I did the same with a few tablets a while ago. I went through a handful of Atom-powered Windows tablets over the years, because they are just so versatile. A full (if slow) PC that fits into any bag? Yes please. These were good enough for programming, reading, writing, light gaming, anything a PC can. I did however notice that most of the software is of course not ideal for a touchscreen and programs like Touchmousepointer (which turns the entire screen into a touchpad so that you can use older software with small buttons) only gets you so far. I got a small keyboard, mouse, various adapters, hubs, dongles and such. I could have just bought a late netbook or small notebook, but this was actually cheaper and more versatile, with better battery life than any of the other options, so it kind of made sense.
Not quite a PC, not quite a camera, not quite an iPod, not quite a game console - pretty much sums up the early to mid 2000s PDA experience. That didn't stop me from owning half a dozen of these over the years.
@@gmcnewlook yeah except Apple's solutions are well designed and well implemented... even in 2009 they had realtime full resolution HDMI mirroring for iPhone. Yes it was an "expensive add on", but it just worked SO much better than products from their competitors. Just like the M1. 😉
@@fzr850 Maybe on the high end with an adapter, i can find 14 that were released last year that have it, all of which require an adapter. Thats out of 72 released in 2020.
@@fzr850 Sure, but that's not as cool in my eyes. Those phones are made with that feature in mind. The showcased device in the video is made to bring that feature to a device that don't have such a feature and that's way more interesting to me. The fact that it does it in a non-obvious way through an SD-interface makes it even more interesting.
Some SD-card slots can hold onto things put in there pretty well, even those of push-push release variety. There's a mechanism foreseen for that. That's the reason why SD-cards have a notch on them opposite the WP slider!
lol the screen refreshing constantly is very similar to the zx80s original quirk of the screen blanking out for a second everytime you press a key. Only about 20 years later haha.
It most likely hooks into the video driver of Windows CE to know what portion of the screen has been redrawn and transfers that portion pixel by pixel via the SD bus which is just a simple but apparently very slow serial connection. It must do some double buffering because it doesn't slow down the refreshing of the PDA screen itself. I would be interesting to see if it can display full screen slideshows with PowerPoint.
I think you're close to being right how it works. ^ I think it's sending incremental screenshots, meaning it's sending only the changed pixels line by line starting from the top. It might be the Window$ infrastructure wasn't particularly robust even for Window$, like, maybe the OS didn't allow background softwares to have realtime access to the screen or to the pipeline resulting in what you see on the screen. ^ You can see that in 8:50-9:00 where it doesn't finish sending the old screen when you do something, which has to be to save the already slow narrow bandwidth, and most likely also to save the PDA's CPU. Pretty sure the CPU's pretty powerful for the period, but if you don't have to waste what you got ...
ive had pocket PDAs some are bit laggy on the touch but that one seems pretty good they can be pain get use too when trying find things when looking to send emails with picture attachments haha
Still, its defeated by the fact, that you can't use your SD card in parallel. Means, you need to transfer your data you want to show onto the internal memory every time. Same crap with the cam, making photos, then offloading them onto the SD card. Major inconvenience back then, absolute no go today.
I have two windows CE hand-held computers with VGA out. Fully mirrors the screen, and supports higher resolution in PowerPoint. One is 640x480, and the other is 800x600. Significantly better performance than this. One even runs a windows CE port of Doom. One has USB, and I'd get Wi-Fi over a PCMCIA card.
The dongle/box contains the VGA signal generator (the PDA is too slow). There is a screen buffer which is polling the screen for changes and writing them via the SD interface to memory in the box. The box renders the screen at regular intervals from this memory. Pretty slick.
@@Kyle-McGough : Ah, now that's part of the trick- the bits of the Win32 api that allow the program to explicitly specify what parts of the screen to update were part of Windows 95, and were in turn based on high-performance programming practices in DOS. Chances are that Solitaire updates faster because it _doesn't_ do a call to the screen-clear function first, while the other program _does_ make that call, allowing Solitaire to reduce the data that has to be sent through the SDIO bus.
And yes, I'm aware this device won't be running a Windows 95 version- my poorly-expressed sentiment is that it was already standard practice to _not_ update the entire screen.
@Bob Sacamano The PDA screen is not an SPI device. Nowadays it's common for such screens to be SPI compatible, but back then it was not the time yet for this, the displays were all parallel drive, and it was common to share RAM data bus and display bus and you basically enable the display and then do DMA RAM reads into nowhere to scan them out, and there's a helper chip to help form the H and V strobes for the display.
