheet in those days was an achievement for me.
Great memories. No pun intended. We were contemporaries in the industry. I designed vision boards at Applied Scanning Technology in the late 80s and then video processor boards for Prime Image in the early 90s. I used a lot of PALS and GALS, hid boot code in the EPROM on the Oak VGA boards, and suffered memory starvation because management refused to purchase the six memory ZIPs that I requested and forced me to fit my video in four (.5Megabyte). This forced my component NTSC to be 512x488 and totally incapable of supporting PAL. Who remembers Brooktree? Ah, good times. Thanks for the nostalgia!
I would like to think we are of similar age (50 ish) and at the time time you were doing this work me and my mates were learning electronics going down to the local Maplin store and building various circuits outlined in their catalogues, self teaching etc. Although I understand most of what you are talking about now, back then it would have been impossible and am amazed you were doing this work when I was still building flashing LED circuits (not quite that simple but not much more) It has taken me 30 years to get to where you were 40 years ago. Love your videos and the way you explain your thoughts. keep up the good work.
I had the exact same thought.
Same here.
I was writing video games in those days, and digitizing was very early. It made a huge difference in how we built the graphics: our artists began using lego figures and models to digitize, and then “tidy up” after. So cool to understand how the early units worked.
I love the videos where you show off your different projects, and especially when you talk about genius tricks in the projects. Please make more videos! 🙂
Love the fact that all the socket adapters look like they’re made of wood.
My father worked for a PC manufacturer in the late 80s and 90s, and designed a Winchester drive podule for the Archimedes that they sold. I don't know whether it was an original design or a clone, but he at least did the PCB layout. We rediscovered the original CAD files (Cadstar!) on an old floppy, and I managed to convert them to gerbers that were readable in modern software. 😀
Best start of the week ever.... Thanks Mike!
I worked at WE when these were first appearing; amazing how much stuff was crammed into that tiny shop in Cardiff Road!
Still brings back memories as I used to buy all my components from Watford Electronics and knew the owner quite well in the end, as I’d be sitting in his living room most Saturdays while he got the bits I wanted.
My “first clock I built” video was built from parts from a visit to that living room in 1975. My dad would drive me over as I was 15 at the time.
I used to work for Castle Technology. We manufactured the Acorn range after Acorn went kaput. We also did our own SCSI card, the "Storm DMA32" SCSI card :-)
The main board being manufactured by Fujitsu ?
Love it when you pull out your old projects. Its a great learning experience and history lesson in one. Top notch watch!
me too :)
Hi Mike, Loved the video, a real blast from the past. LM1881, now that really was a legendary IC! Those were the days....Best regards Pete (Wild Vision)
Hi Pete - I hunted around but couldn't find a picture of your colour converter board!
Absolutely fascinating, and impressive how much detail you can recall! I was one of those kids exposed to these machines back in the early 90s at school, though it was here in NZ and most of the machines were fairly standard, one machine per class with no networking or fancy expansions such as these. Great machines for the time to which I probably owe my career in computing. Thanks for bringing up some fond memories :)
Fascinating video Mike, thank you for sharing your old designs!
Having worked in post production from the early 90's, getting all of this processing working on such a small form-factor is incredibly impressive.
Wow.. I had no idea you'd done these. We had one of the video digitisers at school, and that got me a bit obsessed with how that worked at the time. I recall Maplin also made a kit which could be used with the Amstrad CPC (which is what I had). Great to see all this. The Archimedes was fantastic for anyone interested in how computers worked and could be used - and the Acorn !Draw software has had a lasting impact on me. I designed PCBs by hand with that - and the trick was to use a laser printer then drench the printout in WD40 to make it transparent enough to expose the board in the lightbox...
You never discovered tracing paper then..!
I often watch YT on 2x speed. For Mike it's 1.25x tops.
Another great video Mike. Nice to hear from the original desiger of this stuff and on you own time also. I still have most of my Acorn machines includeing my A440 with the 20MB St506 HDD. The first time I knew you were involved in Watford Electronics was the print buffer video for the BBC. We used one of these in school and it was such a time saver.
Mike, thanks for sharing you experience and knowledge!
