one thing most people don't know about vinyl stick on surfaces is that it has 2 kind of glue. one is the temporary weak glue that most people think is the only one and the other glue is heat activated. you first stick the vinyl around where it best fit then use hairblower or low heat heatgun to make it permanent. also if you don't use heat it often wrinkles whenever you put something heavy on top
I actually did that with a hair dryer! It's just that on the edges the grain of the MDF doesn't provide a very smooth surface for the vinyl to stick to, so even the hairdryer couldn't solve the peeling problem at the corners.
@@UsagiElectric when i last build something similar i first used acrylic universal filler, then smoothed it with sand paper and then clean with wet sponge to pull out all dust but i also wraped edges of vinyl under, from top side over the edge to the bottom... and now that i think about it it was 10 years ago. still the guitar amp i covered is highly used and even after that time still look ok, a bit beaten up but vinyl is not pealing but i didn't use mdf as a base but some kind of chip board with smooth surfaces so it might also help anyway good luch with the event, i be chearing you on from the other side of the globe
@@UsagiElectric Paint the edges of the mdf with Elmer's glue, let it dry, sand it a bit, and wrap the Vinyl around the edge and stick it to the bottom. You're going to have the thing apart most of the time since people will ask to see inside, anyway.
Man, I wish I had known to watch all of these videos before VCF East. These videos are great, and it was really a pleasure to talk to you there. Thank you again for taking all the time to talk to me and my daughter, and for building the community that she has found a home in.
Usagi, your channel is addictive! I'm in my mid-60's, and grew up on the HP 2000, 21MX and IBM System 360 & 370. Eventually, I grew into the CP/M world. I had a Altos, then an OSM, and did a bunch of early text-based financial programming in C and a 4GL language called Dataflex. I moved into the PC world early, and for the last 30+ years, I have been a network engineer/architect, and am now retired.I speak fluent Cisco and Juniper, and made a very comfortable living building Ethernet networks over the recent decades. Anyway, I am fascinated by your work in the Centurion and PDP systems, and love watching you resurrect these systems, the same generation of which I cut my teeth on. Watching you work brings me back to the early 70's sitting in front of my KSR33 and KSR35 teletypes, punching away on that noisy keyboard and paper tape punch/reader. That being said, I have one simple question. You worked very hard on the Hawk drive(s), building, rebuilding, fixing, re-fixing. My question is, why didn't you just use the Finch drive? It seems like it would have fit into your "portable" (loose interpretation) Centurion, and would offer better speed and certainly better portability. I sincerely hope you reply, but if you don't I understand. You're a busy guy! :) Respect, my friend! Lots of respect!
Thank you! That's awesome that you got to use these machines in their heyday! Being a product of the 1980s, I just barely missed the large scale computing era. The main reason I focused on the Hawk instead of the Finch is because I really wanted to recreate the original CPU4 style machine with a single Hawk in it. This machine has a few minor differences, but dimensionally, it should be within an inch in all axes. Also, the Finch at the moment is a giant unknown and I was afraid if I dumped time into restoring it and it failed, I wouldn't have had time to fall back on the Hawk. The Finch definitely will be getting some work though just as soon as we get back from VCF!
AFAIK DOOM was written for MS-DOS. In fact it's been running perfectly on my 486 DX33 back in the day - and is even playable on 386 systems as I happened to be able to acquire a small collection of retro PCs. Dunno where that requirements were taken from but a Windows-OS is definitly not required.
I was hoping to head to VCF East and see this and visit relatives in the area, but one of my wife's friends is having a wedding that weekend. Oh well. Great job getting the mini Centurion together, good luck at VCF, and best wishes for a safe trip!
If you match the paint color under one type of lighting, such as sunlight, it won't necessarily match under a different kind of light such as fluorescent or LED light, unless you've matched the actual reflectivity spectrum. So it might not be a bad idea to find out what kind of lighting VCF will be using, and make sure you get a match under that specific lighting, so it doesn't have to be a surprise when you actually get there.
Grats!! Unfortunately, my schedule made it impossible to hit VCF East. If your planning any other excursions, please post them on RUclips! I'd absolutely love to see this thing in action.
Ben Prunty musical background! I applaud your excellent taste, sir! Glad you were able to get the little beast ready for the show, and dang do I wish i could make it not only to meet you and see the mini-Centurion live, but Bil Herd is going to be there! Talk about an 8-bit legend!
Ben Prunty is a legend, and he's a double legend because the Chromatic T-Rex album is and always will be free! Bil Herd is actually going to be moderating the talk on Friday that I'll be a part of with Adrian's Digital Basement, FranLab, and Jeri Ellsworth, it should be awesome. It's a shame we'll miss you there, but the talk should be live streamed, so perhaps you can catch it after the fact!