You should try to find a Dell Axim X50v or x51v PDA. Those suckers had a 624 MHz processor (faster than the original iPhone) and OpenGL support with its own video RAM. :D
Or one of the late model HP Classic series. Paid 5 bucks for one a few years ago, even now they are still worth 30+ times that. 480p screen (high res for WM) and wifi and specs that (if I remember right) rival the X51v.
There were VGA output cables sold for the X50V and X51V PDAs that connected through the docking port and I believe they didn't have the screen redraw limitations that this SD adapter has
The HP hx4700 was the best at the time. It had the same 624MHz processor, plus a big 4.0" screen and a little touchpad mouse at the bottom, and a CF card slot. And it still looks awesome.
I love the fact that these PDA products were essentially "Smart Phones" without a phone. It's truly amazing to see how far we have come, but in such a small amount of time.
Honestly I have to remind myself that I took my school work in on floppy disks because USB storage was ruinously expensive- that was only like 15 years ago or so. Crazy.
Some of them even had a phone...I remember a friend of mine had a Palm OS Treo device that had phone features around the same time I had my Palm Tungsten E2.
@@willm5032 I got a 128mb usb stick for Christmas one year as the big gift when I was a kid. It was way fast than burning cds, and blank cds were actually pretty pricy too.
@@ionstorm66 Haha I remember those days. I invested in a bunch of DVD RW disks (which could be rewritten many times) which, in hindsight were kind of useful and also fucking stupid in eaqual measure
Why is it all I can think of doing with that thing is hooking up a hilarious amount of video adapters to it. SDio to VGA, VGA to DVI, DVI to HDMI, HDMI to DisplayPort.
After you're converted to DisplayPort you obviously need a DP->VGA adapter. Also keep in mind you can't connect your average VGA-DVI and DVI-HDMI adapters together (DVD-D vs DVI-A).
I had a Toshiba e750 back when it was new - transflective screen (way easier to read in the sun), CF and SDIO slots, built in wi-fi, and best of all a module that clicked to the bottom that gave it native USB and VGA outputs. One of the amusing things is that it was sold with the fact it had an SDIO slot as a big feature, while it already had most of those features built in. I think the camera from the previous video might have been useful (assuming it worked on a Toshiba, as opposed to some kind of HP-only lock in). edit: oh yeah, and the VGA was real-time, not this smearfest.
I'm wondering if the refresh selection option has something to do with it redrawing only certain portions of the screen (fast speed) vs perhaps redrawing everything every time (slow speed).
I worked with a guy in college around 2002-2004 who had a PDA and he was basically got to have MS Office wile in class. I straight up told him why not just use a laptop, which I knew he had one already.
It would be really cool if there was a dock for it that had some USB ports and VGA out, it would run Windows Mobile in a desktop interface similar to windows XP.
My guess is that it has a framebuffer that gets sent "real time" to the VGA output. But the framebuffer is updated by scanning the screen line-by-line. Updating the framebuffer might be the bottleneck (SDIO limitation?), so it is faster when only parts of the screen are updated. Also my guess is that medium speed refresh would not scan the lines, but update them "frame-by-frame", so there's not "tearing" (like seen in the solitaire portion). I wonder what the slow speed would be like? Slower, but without the scanning-type update? Maybe the dongle has enough memory to do some kind of double-buffering v-sync? Could you give it a try, Clint? Comparing to early e-readers, this is fairly acceptable. Newer e-readers support partial screen refreshes, which allow them to be used as a note-taking tablet.
I had a ton of fun when I made my first step into the "smartphone / Pocket PC" world with my HTC P4350 aka the T-Mobile Wing back in 2008. Being able to reflash the OS with unofficial updates, slimmed down Roms, tweaking the registry and running custom scripts, discovering XDA, etc, was a thrill back then. I wish Microsoft would get their stuff together and relaunch Windows OS on Mobile. I think it would succeed if .executed properly.
That’s very obvious, and i don’t think an sd card was ever made with video streaming in mind, also i don’t think you can magically turn any sd card input from any device into vga, enen not once the software is installed because everything from the generated ppu chip needs to be physically connectible with the sd card bus, if it doesn’t you can’t stream fotos or videos trough it.