I must have seen you at some of the exhibitions I went to around this time, PCW, Breadboard etc. No educational / Acorn ones though. After School, uni for me was mostly Sun machines and sometimes PCs. I'm so glad the ARM found the success that it has, such an elegant well engineered thing. I find it frustrating that the computer world has moved on so much that we can't make stuff like this any more. I mean, we can in theory, whacking on a Rasp Pi Zero and designing a whizbang-doodah-whatever with amazing PCB from JLC or whoever, but chances are that it already exists on Aliexpress and costs 75p including shipping!
I used to drool over the Archimedes but I already had an Amiga. One of the highlights way back then was going to Watford by train and buying chips and parts. Years later and thousands of miles away I still have many of the chips I bought back then, 68008, Eproms, TTL chips, Pals, etc. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Argh, I really wish I had been an adult during this time. I was a kid, and we didn't get our first computer until 1998 or so, if I remember correctly? So I was born like a decade too late to really enjoy all this stuff. Mike, your bona fides are simply off the chart. The breadth and quality of the stuff you've done over your lifetime is seriously astounding. I genuinely hope you write a memoir at some point, even if it's fairly brief. I do writing professionally and would be happy to help out with editing, proofreading, etc. for free.
I believe we had one of your video digitisers on our A440/1 back in the early nineties! My dad used to take it to school fetes with his massive 80s camcorder. For 10p he'd take your picture and print out a western-style "wanted: dead or alive" poster on our Epson dot matrix printer.
This is long before the days of consumer digital cameras, obviously, so it proved quite popular.
Thought you might like to hear a story of how it was used by the home consumer. If you're still after one then I can dig around my parents' loft next time I'm back, assuming my brother hasn't nicked it.
Actually it was probably the late eighties. Say 89-92 or so.
Either way it got a lot of attention at the time.
Also, I've been subbed to you for years and only just discovered we probably had a fair bit of stuff you personally designed on our Arc. We might have had your SCSI card too.
Small world!
Mike. Really interesting stuff. Youv'e nade Super rare video. That era's electronics not only physically present and in existence, but full description and history by the designer themselves. Thanks for creating and sharing this. I shall do what i can to try to locate the missing 'podule'. cheers man. keep safe and healthy. Rob
It was on an Archimedes that I first saw computer based video capture being done. My school had a video camera plugged into the back of one. I remember being blown away wondering how on earth it worked
God! Sendz! Haven't thought of them in so many decades. Good place for cheap, obscure, 'oooh I bet I could do something with that' purchases.
Anyone remember the jump vectors that RiscOS used everywhere (both low memory addresses for the ARM and the "modules" that would be embedded in the podules)? I ended up using that idea for a fast SMS router for fast/flexible decoding that back in the 2000s - all the Teen Idol voting traffic in the US went through those tables :D (and most of the SMS traffic world wide). I learn that on the Acorn Archimedes!
Quite apart from the clever innovations and novel products, I'm amazed at Mike's output during that time period. Part way through the video I was already thinking OK, nice, Mike must have been working with someone else doing the 4-layer board design with professional PCB software (which I remember was $$$$$ at the time), when Mike casually drops in that he did the board design oh by the way with the software he wrote. !!!!! All on the side while having a full-time job! Is "Mike" actually an amalgam of several clones?
Luckily, at my full-time job, nobody noticed I was doing this stuff half the time at work..!
I've always thought Mike tended to sound tired in his videos.
Now I know it's because he's basically worn out.
:P
Multiplicity
Mike, you were also working for a marconi division??? Lots of time for outside projects and with the very best test gear...
I had one of your teletext cards! Sadly it was given to me after analogue TV was switched off so I was never able to use it properly, but from memory I got some corrupted data from old VHS tapes. I gave it to a chap setting up a computing history museum in the end.
The sheer genius. Wow you’re a dark horse.
Back in those days I was also around the edges of this world. Some of my friends designed most of the Archimedes addons that were sold through HCCS. I have good memories from those years. I remember helping debug an archie SCSI interface that had some issues with its PAL… :)
27:30 - I do recall that. In the pre-standard packet switched network that linked Strathclyde, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities some student in Edinburgh put up a Teletext server you could call up from your async terminal. It mapped the graphics characters as best as it could so you could vaguely see the block graphics as well as the text on your terminal! Thanks Mike!
This video really took me back.....I was the technical services manager of Orion Computers and a component level Archimedes service engineer. I designed a multi podule interface and memory expansions for the A3000 but mainly dealt with repairs and complicated customers. I must have sold a good few of your boards :-). We did an IDE podule but it was VERY dependant on drives and worked with some and not with others. We also had a TV output convertor which was used with the A3000 to hook it up to TV sets that didn't have scart or video in. Out of absolutely everything the only one thing I still have is one of the Orion IDE boards and I didn't even design that. It was designed by a lad called Dave who did quite a bit of Acorn design work although I can't remember his surname.
