From my past I worked for atex publisher systems as a system engineer PDP11 and thay had a memory mapped video and 16 per frame all networked with shared memory i think 16 systems and used at major newspapers, terminal was just serial for keyboard and had allot of keys , four levels deep and editor was the best, (pc version is xywrie) Video to terminals ... Easy.. Systems has live news coming in on multiple ports and sent to users asking for it and formatted for typesetter in the format of that publication with macros. ALOT of publishers. ALL over the world. Before I worked for AUTOLOGIC and installed computer CRT typesetters in the se USA . Even hallmark cards, GTE, IBM,etc. Just so much fun ... you could look at anybody s terminal over network across the country... Amazing for over 20 years ago..
Really digging the format of adding some commentary in post-production. Works well. Also, love the solution w/ the Tk app. That's old-school hacking right there, I'll tell you what.
Awesome! Please post to /R/VAX This is really cool and I'm sure there are people that would be really interested in the details for some simple modules to get a PS2 keyboard and mouse working on old DEC stuff.
I installed a PS2 connector on my 6502 build, bit banged via the 6522. Worked well, until I had timer interrupts going. So I ended up using an Atmege328p as the keyboard controller.
At 25:30 you say that the Teensy 2.0 (that's what I see from the from the vid) doesn't support odd parity -- it does. In the datasheet (ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/Atmel-7766-8-bit-AVR-ATmega16U4-32U4_Datasheet.pdf) chapter 18.3, it supports none, odd and even parity (and even 5 to 9 data bits). It's just that the Arduino core has hardcoded settings (github.com/PaulStoffregen/cores/blob/master/teensy/HardwareSerial.cpp#L64) and sets the register UCSR1C to 8N1. You can simply start the hardware serial with a Serial.begin() and then modify the register yourself afterwards, using UCSR1C = (1
Freaking excellent comment, thank you! Yeah, I was really surprised that even on the PJRC product page they say explicitly only the 3.0 and up support parity settings when the chip has the hardware. This is part of the reason I kind of just want to use raw AVRs like back in the day. It's a little more manual work (and the ease of doing basic stuff with arduino is obviously fantastic) but I don't love having to make the abstraction all leaky when I want to tweak things beyond what the standard libraries provide. I'm also perennially lazy, though, so if this works I'll probably just go with it and revert back to trying to multiplex the keyboard and mouse at the same time. And then forget what I did. And lose the original code.
The one the max232 is on is an old radioshack one I've had knocking around for years Most of the rest you see are those crazy cheap "pack of 40 boards of various size" jobbies you can find on Amazon and ebay. They're all somewhat warped and of dubious quality, but the pads actually seem to stand up to a good amount of heat abuse which is much more than I can say for those old radioshack ones
Nice!!! You probably ought to put a fresh install of OpenVMS 7.3 on there, though? ideally on like a SCSI2SD or at least something newer than the current hard drives if possible?
Haha, this machine doesn't even have SCSI drives, my dude. They're DSSI. And I was trying to go as old as I could manage to be more contemporary with the actual machine, so it's running VMS 5.5
@@HalianTheProtogen I've definitely thought about this before as Q-Bus prototyping cards pop up every now and again on eBay. I'm no Q-Bus expert, but I think the best approach would actually probably be to just implement a card that serves an SD card as an MSCP device directly. I don't know a ton about MSCP, but to my knowledge it's kind of like the DEC Q-Bus equivalent to the USB Mass Storage Device standard in that if a card implements that protocol/interface then VMS will use it as a disk no questions asked. Also similar to the in-ROM DOS device drivers on many Apple II cards Anyway, that's a really cool project idea that I almost certainly will never have the guts to do
Glad I'm not the only one who uses nail clippers as a bench tool
From my past I worked for atex publisher systems as a system engineer PDP11 and thay had a memory mapped video and 16 per frame all networked with shared memory i think 16 systems and used at major newspapers, terminal was just serial for keyboard and had allot of keys , four levels deep and editor was the best, (pc version is xywrie) Video to terminals ... Easy.. Systems has live news coming in on multiple ports and sent to users asking for it and formatted for typesetter in the format of that publication with macros. ALOT of publishers.