I don't think it's even running the SD bus at its full performance - in fact, not even the 12.5MB/s "default speed" mode seems to be fully utilized. Possibly just 1-bit SPI mode, rather than proper SDIO.
A rotated image with 3x zoom (option was there but not shown in the video ...) would nearly perfectly fit the screen. I wish I had one of these things 15 years ago. Would have made me the king of slideshows ;-).
@@NightRidersUrbex Or they make their own weird shit like DVB-T2 HD instead of sticking with the European standard. That said, Mahlzeit und viel Spaß noch mit dem Nostalgietrip 👀
It only updates pixels that change. So the smaller area that changes, the faster the update. We used this same technique in my first programming class, when programming on extremely underpowered hardware. Double buffer the output and only send changed pixels to the framebuffer.
It's displaying at 1024 x 768 at 6:21 (1024 x 768 @ 60Hz has an effective vertical refresh of 48.36kHz) Edit: Also it's very likely using a form of RLE if I'm guessing the date right. It's very easy to implement in a microcontroller with very constrained space using a two-word sliding window. Basically it goes left to right in an image buffer in the top of the connector, counts how many consecutive "tiles" of the image in that line have the same exact color, then send a packet down the wire to a receiver that reads Pixel Value + Number of Consecutive Pixels. It also looks as if it's hard locked to a scan frequency, so if it can't send all the data at once, it'll sweep back to the top and do it in a later scan.
Do note that there are several of large button batteries with various numbers that are inter-compatible. If it's the same size and voltage, it'll be fine to use. (I learned that when building my first PC last year.)
You can often (though not always) jam a (much more common) CR2032 into a CR2025 slot. The only difference is the physical thickness of the battery (3.2mm vs 2.5mm) so if there's enough tolerance in the slot it'll work.
Bit of a tip with 2025 batteries (since I have a Psion Series 3mx that also takes them). The sum total difference between a 2025 and a 2032 battery is that the 2032 is 0.7 millimetres (yes millimetres) thicker and has a correspondingly longer battery life. In literally all other aspects they're exactly the same. So if there's at least 0.7 millimetre's worth of give in the battery compartment you can use a 2032 just fine and it'll last longer too.
Back when having a PDA was still exciting with all its extra gadgets and addons. These days, PDAs either run all the same OS in a different shell or have a bitten off apple on its back.
I have the Handspring Visor version of this. Actually did buy it meaning to use it for presentations back in 2005 or so, as I was doing a panel at anime cons and got tired of lugging my laptop around all the time - but never actually presented with it.
I love how all the regulator agency stamps are all bit mapped to hell. I'm totally sure they went through all the proper channels to get all the proper approvals before putting this product on the market. ;-)
That slow screen refresh reminds me of playing a certain Uno card game on an underpowered 486SX25, but only when it was running in 256-color mode. The hi-color drivers handled it fine though.
yeah looks like it just screenshots it into memory in the controller then transfers it over, but it can be interrupted by taking more screenshots faster.
Damn.. PowerPoint is something I ain't crossed paths with in 25 years.. Took a little while to learn and then I was your go to bod for PP stuff for making slide shows and most definitely making normal stuff and some seriously bizarre stuff too for sh.ts & giggles. As for that SD ("Help.. I've come loose again") issue, a small 3D printed cradle would fix that as elastic bands would cover the screen.
5V @ 600 mA would be trivial for almost any USB power bank to supply, plenty offer up to 1.5 A to "stupid" devices (i.e. not stuff like Quick Charge or USB-PD).
It looks to be doing dirty-rectangles updates, rather than doing a full-display repaint. Clever given the bandwidth limitations of the link. It would have been nice to see them implement some JPEG compression or even reduced bit-depth to speed things up.
I connected my ppcs over USB to my pc ...not only for data but actually also for screen mirroring... Was absolutely amazing to play the win mobile games on a big screen
LGR, I wonder if you had heard of an old app called "MyMobiler"? I remember using it with my iPAQ rx3715 I had back in the day, and it allowed me to view and control it from my PC, including screen recording if I recall correctly!
Somewhere I have a VGA output dongle for my Dell Axim x51v, that provided real-time VGA output as a clone of the display. If you put the device in landscape mode then the 640x480 resolution matched up perfectly. It even had a jack for power injection so you could charge and use the output at the same time.