@@UsagiElectric Oh I definately will be looking for the stream! I live on the wrong coast so there's pretty much no chance of seeing you live for me so I will have to live vicariously through video. Have a great trip!
You are an inspiration to me. Some day I want to create a period correct late 1960's 8 bit minicomputer minimalist system. I would like to make a TTL CPU, 2K bytes RAM (maybe even magnetic core) and a single platter hard disk. I want to do some hands-on computer science experimentation with hardware and software design choices and determine specifically by direct experience what sort of user experience and applications could have been created.
I feel you on the panel SNAFU: Measure twice, cut once, then realize you really should have measured one more time. And it doesn't matter that no one will ever notice unless you point it out to them, it ill always be the first thing your eye goes to. But still a fantastic job, though. Now you've gotta lug that thing up to the Dallas meet-up again so we can all see and hear it run from the Hawk. Safe travels and all that.
Amazing stuff. Really incredible how far you have come since the beginning! Quite literally computer archaeology, but the fossils come to life at the end. :D
Omedetou gozaimasu! So very well done, man. "What's the recipe?" someone asked. "10 percent inspiration, 90% perspiration, and 100% imagination," was my reply. "Wait, that's 200%" "Yup. Your point is?" Have fun at VCF. You certainly worked hard enough getting to this point.
Oh god, paint matching. I’ve been down that road and torn my (limited) hair out. I’ve found most (decent) automotive paint places will be able to scan an original part and mix up a pressure pack for you. My local one has started getting used to me bringing in all kinds of random parts for scanning.
You built a replica case around the guts of an original system. Nice work! I like the removeable side walls. I have a HP1000/A200 that has no rack. I think I will also get a bare frame and add some MDF plates at the top and the sides. Its a shame that there is no company in the world that makes good looking racks.
Last month I emailed you about several computers I have, (Ti-990/10 with a Hawk Drive and 2 ModComp J1's). I also have 2 IBM-AT ISA type boards that emulate a Ti-990/10. There probably were not many of these boards made as they became available near the EOL for the Ti-990/10 series machines. I would really like to get these computers into the hands of someone who would restore and make use of them. Great work on the Centurion!
The blue ( on my screen ) looks similar to Ford Engine Blue, which would be a start for where to go for color matching. The panels do look good, the color you chose looked ( once again, on my screen ) needed a drop of green to get closer to the other color.
I may be off due to it being a video and colour settings may be different, but your blue paint needs a little green to get it where it needs to go. I don't work with paint, but I'm a printer and I mix inks all of the time. I'd put a little Pantone Green equivalent in that. Also, you may want to put some filter material on those fans. Lifting air from the floor is bound to bring a lot of dust into your case.
With VCF Southwest happening this year as well, it's down to managing time I can be away from home, unfortunately. Perhaps next year we'll hit VCF Midwest instead of East!
This is going to be awesome, I can't wait until I get to go to VCF on Sunday and see this thing in person. Happy Easter, here's wishing you a safe and enjoyable drive.
Amazing progress. I have been watching from part 1 (joined a little before that to learn more about vacuum tubes) and it has been an amazing and interesting ride. One of the few channels that is an instant-watch on upload and I never missed an episode since. Thanks for your amazing content, and the bonus content at the end is always something I share with my wife. :)
Great work man! I can't wait to see this beast in person with my kids on Sunday! Maybe I'll bring those Wangwriter disks I have? I don't think they are for that model but who knows? Maybe it'll work? If not you have some possibly usable floppies.
hi you come up with very good points on the wood look i working on something that would need a go looking back panel for my brenell pre amp like you said i had a 2 inch tape deck came in the back of a 7 seat car he just got it in note in the uk the doors to homes here are very small not far of taking door of so you tape deck fans the otari mx 80 is as big as you can get in a uk front door
Shot in the dark... I had a buddy in college in the late 70's who had a blue Ford Pinto... Looks close to the color of the Centurion... I think Ford called it "Grabber Blue".. Another friend in the 80's had a Ford Maverick with the same color... Lived in So Cal at the time, and was the perfect car for visiting Tijuana... Nobody wanted to steal it... lol Plymouth had "True Blue", and GM had "Nassau Blue"...
RS-232 isn't networking? I wish I'd known that when i ran SLIP over modems at an early ISP. ;) Seriously, though, i bet something could be rigged if folks are interested. Or just run a BBS. Hm. UUCP email?!
"Can it run DOOM? No! Of course not!" The internet: *hold my beer* The TI99 was a good example there because it also used a chip intended for minicomputers. If the TI-99 can run DOOM of some sorts, it means that it's possible to do it on the PDP-11.