Top marks for the Rowan Atkinson translator joke!
I also bought from Sendz, using a bank cheque that was posted to them. Issuing bank for London was actually Barclays Bank London, even though I was using my local bank, which had an account with them for this. First few cheques were hand written, stamped by the issuing bank for validity, but the last few were machine printed, and actually a really nice looking bearer instrument, more because they normally were used for massive money transfers. I was getting ones for a few pounds only.
Brings back so many memories for me, had a BBC Micro with a teletext adapter at home and Archimedes with EchoNet in school. (Early 90's 😊)
havnt seen mike for ages, good to catch up. 1 clever man.
Mind you, i never understood a bloody thing, but hey, i still can appreciate it
LDMFD R13!,{r0-r12,pc}
This brings back memories. at home we had an acorn electron then a A310. I remember updating the memory to 4MB with a plugin board - the MEMC1A needed to transferred into the draught board. Also the ARM2 was upgraded with an ARM3. I wrote an app to poke the MEMC1A to increase the speed of the machine too. One module slot was taken up by a Oak SCSI controller + HD.
Later at uni I upgraded to a RISCPC with ARM610, ARM710 and then StrongARM. At that point it had an IDE controller in IIRC. I had the RISCPC 486 daughter card too to run PC based development tools for university. I was looking at Hydra to allow multiple StrongARMs to be run in parallel but moved away from the scene.
I shared my university house with "Berty" Tom Cooper and in the time I wrote an ultra fast screen plotter for Wavelength over summer, Tom had written a playable game. In the same house was Rob that wrote a 3D editor for a magazine, I ended up rewriting his BASIC in ARM + FP assembler for 13x speed increase :)
Great story, thanks ! Bought Wavelength, spend quite a few hours on this great game
@@speedsterh I remember designing that in a Uni lecture, with the lightning etc. IIRC sat with Tom at Moocow's house (I can't remember his real name) and playing the pre-release. Another one of the students did the great music. Tom wrote DarkWood in his final year at uni (well finished it) on his A3020 (I can't remember the precise model), I test it out on the RiscPC.
@@nickk6109 The music (great, could have fit an amiga game) was from Exel. I don't remember him as a musician for the demo scene, though.
The Acorns are fairly hopeless on games the BBC micro was better more suited to serious applications imho.
@@factorylad5071 At the time the direct memory access and fast RISC chip wasn't too bad - it could have done with more registers for faster memory transfers but that's the price you get for having 16 registers addressable in each 32bit conditionally executable opcode.
The 6502 was more an embedded controller and wasn't developed specifically for PCs. If you look at pole position back in the day, the arcade games had 3 CPUs and custom chips. The BBC and Archimedes suffered that their chipset couldn't move memory in a block or really play sound without help from the CPU.
Ah, happy days. I was doing some very similar stuff back in the late 1970s. It was so much easier to knock up hardware and software back then but the market was pretty small.
21:17 "i don't know the exact details...." wow there's enough detail in this video to blow the pants off most today. You Know your stuff, and still do. Way above most pal, excellent work to be proud of. :-)
Awesome. Thanks for sharing your knowledge on the development of these. Never owned an acorn computer back then but always find the old hardware interesting 😀👍
Solid designs from Mike!
I also made video capture cards, and I remember using a 74S124 to generate the recovered pixel clock just as you say- feed the sync into the enable pin. It worked great. I got that trick from a company that made character generators for the broadcast industry, they used it for generating video genlocked to some other source.
Harwin pins in that first prototype from the look of it. I spent too much of the mid-'80s working for a couple of cheapskates, who paid me a pittance to solder hundreds of them into production boards because they were too miserly to pay for through-hole-plated vias.
Mike... please man ! make more videos !!
Regarding the teletext board, the original Acorn "cheese wedge" teletext adapter takes a similar approach to yours: it just does the data slicing and has some minimal discrete logic to capture the packets, which the Beeb then reads immediately down the 1MHz bus. It can't store more than one line of data, so the Beeb has to be running in real-time. The later Morley and Acorn Advanced Teletext systems use the SAA5243 chip which downloads whole pages in to its own RAM, which is then read at leisure by the Beeb over the I2C bus.