My Dell X51v PDA came with a simple VGA adapter, and that worked directly with full refresh rate on the monitor. That said, it was a 624Mhz CPU with a 3D-accelerated GPU. It could play Quake in 640x480 with 3D acceleration
I used SDIO extensively back in the early ‘2000s with my Palm Zire 72 PDA. It didn’t have Wi-Fi from the factory, so I used a SDIO wireless card to add the feature. I can 100% confirm that SDIO devices are very easy to accidentally pull out- since the slot retention mechanism isn’t designed for something protruding from the top.
I had a Toshiba PDA (e740 or e750) that came with a VGA dongle that plugged into the docking port at the bottom. Also provided a USB port, probably for charging. Not sure I ever tested the VGA output.
The original Apple Newton predates the SD card spec. But it did have PCMCIA slots, and you can get PCMCIA to SD card adapters. So with the right software, you could probably hack support onto hardware made in the early 90's.
Those were the days when you could spend hundreds of $$$ to make your PDA not quite a PC.
I did the same with a few tablets a while ago. I went through a handful of Atom-powered Windows tablets over the years, because they are just so versatile. A full (if slow) PC that fits into any bag? Yes please. These were good enough for programming, reading, writing, light gaming, anything a PC can. I did however notice that most of the software is of course not ideal for a touchscreen and programs like Touchmousepointer (which turns the entire screen into a touchpad so that you can use older software with small buttons) only gets you so far.
I got a small keyboard, mouse, various adapters, hubs, dongles and such. I could have just bought a late netbook or small notebook, but this was actually cheaper and more versatile, with better battery life than any of the other options, so it kind of made sense.
And yet Apple still does this... 70 bucks (cdn) for HDMI output dongle for an iPhone or iPad...
Not quite a PC, not quite a camera, not quite an iPod, not quite a game console - pretty much sums up the early to mid 2000s PDA experience.
That didn't stop me from owning half a dozen of these over the years.
@@gmcnewlook yeah except Apple's solutions are well designed and well implemented... even in 2009 they had realtime full resolution HDMI mirroring for iPhone. Yes it was an "expensive add on", but it just worked SO much better than products from their competitors. Just like the M1. 😉
@@dregenius well designed... lmao check out all "apple repair" examples, where products break BECAUSE of stupid design lol
This blows my mind even in 2021 🤯
same
I thought it was a new product for the "retro" market. I had no idea these existed. I've still got my Treo.
Most new phone has HDMI output...
@@fzr850 Maybe on the high end with an adapter, i can find 14 that were released last year that have it, all of which require an adapter. Thats out of 72 released in 2020.
@@fzr850 Sure, but that's not as cool in my eyes. Those phones are made with that feature in mind. The showcased device in the video is made to bring that feature to a device that don't have such a feature and that's way more interesting to me. The fact that it does it in a non-obvious way through an SD-interface makes it even more interesting.
Some SD-card slots can hold onto things put in there pretty well, even those of push-push release variety. There's a mechanism foreseen for that. That's the reason why SD-cards have a notch on them opposite the WP slider!
Looks pretty sophisticated actually. I’d guess it’s only redrawing the part of the image that changes.
And here I was looking forward for video presentations.
I always wanted some of these SD card addons for my Mio P350 Pocket PC...
(I still have it, and it still works!)
lol the screen refreshing constantly is very similar to the zx80s original quirk of the screen blanking out for a second everytime you press a key. Only about 20 years later haha.
Back in the day could see people using this device to display PowerPoint on a projector.
It most likely hooks into the video driver of Windows CE to know what portion of the screen has been redrawn and transfers that portion pixel by pixel via the SD bus which is just a simple but apparently very slow serial connection. It must do some double buffering because it doesn't slow down the refreshing of the PDA screen itself. I would be interesting to see if it can display full screen slideshows with PowerPoint.
With speeds as high as 2 seconds per frame!
I think you're close to being right how it works.
^ I think it's sending incremental screenshots, meaning it's sending only the changed pixels line by line starting from the top. It might be the Window$ infrastructure wasn't particularly robust even for Window$, like, maybe the OS didn't allow background softwares to have realtime access to the screen or to the pipeline resulting in what you see on the screen.
^ You can see that in 8:50-9:00 where it doesn't finish sending the old screen when you do something, which has to be to save the already slow narrow bandwidth, and most likely also to save the PDA's CPU. Pretty sure the CPU's pretty powerful for the period, but if you don't have to waste what you got ...