The PDP-11/83 should totally be able to run some form of Doom being a 16-bit machine at 18MHz with a Matrox QRGB and DEB41 graphics combo. The Centurion on the other hand is going to be a proper battle to get Doom onto. We need to build a graphics card from scratch, which isn't impossible and I think we're starting to understand enough of the OS to even be able to write essentially drivers for custom cards. Where there's a will, there's a way to run Doom!
@@monad_tcp The way the Centurion and many other very old computers worked was, they often did not have a video card or even a keyboard port; they just had serial ports, and all the input/output was done via serial consoles, via actual hardware terminals (as opposed to "modern" terminal emulators running on computers that have video cards and keyboards). So these old hardware terminals supplied the keyboard and either a CRT monitor or a more or less typewriter-like printer (in the very beginning, _10 PRINT "Hellorld"_ used to literally print the text on actual paper). The Centurion used so-called glass terminals, which were no longer paper-based, but either way, if you tried to use the Centurion's I/O, you wouldn't be using the Centurion at all; you would just be using a terminal. The Centurion used ADDS (Applied Digital Data Systems) terminals which were painted and badged to match the machine. The real question is, would the Centurion's serial terminal capabilities allow fullscreen character access? If it can run something like a vi port, it should be able to produce arbitrary text mode screen updates without scrolling. Probably not fast enough for a DOOM port though. That said, if anyone knows of any serial terminal setup that _is_ fast enough for ASCII art FPS gaming, please let us know!
@@ropersonline I was thinking more about using the bus and talking to it as IO, not the serial muxer. It would be more like giving a GPU to the machine. But it would also do more than being a mere framebuffer. It would need to be at least a floating point coprocessor to be able to run Doom. Even having other circuitry to accelerate the render portion of the Doom engine. I wonder if that would be cheating. Probably not.
You might be able to add a transparent cache to the disk to speed it up. Either outboard or in the OS. Given the advantage of a hdd over floppy, the reliance on disk would show large speedups from a cache compared to cpu overclocking (a guess).
Hi, ……. Fabulous fabulous series …. But I think I missed one … can’t find the one where you fix the printer that you picked up originally … keep up the great works absolutely fantastic…
Glad to see it together and working. I wish I had noticed how I am not that far away from VCFEast sooner, and was able to arrange getting over that way to attend it.
Some paint stores can match paint from a sample. Take one of the panels to them. Alternately, of course, you could repaint all the panels from that machine. They would match, just not the other machine.
If I were you I would try to have modems and 2 fixed lines at home to call and do remote terminals from other devices through phone lines. You can also setup a virtual/private phone switch/PBX to avoid using fixed lines.
Now you just need to find a Qantel system. It was a similar mini-computer system around the same era. It actually was used by NFL teams to do predictions. But the bread and butter was accounting, general contractors, and hotel management.
Rambling? Maybe, but still fascinating!! With your friends involved and your persistence most of your stretch goals could happen! Have fun at VCS East. I am wondering if a builders supply company could mix up paint that would match. It might be less expensive and would work well on any wood painting for sure. It might also work on metal…?
As an emulation of pre-IDE or pre-SCSI hard disks is pretty challenging, you still can emulate the controller together with a disk. This should be a way easier task. The same was done with ST-506 disks for some systems, in particular ACSI2STM for the Atari ST series.
It was cool finally seeing this in person at VCF East. That was a fun time. You don't realize how much bigger these things are than contemporary tech until you can literally feel and see them move. I, of course, had to ask Dave for the trolls, "How come you didn't just emulate it with a Raspberry Pi?" 🤣 Obviously I wasn't being serious.
Great video, as usual. Looking at the comparison between your wood grained vinyl and the original, it looks like the original may be plastic laminate (i.e., Formica), not real wood. You should be able to tell easily if you take a close look. Wish I could make VCF East this year, but alas, no time.
The video mentioned the idea of a custom graphics card. To solve the issue of "emulating the hawk drive" I am thinking you don't just emulate the drive itself but design a new board to plug in to the system that makes the system think it is a drive it can use. No fancy timing should be involved if the operating system is just issuing simple read/write commands to the card. For networking there is the ENC28J60 Stand-alone Ethernet Controller with SPI that might work. You would have to look at what is available to convert RS-232 to SPI but this might provide a means towards getting network support. Have fun at VCF.
I am a painter. If you want the panels to match, you need to add yellow ochre or raw sienna in small amounts, and maybe a little raw umber, you can get tints in a cup at your local paint store. Be careful and add slowly. Your biggest enemy is adding too much. Use a heat gun to view your finished color in swatches before doing the whole panel. Use 220 grit sandpaper and a circular random orbital sander to smooth down the surface. Then use a tack rag. If you really want a smooth surface, rent a sprayer using a .412 spray tip. For ultimate results, spray everything that is blue in one batch (including the old panels.) then they are sure to match. Don't sand the old panels (I see some texture), instead use Wil-Bond or liquid sander. Remember to use PG29tape (not blue tape!) You will need a whole gallon to get this into the sprayer.