ALL over the world. Before I worked for AUTOLOGIC and installed computer CRT typesetters in the se USA . Even hallmark cards, GTE, IBM,etc.
Just so much fun ... you could look at anybody s terminal over network across the country... Amazing for over 20 years ago..
Really digging the format of adding some commentary in post-production. Works well.
Also, love the solution w/ the Tk app. That's old-school hacking right there, I'll tell you what.
keep going.
Awesome! Please post to /R/VAX This is really cool and I'm sure there are people that would be really interested in the details for some simple modules to get a PS2 keyboard and mouse working on old DEC stuff.
Oh no, I forgot! Incoming!
I installed a PS2 connector on my 6502 build, bit banged via the 6522. Worked well, until I had timer interrupts going. So I ended up using an Atmege328p as the keyboard controller.
At 25:30 you say that the Teensy 2.0 (that's what I see from the from the vid) doesn't support odd parity -- it does. In the datasheet (ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/Atmel-7766-8-bit-AVR-ATmega16U4-32U4_Datasheet.pdf) chapter 18.3, it supports none, odd and even parity (and even 5 to 9 data bits). It's just that the Arduino core has hardcoded settings (github.com/PaulStoffregen/cores/blob/master/teensy/HardwareSerial.cpp#L64) and sets the register UCSR1C to 8N1. You can simply start the hardware serial with a Serial.begin() and then modify the register yourself afterwards, using UCSR1C = (1
Freaking excellent comment, thank you!
Yeah, I was really surprised that even on the PJRC product page they say explicitly only the 3.0 and up support parity settings when the chip has the hardware.
This is part of the reason I kind of just want to use raw AVRs like back in the day. It's a little more manual work (and the ease of doing basic stuff with arduino is obviously fantastic) but I don't love having to make the abstraction all leaky when I want to tweak things beyond what the standard libraries provide.
I'm also perennially lazy, though, so if this works I'll probably just go with it and revert back to trying to multiplex the keyboard and mouse at the same time.
And then forget what I did.
And lose the original code.
Good job. Where do your source your perf boards from?
The one the max232 is on is an old radioshack one I've had knocking around for years
Most of the rest you see are those crazy cheap "pack of 40 boards of various size" jobbies you can find on Amazon and ebay.
They're all somewhat warped and of dubious quality, but the pads actually seem to stand up to a good amount of heat abuse which is much more than I can say for those old radioshack ones
Nice!!! You probably ought to put a fresh install of OpenVMS 7.3 on there, though? ideally on like a SCSI2SD or at least something newer than the current hard drives if possible?
Haha, this machine doesn't even have SCSI drives, my dude. They're DSSI.
And I was trying to go as old as I could manage to be more contemporary with the actual machine, so it's running VMS 5.5
Q-bus SCSI cards are kinda expensive
@@joesvax So expensive that I bought this ridiculous video card before ever pulling the trigger on a SCSI card.
@@TrackZeroFutzin My brain slipped a gear, lol. I wonder how feasible it might be to make a repro Q-bus SCSI card.
@@HalianTheProtogen I've definitely thought about this before as Q-Bus prototyping cards pop up every now and again on eBay.
I'm no Q-Bus expert, but I think the best approach would actually probably be to just implement a card that serves an SD card as an MSCP device directly.
I don't know a ton about MSCP, but to my knowledge it's kind of like the DEC Q-Bus equivalent to the USB Mass Storage Device standard in that if a card implements that protocol/interface then VMS will use it as a disk no questions asked.
Also similar to the in-ROM DOS device drivers on many Apple II cards
Anyway, that's a really cool project idea that I almost certainly will never have the guts to do
hello