Fascinating history lesson... the Archimedes was one machine to which had little exposure. I remember it appearing in the news occasionally but by the time it was current ai would have been using the equipment which work supplied (Fujitsu C/CPM luggables I suspect). Fingers crossed someone unearths a board or two to let you restock 😀👍
9:35 The A305 came with 512k RAM soldered on the board, and empty sockets for another 512k. In practice, the machine was not usable with only half a meg, so after a couple of weeks I filled up the empty sockets, but even with 1024k memory remained tight. Later, I had the onboard RAM and the original sockets removed and replaced by new sockets with 4 megs on the main board, which was plenty at the time.
Awesome! =D Had no idea you did so much cool stuff with Acorns!
Quite fascinating work and design.
Thanks for sharing.
I remember designing PCB's using XCad on the Amiga, would have been around the same time, I had a plotter I got cheap from a kitchen design place that closed down and spent a fortune on specialist latex ink plotter drafting pens and polyester film, I made my own prototypes and for high res stuff used a local printer to do reductions onto film, bizarrely a local small hardware/garden shop also had a full PCD production line in the basement, I got friendly with them and he'd run my boards through cheap with other larger orders.
I had that digitiser will check the loft
Ah Sendz was great - if you ever needed a replacement remote control for anything, they would have it!
Love these ‘from the archives’ videos
I am 18 years old and I am studying electronics, I just have one question for you, what do I have to do to be as cool as you?
I think Mike has freelanced for most of his career, so just start designing stuff for problems ;) I can give you some ideas to boot if you are interested ;)
I had an early Oak SCSI card, and it worked great with its 45MB Seagate drive. However, when I upgraded to a 200MB Maxtor, it would give me ~1b error every 1MB read. Oak couldn't find a fault with it, so I sold it and splashed out on the Acorn SCSI card, which fixed the problem. But I can't complain, since the investigations I had to do to convince myself there even was a problem set my career in motion! (If you've never suffered occasional data corruption, it's really quite insidious.)
In the early 2000's I bought a load of Archimedes stuff, there was a lot of it on eBay (Probably because schools were selling it off at that time?) and I was looking for something more interesting than PCs to play with. I got one machine working, the second refused to boot. They came with loads of cards and floppy drives though, and I spent a good while trying them out, seeing which bits fitted. I think some of it was for other machines than the 2 I had. Most of the stuff got sold on eBay a few years later where there seemed to be an enthusiastic market for it. My one working machine worked as a file server for me for quite a while until someone offered me more cash for it than I could resist! They were nice machines, although I never really got deeply into them from a software point of view, you could tell they were much better engineered and more like the minicomputers I used at work than PCs.
Great video mike very interesting history lesson.
Awesome to hear from the creator of them very nice video
Econet was seriously slow. It could take several seconds for me to send a message to my mate across the classroom asking about "Inflatable Ingrid", and for him to call me a smeghead back... Those were the days!
I remember we had teletext in our school dinner hall and it was powered by the Tele-Card, I thought it was a pretty cool system
I've come across a few instances of your work for Watford at The Centre for Computing History already :)
Am I the only one drooling over the Ideal-Tek SMD Tweezers? ^^
Love this video. Brings back all kinds of good Archie memories
Just one word: awesome!
The A540 didn't stop at 8meg, it could have 16 - 4meg + MEMC1A on board, and 3 expansion cards with 4meg + MEMC1a on board.. if you had the money. IIRC, adding the 3 cards to get to the max memory cost almost as much as the base A540!
I has a vague recollection that there was more than 1 memory slot but wasn't sure
@@mikeselectricstuff Yes, but the A540 was (annoyingly) a long way out...
You were a bit bemused as to the early date on the A480 memory card... We'd been asked to help get the M4 prototype board booting (which was to develop into the A680) so put support for a second MEMC into a deviant Arthur build. That worked OK. I think as we got wind that the A680 was going to be produced, we dropped that code back into RISC OS 2, possibly without informing manglement (who wanted a clear distinction between their professional Unix systems and the lower-end products), so that we'd be able to surprise folk by having it running on that too. The A480 card would have taken advantage of that I surmise.
We didn't know at the time I left Acorn (Dec 1988) of any plans to do the quad MEMC systems, so if you look at the RISC OS 2.01 memory map from the A540, it has two separate areas for the CAM soft copies, one for each MEMC pair.