A quarter inch *or a centimeter* of clearance… It might not seem much, but an American converting the Freedom-units to metric (eg _sensible_ units) is much appreciated 😊
23:40 I bet old network cards that used the MII protocol could talk it over serial lines, If I'm not mistaken, that's how network cards used to be made, they had a PHY layer which did the signaling and electronics and a MAC layer which was basically a serial protocol of sorts, so you indeed would talk to the MAC layer through serial lines. Then it was all integrated into one single card/device and connected to a bus driver/controller like IBM PC bus, so you could send ethernet frames and it would do all its magic. I have experience with implementing a driver through reverse engineering for an old Conexant network chip and that was how it worked, that job was for a POS (point of sale) system. I don't know how other manufacturers create network cards nowadays, but back in the old days I guess that's how they did it.
looks good but why is it GREEN inside lol. Maybe use some sticky black foam on a double sided tape (for sealing something) to close the gaps between the parts. You should find something in the hardware store but not sure how its called but I have that. You are real serious about the project with the color and the spacing - nice. And it's much better with the new PSUs, never trust an old capacitor that is big as your arm LOL Happy bunny easter day
Given the relatively small market for these back in the day (say, compared to the likes of IBM and Digital) you must be close to being a World authority on the Centurion system - certainly in the top tier of experts.
Lovely mini-Centurion project and nice FAQ too :). As for networking, you may try adding an Arduino with an Ethernet shield and a RS232/UART interface but then you'd have to write some middleware translating the raw serial data to network protocols. It ain't gonna run Doom as long as there's no C compiler for Centurion. Plus, as you mentioned - graphics. Major no-go... Good luck at VCF!
Thanks Keri! We'll see what the boffins on the Discord come up with when we get to the point of networking stuff, they're all way smarter than I am for sure!
Hmm, good point about the C compiler. Doing actual networking on the Centurion could be done with SLIP (serial-line IP) or PPP (point-to-point protocol), but all that existing code is written in C. So figuring out a way to port that code to the Centurion platform work probably be a good first step. Once you get there, then it would be trivial to add an ESP32 to put it on a wifi network.
Nitpick: I think the game on TI was ray casting and not ray tracing. Castle Wolfenstein for example was made with ray casting. Its a vertical scanning technique and it as possible to get ray casting running on old and slow systems
I feel like everyone I follow (except David Murray) is close to VCF East or Midwest. Is anyone going to Southwest this year? So glad you got this thing running, it’s a beauty!
@Usagi Electric - Don't forget that developer who has those low hours Digital (DEC) PDP-11 machines with EVERY OPTION that he wants to donate to you or a museum. This guy wrote software for many big clients of DEC as well as the Govt. These are complete fully featured systems with the tape drives, hard drives and terminals/printers, and all software.
Raycasting! Common mistake amongst non graphics nerds 😊 They're similar, in that they both at a very high level work by following the path of light rays backwards (i.e. from the camera out to the world, rather than from light sources to the camera). But where raytracing works over the entire pixel grid of the screen, and once it determines what geometry is visible in that pixel, can do fancy things involving casting further secondary rays to determine how that geometry is lit/shadowed, reflections if it's a mirror, etc., raycasting is much more limited: only one ray is cast per vertical column, usually they are limited to being cast into a 2D grid of squares, and there are no secondary rays. Basically, for each column, you're figuring out how far away the nearest vertical, 90-degree, grid-aligned wall is, and that distance determines how high to draw that column segment. A common optimisation, as you can see in that TI99 demo, is to divide the screen more coarsely than one column per pixel, trading casting fewer rays for lower horizontal resolution.
Another option to painting and label printing would be to have a custom "wrap" made. Provided you got the right people to apply it, I thing the effect would be pretty cool.
It looks beautiful. If you had'nt pointed out the faults, I would'nt have noticed. I wonder if there is a BASIC interpreter for the Centurion? That would make writing software so much easier. :)
Sorry to miss you. If you have any questions or something you want to see on the Centurion let me know and I can maybe incorporate it into a future episode!
I'm sure I'm far from the first person to say this by now but for attempting drive emulation you wouldn't really want to do it by directly twiddling signals from software, it would be more a case of either figuring out how to use/abuse some hardware peripheral (like SPI) to do most of the heavy lifting, or using something a little fancier like an RP2040 with its PIO stuff to do it more "properly".
The point of old stuff is that it is old stuff. Yes, we could put a modern engine (or electric drivetrain) in our 1916 fire engine, but what would be the point of it then? Similarly, the Hawk drive is part of what makes the machines worth conserving.