Vga capture for a bloody PDA!
ive had pocket PDAs some are bit laggy on the touch but that one seems pretty good they can be pain get use too when trying find things when looking to send emails with picture attachments haha
You really need to load PowerPoint and connect it to a projector so we can get a proper slide show demonstration.
They knew it was junk but what they ACTUALLY sold you was the use of the trademark “What’s Included” 1:03
Still, its defeated by the fact, that you can't use your SD card in parallel. Means, you need to transfer your data you want to show onto the internal memory every time. Same crap with the cam, making photos, then offloading them onto the SD card. Major inconvenience back then, absolute no go today.
I have two windows CE hand-held computers with VGA out. Fully mirrors the screen, and supports higher resolution in PowerPoint. One is 640x480, and the other is 800x600. Significantly better performance than this. One even runs a windows CE port of Doom. One has USB, and I'd get Wi-Fi over a PCMCIA card.
I would like to see adapters where u plug it in on the LCD socket and convert it to VGA/ HDMI signal
Does the scaling cause it to slow down ? Or is the 1x real time output?
Nice
would be interesting to see a video attempt to run on that!
The way those old PDAs handled video clips, I don't think this would be much of a downgrade. :P
@@stevef6392 Haha, so true, but would be interesting to see nonetheless... Just a tiny 240×180 ... I'm sure it would fail miserably...
its just a very low refresh rate, 1.0 Hertz seems about
Hi-octane fast-paced Soltaire action with an amazing refresh rate! Just when I thought it couldn't get crazier you switched to direct capture!
Getting a powerpoint presentation on a CD showing you how to use a VGA adapter for your Windows PDA is just about the most early 2000s thing possible.
The dongle/box contains the VGA signal generator (the PDA is too slow). There is a screen buffer which is polling the screen for changes and writing them via the SD interface to memory in the box. The box renders the screen at regular intervals from this memory. Pretty slick.
Good analysis. That's definitely what it looks like. Interestingly similar to modern video encoding only specifying the updated parts of the image.
@@Kyle-McGough : Ah, now that's part of the trick- the bits of the Win32 api that allow the program to explicitly specify what parts of the screen to update were part of Windows 95, and were in turn based on high-performance programming practices in DOS. Chances are that Solitaire updates faster because it _doesn't_ do a call to the screen-clear function first, while the other program _does_ make that call, allowing Solitaire to reduce the data that has to be sent through the SDIO bus.
And yes, I'm aware this device won't be running a Windows 95 version- my poorly-expressed sentiment is that it was already standard practice to _not_ update the entire screen.
@Bob Sacamano I doubt that the mirroring software has access to the bus used by the screen
@Bob Sacamano The PDA screen is not an SPI device. Nowadays it's common for such screens to be SPI compatible, but back then it was not the time yet for this, the displays were all parallel drive, and it was common to share RAM data bus and display bus and you basically enable the display and then do DMA RAM reads into nowhere to scan them out, and there's a helper chip to help form the H and V strobes for the display.
You should try to find a Dell Axim X50v or x51v PDA. Those suckers had a 624 MHz processor (faster than the original iPhone) and OpenGL support with its own video RAM. :D
Could it run glquake?
I have got one of those lol (x51v)
Or one of the late model HP Classic series. Paid 5 bucks for one a few years ago, even now they are still worth 30+ times that. 480p screen (high res for WM) and wifi and specs that (if I remember right) rival the X51v.
There were VGA output cables sold for the X50V and X51V PDAs that connected through the docking port and I believe they didn't have the screen redraw limitations that this SD adapter has
The HP hx4700 was the best at the time. It had the same 624MHz processor, plus a big 4.0" screen and a little touchpad mouse at the bottom, and a CF card slot. And it still looks awesome.
I love the fact that these PDA products were essentially "Smart Phones" without a phone. It's truly amazing to see how far we have come, but in such a small amount of time.
Honestly I have to remind myself that I took my school work in on floppy disks because USB storage was ruinously expensive- that was only like 15 years ago or so. Crazy.
Some of them even had a phone...I remember a friend of mine had a Palm OS Treo device that had phone features around the same time I had my Palm Tungsten E2.
@@willm5032 I got a 128mb usb stick for Christmas one year as the big gift when I was a kid. It was way fast than burning cds, and blank cds were actually pretty pricy too.