I should see if my A540 still works. Last powered on about ten years ago. Probably the battery will have killed it.
The multiple MEMCs had to be speed-selected to match propagation delay : in the 540 it was further adjusted by changing Vcc of a buffer. Did the add-on boards do this too ?
Back in the day I only added the holes for the 64-way edge connector screws (M2.5) if I remembered also....:)
Seriously, great to see a review of these old cards......please keep this sort of stuff coming.
PS. I remember Watford Electronics well, two page spread in electronics magazines. My goto place for components back in the day.
Wow, I remember reading about some of these cards in Acorn User in the early 90s.
I got an Archie A3000 around 1992, and it was my main machine for quite a long time.
I only have about four disks left now, and donated my A3020 recently.
I remember Dad buying me the RiscOS 3.1 ROMs, installing them, and thinking "This is a future!". lol
I first saw a digitizer card used on the BBC Master at school in the late 80s. It was very low resolution, ofc, and B&W capture.
The guy demonstrating it applied different colour palettes to the captured image.
I think the printer was only a 9-pin dot matrix (B&W), but it was still impressive to see video capture back then.
And yep, I do recall the BBC Micro digitizer being very slow. You had to sit perfectly still in front of the camera.
The Sega Mega Drive / Genesis uses similar DRAMs with the internal shift reg.
And I think VDP1 on the Sega Saturn, which have a "SAM" output pin for shifting out 4-bits of pixel data per chip.
23:00 - Haven't seen an AUI connector in quite a few years. I forgot they were a thing.
By the 90s, I very rarely saw the modules that used to plug into that port, as most stuff had the 10base2 BNC on by then.
27:06 - I recall we had a system for the Amstrad CPC with a photosensor that stuck onto the corner of the TV.
There were a few broadcasts back then, which sent computer programs via TV, and also a few that were broadcast directly via the radio.
I think the TV version must have had it's own "bootstrap" disk or BASIC program to load in first, so it could cope with the blanking periods etc. I'd be interested to track down that system again, as I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining it. lol
We had a modem for the CPC 6128, and it was used it to book the flight for my first ever holiday abroad (Mallorca, around 1988). Strange to think how booking stuff online is taken so much for granted now.
Nice coincidence, I was just going through some old Acorn Users today! In fact I have January 1988's issue open right now!
I have several Acorn RISC pcs I will see what's inside... Thanks for the video Mike great stuff as usual!
I remember Sendz advertising in Television magazine, loved reading all those ads as a kid.
I've actually got one of the Oak 16 bit Solutions SCSI Interface boards, same issue 2 you have.
Never done anything with it, as that requires getting the Archimedes working first (it doesn't like me).
Love this video about electric stuff, from mike 👍
Amazing! All my Acorns had boring network podules 😟
A bit off topic, but I remember seeing a video for a buffer built for a high-speed camera. The board was missing and had to be designed and built from scratch. The image sensor was monochrome. Was that one of your projects?
yes, but not a video : electricstuff.co.uk/ektapro.html
Wait, was that Rowan Atkinson at 1:24 saying podule? 🤣
Yes, I don't recall the timing, but it's possible that it was the origin of the name
Nope that is Zak.
I wonder how much it cost to prototype 4 layer boards back then? Pretty expensive I imagine!
Is...that Rowan Atkinson at 1:23?
Yes. Might be the origin of "Podule"
Its almost certainly from a Not the Nine o'Clock News sketch.
I guess now is as good a time as any to brag about the hardware interface I created for the Acorn pocket book - it had problems connecting to the serial interface of more modern Macs, so I built a small serial adapter to allow the serial to talk to the Mac. A few schools got the use out of their pocket books and I got a visit from someone from Acorn who offered me a job. I regret to this day that I declined!
The teletext adapter I had was built for the beeb and used only I2C - it also worked on the Arch, which had I2C on the backplane. Very slow compared with Mike's board.
The company in Southend that sold the end of line surplus components. Sendz components by any chance?
yes
@@mikeselectricstuff I knew it 👍🏼
Thanks for sharing
Brilliant stuff Mike....
You are so lucky.
I wish I were worth something.
Hugs
I still have a factory sealed A3000 and a classroom worth of BBCs!
better check the state of the battery in that A3000 - lots of reports of PCB
damage caused by leakage
@@mikeselectricstuff Good call! I must get around to checking all my kit!