Talk with "8-bit guy" (he'll be on the panel with you @ VCF). Maybe he can hook you up with one of the "Vera" FPGA based video solutions they're using in his Commander X-16 computer. As I understand it, it has a pretty simple interface for interacting with it at a low level, and it's an 8-bit computer, so might be relatively doable to interface with.
I'm sure James Sharman (weirdboyjim on RUclips) wouldn't mind you using the VGA resolution graphics card design from his own-design CPU. He even has a simple version of Wolfenstein graphics working on it. I believe the default clock speed on his CPU is around the same speed as the Centurion, but the graphics are surprisingly smooth. As if you didn't have enough projects!
And PLEASE do something to put the heads into a safe mode before triving cross country with the system. Would HATE to see the drive crash again on the way here thanks to NJ's numerous potholes!
Of course! When the drive is off, the voice coil retracts and unloads the heads from the platters. They ride up on little bearings to keep them from banging into each other as well. There's a simple cotter pin that is kept on the side of the magnet that you can slot into the armature that locks the heads in place and prevents them from sliding forward. Should keep the heads safe and sound for the drive up!
@@UsagiElectric One would think, but I NOTHING is certain going up against NJ roads... I've broken the strut mounts on my explorer like 5 times in the 10 years I've lived here thanks to the crap roads.
@suckerpinch tried to emulate an old NES with a Raspberry PI, and it was a nightmare to just get it half right. Even an old ROM will answer within 70ns and the timings will be always perfect, reading and switching an IO pin on a PI takes 10-20 times as much.
Sometimes I just ask myself what I am doing here, watching this channel about ancient computers that I never heard before, because in my country we basically jumped from typewriter to 486 and pentiums (Brazil and its military dictatorship things from 60s to 90s)... Well, keep going fedding my curiosity!
Just for clarification, we had some apple 2 clones, one Amiga clone, MSX clones. For enterprises, I really don't know, but I assume that probably large enterprises used IBM or another mainframe-kind-of systems.
Everyweek i say a little prayer that this week, work will start on the printer, just looking at it makes my heart beat faster
Very soon!
The printer and the Finch are the very next items on the list after we return from VCF!
one thing most people don't know about vinyl stick on surfaces is that it has 2 kind of glue. one is the temporary weak glue that most people think is the only one and the other glue is heat activated. you first stick the vinyl around where it best fit then use hairblower or low heat heatgun to make it permanent.
also if you don't use heat it often wrinkles whenever you put something heavy on top
I actually did that with a hair dryer!
It's just that on the edges the grain of the MDF doesn't provide a very smooth surface for the vinyl to stick to, so even the hairdryer couldn't solve the peeling problem at the corners.
@@UsagiElectric when i last build something similar i first used acrylic universal filler, then smoothed it with sand paper and then clean with wet sponge to pull out all dust but i also wraped edges of vinyl under, from top side over the edge to the bottom... and now that i think about it it was 10 years ago. still the guitar amp i covered is highly used and even after that time still look ok, a bit beaten up but vinyl is not pealing
but i didn't use mdf as a base but some kind of chip board with smooth surfaces so it might also help
anyway good luch with the event, i be chearing you on from the other side of the globe
@@UsagiElectric If you can find edging that matches the top surface, you could leave the top alone and just apply some stiff edging around the sides.
@@UsagiElectric Paint the edges of the mdf with Elmer's glue, let it dry, sand it a bit, and wrap the Vinyl around the edge and stick it to the bottom.
You're going to have the thing apart most of the time since people will ask to see inside, anyway.
Man, I wish I had known to watch all of these videos before VCF East. These videos are great, and it was really a pleasure to talk to you there. Thank you again for taking all the time to talk to me and my daughter, and for building the community that she has found a home in.
Usagi, your channel is addictive! I'm in my mid-60's, and grew up on the HP 2000, 21MX and IBM System 360 & 370. Eventually, I grew into the CP/M world. I had a Altos, then an OSM, and did a bunch of early text-based financial programming in C and a 4GL language called Dataflex. I moved into the PC world early, and for the last 30+ years, I have been a network engineer/architect, and am now retired.I speak fluent Cisco and Juniper, and made a very comfortable living building Ethernet networks over the recent decades.
Anyway, I am fascinated by your work in the Centurion and PDP systems, and love watching you resurrect these systems, the same generation of which I cut my teeth on. Watching you work brings me back to the early 70's sitting in front of my KSR33 and KSR35 teletypes, punching away on that noisy keyboard and paper tape punch/reader. That being said, I have one simple question. You worked very hard on the Hawk drive(s), building, rebuilding, fixing, re-fixing. My question is, why didn't you just use the Finch drive? It seems like it would have fit into your "portable" (loose interpretation) Centurion, and would offer better speed and certainly better portability. I sincerely hope you reply, but if you don't I understand. You're a busy guy! :) Respect, my friend! Lots of respect!
Thank you!