@@ionstorm66 Haha I remember those days. I invested in a bunch of DVD RW disks (which could be rewritten many times) which, in hindsight were kind of useful and also fucking stupid in eaqual measure
@@willm5032 ... In 2005?
Why is it all I can think of doing with that thing is hooking up a hilarious amount of video adapters to it. SDio to VGA, VGA to DVI, DVI to HDMI, HDMI to DisplayPort.
Remember to go to composite video and finally a video capture device. :P
@@jmalmsten Knew I was forgetting something!
@@jmalmsten don't forget composite to a television with a RF camera in front of it
After you're converted to DisplayPort you obviously need a DP->VGA adapter.
Also keep in mind you can't connect your average VGA-DVI and DVI-HDMI adapters together (DVD-D vs DVI-A).
@@televisionandcheese
Dangit! forgot about that step. I fail at videography
SD... VGA... PDA... This is exactly how technology-lingo sounds to our parents :D
Giga, mega, whatsits
So the SD is connected to the PDA which is connected to the VGA?
RCA...VGA...SDA..PDA...
🤣 yup
Though, this stuff is so old, we ARE the parents now
I had a Toshiba e750 back when it was new - transflective screen (way easier to read in the sun), CF and SDIO slots, built in wi-fi, and best of all a module that clicked to the bottom that gave it native USB and VGA outputs. One of the amusing things is that it was sold with the fact it had an SDIO slot as a big feature, while it already had most of those features built in. I think the camera from the previous video might have been useful (assuming it worked on a Toshiba, as opposed to some kind of HP-only lock in).
edit: oh yeah, and the VGA was real-time, not this smearfest.
I'm wondering if the refresh selection option has something to do with it redrawing only certain portions of the screen (fast speed) vs perhaps redrawing everything every time (slow speed).
Holy crap. This is literally Powerpoint Presentation performance.
A literal slide show when the whole screen updates.
@@Redhotsmasher Powerpoint transitions..without the need for Powerpoint transitions!
I worked with a guy in college around 2002-2004 who had a PDA and he was basically got to have MS Office wile in class. I straight up told him why not just use a laptop, which I knew he had one already.
at least he need a reason to use pda
It would be really cool if there was a dock for it that had some USB ports and VGA out, it would run Windows Mobile in a desktop interface similar to windows XP.
The pixelated CE logo on the box really inspires confidence on the product.
Now we need USB over SDIO, or even HDMI LOL
Somewhere i have a freaky Smartmedia to USB adapter. It only supports drives up to 256 megs too. Slow as heck as well.
My guess is that it has a framebuffer that gets sent "real time" to the VGA output. But the framebuffer is updated by scanning the screen line-by-line. Updating the framebuffer might be the bottleneck (SDIO limitation?), so it is faster when only parts of the screen are updated.
Also my guess is that medium speed refresh would not scan the lines, but update them "frame-by-frame", so there's not "tearing" (like seen in the solitaire portion). I wonder what the slow speed would be like? Slower, but without the scanning-type update? Maybe the dongle has enough memory to do some kind of double-buffering v-sync? Could you give it a try, Clint?
Comparing to early e-readers, this is fairly acceptable. Newer e-readers support partial screen refreshes, which allow them to be used as a note-taking tablet.
I had a ton of fun when I made my first step into the "smartphone / Pocket PC" world with my HTC P4350 aka the T-Mobile Wing back in 2008. Being able to reflash the OS with unofficial updates, slimmed down Roms, tweaking the registry and running custom scripts, discovering XDA, etc, was a thrill back then. I wish Microsoft would get their stuff together and relaunch Windows OS on Mobile. I think it would succeed if .executed properly.
Looked at the price of these on ebay, and, **nope!!!** :P
You mean Clint didn't cause a market run on these already!?
I bet someone could make a cheap replacement using a raspberry pi pico!
@@clebbington not everyone likes to mess around with that stuff, is the issue, I certainly don’t.
It's funny because these things were like pennies before, almost no one wanted them
This still blows my mind that this was 15-ish years ago. We've come so far already! Who knows what we will see in the next 15 years?
SD bus is too slow !
That’s very obvious, and i don’t think an sd card was ever made with video streaming in mind, also i don’t think you can magically turn any sd card input from any device into vga, enen not once the software is installed because everything from the generated ppu chip needs to be physically connectible with the sd card bus, if it doesn’t you can’t stream fotos or videos trough it.