The Archimedes was a genius machine. It's a pity it didn't really take off.
You must have been a teenager when you designed these?
@23:00 64KB of SRAM on that network card, and the same size on original Acorn Lance Ethernet card :o while PC Ethernet cards in similar timeframe shipped with 8 (3com 509B) to 16KB (NE2000) buffers.
Mike why not release same products (video grabber, TV tuner with teletext) for PC platform on ISA bus? Surely the market was at least 10x if not 100x bigger in early nineties.
I would guess because Mike is in the UK, and the Acorn and BBC were a massive market at the time, as they sold a lot to the educational market.
@@SeanBZA Plus the ARM processor, at least in the beginning, was a fair bit more powerful that the Intel processors in PC's and as such were more suited to these kinds of applications.
The PC world took over indeed, happy to see that ARM in de end will win this race. Th days for x86 are over, see the M1.
As soon as Nvidia finish buying arm arm as you know it will be dead. Apple will evolve their arm sub varient with undocumented and incompatible extensions.
I may be wrong, but didn't OAK also made VGA cards for PC's? If it did I installed many of those back in the day when assembling PC's (mostly for business applications)
While watching this video I got the impression you could be THE man to help me bring an interesting idea to life based on a Retro architecture. The idea starts by re-implementing that system with new hardware producing a fully compatible system. And I do mean 100% compatible. Though, due to the way I have in mind to achieve this re-implementation the new system will also be able to "morph" into something much much more powerful. If this short description tingles your curiosity please do get in touch!
The VGA cards you mean were made by "Oak Technology, Inc.", a US company based in the Silicon Valley, whereas this stuff here is from "Oak Solutions" which seems to be a British company.
loved my acorn electron every one else has ZX's an c64...think my mum fell for the bunk they said about schools using BBC's. id3 deffo preferred the look of games verses speccy games tho c64 was Better
very interesting. 2x👍
Whatever happened to Watford Electronics?
Went tits up around 2007
They moved to Luton, got more into PC stuff - I lost touch with them after that, but ISTR reading it didn't end well.
Interesting stuff
My A3000 had an expansion card but I don't think it was a podule.
It was a midi and audio sampler card and it used the Econet socket for it's I/O.
no, the 3000 just had a strip of 0.1" sockets with a subset of the podule connector, only 8 bits wide
@@mikeselectricstuff
Was that for the mini podule slot?
There was a slot on the back for expansion card but I never saw it used.
Mine used the Econet socket so I assume it used the Econet upgrade slot.
It came with a breakout pigtail for audio in, MIDI in and MIDI out.
Sadly it was pre-general midi and the something in the sampler started adding a constant glitchy noise to the recordings.
Is that like the A3020? In that I was thinking a full size podule was in there but opened it up and was wrong! It was a short board with a few pins!
AFAIK A3000 system had a podule connector on the back which was later dropped for the A3010/3020, not quite sure how you would use it as even if there was an external case it would be a bit of a kludge.
Naturally I grew up with Archimedes machines and even at secondary school they had only got their first windows machines two years before I was there (2000) and my junior school was the same.
Managed to acquire a few A30x0 and A7000 machines but sadly they are now all long gone, even got given a copy of Fastrax PCB software.
The later machines (A7000/RISC PC) had a special connector for a network card as well as the podule(s), though one design flaw was that on the A7000 you could not have a podule and an internal CD-ROM as the case is not deep enough!
@@dglcomputers1498 A mate of mine had a video capture card podule that he used with the A3000 - the card was installed in a metal box and then plugged into the back of the machine - I think there was a slot under the back of the machine that a metal tab went into to stop side to side movement.
Cool video, keep it up, thanks :)
Did you ever do a colour capture board? At school we had one of those Canon analog Still Video Cameras which could be "downloaded" by hooking it up to an Archimedes with a video capture card, and it was definitely colour.
(Of course no one was ever allowed to use it because it was too precious)
No, ISTR there were some colour digitisers that came later from other companies.
Boards like those were a fortune, in the day. A network card was $100. How quickly the job of designing boards went to China.
The designing? Probably not. Construction/manufacturing on the other hand...
Make your own double sided by creating new layers in RiscOs !Draw files and use photographic high resolution line film costs much less than $100.
Oh yes, the days of low integration ICs. So much simpler to design with. Whatever happened to PALs and GALs...?
Replaced by CPLDs , FPGAs and in some cases, MCUs