That's awesome that you got to use these machines in their heyday! Being a product of the 1980s, I just barely missed the large scale computing era.
The main reason I focused on the Hawk instead of the Finch is because I really wanted to recreate the original CPU4 style machine with a single Hawk in it. This machine has a few minor differences, but dimensionally, it should be within an inch in all axes. Also, the Finch at the moment is a giant unknown and I was afraid if I dumped time into restoring it and it failed, I wouldn't have had time to fall back on the Hawk.
The Finch definitely will be getting some work though just as soon as we get back from VCF!
Have a safe drive, and hope the event turns out great! 😁😁
Thanks!
AFAIK DOOM was written for MS-DOS. In fact it's been running perfectly on my 486 DX33 back in the day - and is even playable on 386 systems as I happened to be able to acquire a small collection of retro PCs. Dunno where that requirements were taken from but a Windows-OS is definitly not required.
I was hoping to head to VCF East and see this and visit relatives in the area, but one of my wife's friends is having a wedding that weekend. Oh well. Great job getting the mini Centurion together, good luck at VCF, and best wishes for a safe trip!
If you match the paint color under one type of lighting, such as sunlight, it won't necessarily match under a different kind of light such as fluorescent or LED light, unless you've matched the actual reflectivity spectrum. So it might not be a bad idea to find out what kind of lighting VCF will be using, and make sure you get a match under that specific lighting, so it doesn't have to be a surprise when you actually get there.
Fantastic video. Your content is consistently high quality and you've managed to preserve some genuinely fascinating hardware.
Grats!! Unfortunately, my schedule made it impossible to hit VCF East. If your planning any other excursions, please post them on RUclips! I'd absolutely love to see this thing in action.
Ben Prunty musical background! I applaud your excellent taste, sir! Glad you were able to get the little beast ready for the show, and dang do I wish i could make it not only to meet you and see the mini-Centurion live, but Bil Herd is going to be there! Talk about an 8-bit legend!
Ben Prunty is a legend, and he's a double legend because the Chromatic T-Rex album is and always will be free!
Bil Herd is actually going to be moderating the talk on Friday that I'll be a part of with Adrian's Digital Basement, FranLab, and Jeri Ellsworth, it should be awesome. It's a shame we'll miss you there, but the talk should be live streamed, so perhaps you can catch it after the fact!
@@UsagiElectric Oh I definately will be looking for the stream! I live on the wrong coast so there's pretty much no chance of seeing you live for me so I will have to live vicariously through video. Have a great trip!
I look forward to watching the Centurion do its thing in person. See you there!
Огромная работа!!! Восхищаюсь!!!
Большое спасибо!
it turned out so well! i wish i coulkd go to VCF tbh 😭 hope u have a fantastiuc time and many ppl will be able to experience the centurion!
Wow!!! Huge respect to your skills. None of which I have
Thanks!
But it's less about skills and more about pure stubbornness, haha. Just refuse to quit and a lot of interesting things can start to happen!
You are an inspiration to me. Some day I want to create a period correct late 1960's 8 bit minicomputer minimalist system. I would like to make a TTL CPU, 2K bytes RAM (maybe even magnetic core) and a single platter hard disk. I want to do some hands-on computer science experimentation with hardware and software design choices and determine specifically by direct experience what sort of user experience and applications could have been created.
I feel you on the panel SNAFU: Measure twice, cut once, then realize you really should have measured one more time. And it doesn't matter that no one will ever notice unless you point it out to them, it ill always be the first thing your eye goes to.
But still a fantastic job, though. Now you've gotta lug that thing up to the Dallas meet-up again so we can all see and hear it run from the Hawk.
Safe travels and all that.
Thanks!
This little guy will absolutely be at VCF Southwest coming up later this year in DFW, so definitely a chance to see and use it in person.
Amazing stuff. Really incredible how far you have come since the beginning! Quite literally computer archaeology, but the fossils come to life at the end. :D
Thank you so much!
So, I didn't realise you've got two of these things. Madness - in the best possible was!
pretty sure I will be at the VCF on Friday, looking forward to it!
Awesome, see ya there!
Safe trip.. And love the Bunnies :) :)
I'll see you there! Can't wait!
Awesome, looking forward to catching you there!
@24:40 It could do the DOOM splash screen. That’s a start. 😊
Omedetou gozaimasu! So very well done, man.
"What's the recipe?" someone asked.
"10 percent inspiration, 90% perspiration, and 100% imagination," was my reply.
"Wait, that's 200%"
"Yup. Your point is?"
Have fun at VCF. You certainly worked hard enough getting to this point.
Can't wait to see it and you next weekend! I'll be there on Saturday.
Beautiful machine
What a nice birthday gift, a new usagi electric video!
Happy Birthday!