I don't think it's even running the SD bus at its full performance - in fact, not even the 12.5MB/s "default speed" mode seems to be fully utilized. Possibly just 1-bit SPI mode, rather than proper SDIO.
A rotated image with 3x zoom (option was there but not shown in the video ...) would nearly perfectly fit the screen. I wish I had one of these things 15 years ago. Would have made me the king of slideshows ;-).
Make it more like 20.
@@MegaManNeo Over here in Germany we're adapting tech five years later ;-). You are right btw, just recalled using my first PDA with SD-slot in 2002.
@@NightRidersUrbex Or they make their own weird shit like DVB-T2 HD instead of sticking with the European standard.
That said, Mahlzeit und viel Spaß noch mit dem Nostalgietrip 👀
But what about a PowerPoint slide?
Man, that would really mess with my PowerPoint star transitions
"Greetings. Blerbs."
Badabing badaboom.
Subscribe. Oh!
I'm almost equally as impressed with your monitors control panel, I've never seen one rotate
It only updates pixels that change. So the smaller area that changes, the faster the update.
We used this same technique in my first programming class, when programming on extremely underpowered hardware. Double buffer the output and only send changed pixels to the framebuffer.
There was a 3x zoom option that appeared when you had it rotated left and right
Think that would fill the screen great
It's almost like Slow Scan TV, except a lot less impressive.
that smell is a reason to collect this old stuff lol
Sometimes. Most of the time it just smells like lint and has tonnes of pubes inside.
It's displaying at 1024 x 768 at 6:21
(1024 x 768 @ 60Hz has an effective vertical refresh of 48.36kHz)
Edit: Also it's very likely using a form of RLE if I'm guessing the date right. It's very easy to implement in a microcontroller with very constrained space using a two-word sliding window. Basically it goes left to right in an image buffer in the top of the connector, counts how many consecutive "tiles" of the image in that line have the same exact color, then send a packet down the wire to a receiver that reads Pixel Value + Number of Consecutive Pixels. It also looks as if it's hard locked to a scan frequency, so if it can't send all the data at once, it'll sweep back to the top and do it in a later scan.
Do note that there are several of large button batteries with various numbers that are inter-compatible. If it's the same size and voltage, it'll be fine to use.
(I learned that when building my first PC last year.)
You can often (though not always) jam a (much more common) CR2032 into a CR2025 slot. The only difference is the physical thickness of the battery (3.2mm vs 2.5mm) so if there's enough tolerance in the slot it'll work.
Can't wait to show people my vacation photos that I took with my PDA.
Bit of a tip with 2025 batteries (since I have a Psion Series 3mx that also takes them). The sum total difference between a 2025 and a 2032 battery is that the 2032 is 0.7 millimetres (yes millimetres) thicker and has a correspondingly longer battery life. In literally all other aspects they're exactly the same. So if there's at least 0.7 millimetre's worth of give in the battery compartment you can use a 2032 just fine and it'll last longer too.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's hooked to responding to Windows OnPaint events. Based on how it redraws sections, that seems likely.
Back when having a PDA was still exciting with all its extra gadgets and addons.
These days, PDAs either run all the same OS in a different shell or have a bitten off apple on its back.
Some of 'em support proper docking stations and have native HDMI-out and can use a 'desktop' UI... but still not very practical.
@@ReptilianLepton these days you can even go wireless display. It's handy in a pinch but definitely not for getting work done.
To be fair, they all run it a bit differently for different types of people.
Unlike today... Where you have the choice between Android and IOS. Instead of WindowsCE and IOS.
pop a USB-C dock onto them and off you go!
I have the Handspring Visor version of this. Actually did buy it meaning to use it for presentations back in 2005 or so, as I was doing a panel at anime cons and got tired of lugging my laptop around all the time - but never actually presented with it.
Is this Oddware on Blerbs?
Just when I thought connecting wirelessly the smartphone to a TV was cool I find that the idea is not new... Good days...
Dell AXIM Pocket PC’s have built in VGA
I love how all the regulator agency stamps are all bit mapped to hell. I'm totally sure they went through all the proper channels to get all the proper approvals before putting this product on the market. ;-)
When you put it in rotated mode there was a 3x mode. I wish you showed that.
Who else was waiting for him to actually give a PowerPoint presentation?