Can't wait to meet you at VCF. Looking forward to seeing your mini-centurion system! You definately put the "mini" in Minicomputer :)
This is one of the most beautiful technical things I have seen. ❤
I'll be at VCF on Saturday, can't wait to see it.
That chair-run was adorable tbh. lol
Mini-Centurion is kinda cute too actually. Funny how something so big looks small when you know what it was.
Oh god, paint matching. I’ve been down that road and torn my (limited) hair out.
I’ve found most (decent) automotive paint places will be able to scan an original part and mix up a pressure pack for you. My local one has started getting used to me bringing in all kinds of random parts for scanning.
“So, if you’re going to be at VCF East…” (can you give me a hand unloading this beast from my SUV?) 😂
WOW, those metal fabrication skills !!!!
You built a replica case around the guts of an original system. Nice work! I like the removeable side walls. I have a HP1000/A200 that has no rack. I think I will also get a bare frame and add some MDF plates at the top and the sides. Its a shame that there is no company in the world that makes good looking racks.
Last month I emailed you about several computers I have, (Ti-990/10 with a Hawk Drive and 2 ModComp J1's). I also have 2 IBM-AT ISA type boards that emulate a Ti-990/10. There probably were not many of these boards made as they became available near the EOL for the Ti-990/10 series machines. I would really like to get these computers into the hands of someone who would restore and make use of them. Great work on the Centurion!
Looking at that streamer roundtable line-up it seems that you are in fantastic company! Good luck and have a great one!
I feel a bit like a newbie hanging around legends, but it should be awesome!
@@UsagiElectric I don't doubt that for a second, but I'm sure you'll do great!
The blue ( on my screen ) looks similar to Ford Engine Blue, which would be a start for where to go for color matching. The panels do look good, the color you chose looked ( once again, on my screen ) needed a drop of green to get closer to the other color.
I may be off due to it being a video and colour settings may be different, but your blue paint needs a little green to get it where it needs to go. I don't work with paint, but I'm a printer and I mix inks all of the time. I'd put a little Pantone Green equivalent in that.
Also, you may want to put some filter material on those fans. Lifting air from the floor is bound to bring a lot of dust into your case.
Man, I wish you were coming to VCF Midwest.
With VCF Southwest happening this year as well, it's down to managing time I can be away from home, unfortunately. Perhaps next year we'll hit VCF Midwest instead of East!
This is going to be awesome, I can't wait until I get to go to VCF on Sunday and see this thing in person. Happy Easter, here's wishing you a safe and enjoyable drive.
Amazing progress. I have been watching from part 1 (joined a little before that to learn more about vacuum tubes) and it has been an amazing and interesting ride. One of the few channels that is an instant-watch on upload and I never missed an episode since. Thanks for your amazing content, and the bonus content at the end is always something I share with my wife. :)
Ditto. Top comment. Centurion #1 was my first video watch of this channel . One of the few channels I watch the content immediately and not later.
Me too.
Great work man! I can't wait to see this beast in person with my kids on Sunday! Maybe I'll bring those Wangwriter disks I have? I don't think they are for that model but who knows? Maybe it'll work? If not you have some possibly usable floppies.
hi you come up with very good points on the wood look i working on something that would need a go looking back panel for my brenell pre amp
like you said i had a 2 inch tape deck came in the back of a 7 seat car he just got it in note in the uk the doors to homes here are very small not far of taking door
of so you tape deck fans the otari mx 80 is as big as you can get in a uk front door
wow you have all the tools for sheet metal work and more
Shot in the dark... I had a buddy in college in the late 70's who had a blue Ford Pinto... Looks close to the color of the Centurion... I think Ford called it "Grabber Blue".. Another friend in the 80's had a Ford Maverick with the same color... Lived in So Cal at the time, and was the perfect car for visiting Tijuana... Nobody wanted to steal it... lol
Plymouth had "True Blue", and GM had "Nassau Blue"...
Vinyl you just have to paint the MDF with 2 coats of PVA paint, to make the surface a little more smooth. Then the vinyl will adhere a lot better.
RS-232 isn't networking? I wish I'd known that when i ran SLIP over modems at an early ISP. ;)
Seriously, though, i bet something could be rigged if folks are interested. Or just run a BBS.
Hm. UUCP email?!
Epic, wish I could visit you at VCF
"Can it run DOOM? No! Of course not!"
The internet: *hold my beer*
The TI99 was a good example there because it also used a chip intended for minicomputers. If the TI-99 can run DOOM of some sorts, it means that it's possible to do it on the PDP-11.
The PDP-11/83 should totally be able to run some form of Doom being a 16-bit machine at 18MHz with a Matrox QRGB and DEB41 graphics combo. The Centurion on the other hand is going to be a proper battle to get Doom onto. We need to build a graphics card from scratch, which isn't impossible and I think we're starting to understand enough of the OS to even be able to write essentially drivers for custom cards.