I'd say something about you just rawdogging a capture of your youtube suggestions but my right bar is basically the same
Oh man...
Yup
Imagine you plug it into windows and ita just like "Display adapter installing" lol
Clint could you throw a random old school game review in the mix sometime soon? Miss them.
Wow this would have been extremely useful for my old Palm video. No idea this existed.
I think you meant "thanks for blerbin'"
It doesn't run Doom, but it'll _walk_ Doom!
TIL that the SD card standard is/was pretty versatile
That slow screen refresh reminds me of playing a certain Uno card game on an underpowered 486SX25, but only when it was running in 256-color mode. The hi-color drivers handled it fine though.
I mean, I was expecting this kind of thing from this device, but I was still disappointed.
Sadness...
Try with a hx4700 and see if it's any faster.
shame sdio didnt take off
yeah looks like it just screenshots it into memory in the controller then transfers it over, but it can be interrupted by taking more screenshots faster.
48.3 kHz is the typical horizontal scan rate for 1024x768 (60hz). c:
I have the PCMCIA version of this
Damn.. PowerPoint is something I ain't crossed paths with in 25 years.. Took a little while to learn and then I was your go to bod for PP stuff for making slide shows and most definitely making normal stuff and some seriously bizarre stuff too for sh.ts & giggles.
As for that SD ("Help.. I've come loose again") issue, a small 3D printed cradle would fix that as elastic bands would cover the screen.
Wonder if you could make a battery pack to replace the charger? The voltage and current seem low enough to handle battery power.
5V @ 600 mA would be trivial for almost any USB power bank to supply, plenty offer up to 1.5 A to "stupid" devices (i.e. not stuff like Quick Charge or USB-PD).
What? Did you not have a proper PPT on your Pocket PC? For shame! LOL :D
How does it look running Doom?
That was the early version of screen casting! Many phones made in the past 5 years have this built in nowadays.
Expecting to hear "yes you did" in Duke's voice after Clint says "I turned it on"
I forgot how much I miss playing Bubble Breaker in monochrome mode, with a stylus, on my HTC Touch HD.
Before AirPlay/Screen mirroring exists. But it’s kinda slow for this addon.
It looks to be doing dirty-rectangles updates, rather than doing a full-display repaint. Clever given the bandwidth limitations of the link.
It would have been nice to see them implement some JPEG compression or even reduced bit-depth to speed things up.
I connected my ppcs over USB to my pc ...not only for data but actually also for screen mirroring...
Was absolutely amazing to play the win mobile games on a big screen
You want to make gameplay footage of SimCity 2000 for Pocket PC's?
This is pretty cool but I'm holding out for the SD card to TI-83 GRAPH LINK/Pontiac CANbus adapter...
LGR, I wonder if you had heard of an old app called "MyMobiler"? I remember using it with my iPAQ rx3715 I had back in the day, and it allowed me to view and control it from my PC, including screen recording if I recall correctly!
Cool! Public Display of Affection on a VGA monitor! I know that was a terrible pun, but couldn't resist! Awesome upload as always Clint! :)
Somewhere I have a VGA output dongle for my Dell Axim x51v, that provided real-time VGA output as a clone of the display. If you put the device in landscape mode then the 640x480 resolution matched up perfectly. It even had a jack for power injection so you could charge and use the output at the same time.
DIdn't catch this in my sub box. Bell was clicked and everything. Thanks youtube
My Dell X51v PDA came with a simple VGA adapter, and that worked directly with full refresh rate on the monitor. That said, it was a 624Mhz CPU with a 3D-accelerated GPU. It could play Quake in 640x480 with 3D acceleration
I used SDIO extensively back in the early ‘2000s with my Palm Zire 72 PDA. It didn’t have Wi-Fi from the factory, so I used a SDIO wireless card to add the feature.
I can 100% confirm that SDIO devices are very easy to accidentally pull out- since the slot retention mechanism isn’t designed for something protruding from the top.
I had a Toshiba PDA (e740 or e750) that came with a VGA dongle that plugged into the docking port at the bottom. Also provided a USB port, probably for charging. Not sure I ever tested the VGA output.
Review that weird SCSI color graphics for Mac Plus.
The original Apple Newton predates the SD card spec. But it did have PCMCIA slots, and you can get PCMCIA to SD card adapters. So with the right software, you could probably hack support onto hardware made in the early 90's.