Where there's a will, there's a way to run Doom!
would it be cheating if someone made a DOOM TTL render and plugged it in ? so the computer just input/output to the part that does the render.
Who cares about Doom, does it play Zork 1-3?
@@monad_tcp The way the Centurion and many other very old computers worked was, they often did not have a video card or even a keyboard port; they just had serial ports, and all the input/output was done via serial consoles, via actual hardware terminals (as opposed to "modern" terminal emulators running on computers that have video cards and keyboards). So these old hardware terminals supplied the keyboard and either a CRT monitor or a more or less typewriter-like printer (in the very beginning, _10 PRINT "Hellorld"_ used to literally print the text on actual paper). The Centurion used so-called glass terminals, which were no longer paper-based, but either way, if you tried to use the Centurion's I/O, you wouldn't be using the Centurion at all; you would just be using a terminal. The Centurion used ADDS (Applied Digital Data Systems) terminals which were painted and badged to match the machine. The real question is, would the Centurion's serial terminal capabilities allow fullscreen character access? If it can run something like a vi port, it should be able to produce arbitrary text mode screen updates without scrolling. Probably not fast enough for a DOOM port though. That said, if anyone knows of any serial terminal setup that _is_ fast enough for ASCII art FPS gaming, please let us know!
@@ropersonline I was thinking more about using the bus and talking to it as IO, not the serial muxer.
It would be more like giving a GPU to the machine.
But it would also do more than being a mere framebuffer.
It would need to be at least a floating point coprocessor to be able to run Doom.
Even having other circuitry to accelerate the render portion of the Doom engine.
I wonder if that would be cheating. Probably not.
You might be able to add a transparent cache to the disk to speed it up. Either outboard or in the OS. Given the advantage of a hdd over floppy, the reliance on disk would show large speedups from a cache compared to cpu overclocking (a guess).
See you there!!
Hi, ……. Fabulous fabulous series …. But I think I missed one … can’t find the one where you fix the printer that you picked up originally … keep up the great works absolutely fantastic…
Great! ))) just great ))))
Glad to see it together and working. I wish I had noticed how I am not that far away from VCFEast sooner, and was able to arrange getting over that way to attend it.
Some paint stores can match paint from a sample. Take one of the panels to them. Alternately, of course, you could repaint all the panels from that machine. They would match, just not the other machine.
I love the fpga idea! So so much.
Your videos and projects are just so cool 👍 Enjoying them from Denmark. All the best with VCF, Per
I would like to know more about your wicked cars!!! Awesome work BTW.
Das wird eine Weile halten! 👍🏻
If I were you I would try to have modems and 2 fixed lines at home to call and do remote terminals from other devices through phone lines. You can also setup a virtual/private phone switch/PBX to avoid using fixed lines.
Now you just need to find a Qantel system. It was a similar mini-computer system around the same era. It actually was used by NFL teams to do predictions. But the bread and butter was accounting, general contractors, and hotel management.
Rambling? Maybe, but still fascinating!! With your friends involved and your persistence most of your stretch goals could happen!
Have fun at VCS East.
I am wondering if a builders supply company could mix up paint that would match. It might be less expensive and would work well on any wood painting for sure. It might also work on metal…?
As an emulation of pre-IDE or pre-SCSI hard disks is pretty challenging, you still can emulate the controller together with a disk. This should be a way easier task. The same was done with ST-506 disks for some systems, in particular ACSI2STM for the Atari ST series.
Man, This has been a Killer Adventure
Congrats on getting that thing looking so Mint
It was cool finally seeing this in person at VCF East. That was a fun time. You don't realize how much bigger these things are than contemporary tech until you can literally feel and see them move.
I, of course, had to ask Dave for the trolls, "How come you didn't just emulate it with a Raspberry Pi?" 🤣 Obviously I wasn't being serious.
Great video, as usual. Looking at the comparison between your wood grained vinyl and the original, it looks like the original may be plastic laminate (i.e., Formica), not real wood. You should be able to tell easily if you take a close look. Wish I could make VCF East this year, but alas, no time.
Great project, keep it going! :)
The video mentioned the idea of a custom graphics card. To solve the issue of "emulating the hawk drive" I am thinking you don't just emulate the drive itself but design a new board to plug in to the system that makes the system think it is a drive it can use. No fancy timing should be involved if the operating system is just issuing simple read/write commands to the card. For networking there is the ENC28J60 Stand-alone Ethernet Controller with SPI that might work. You would have to look at what is available to convert RS-232 to SPI but this might provide a means towards getting network support. Have fun at VCF.
@8:40 Get a *Pantone* colomatch palette guide and you should be able to match to color.
I am a painter. If you want the panels to match, you need to add yellow ochre or raw sienna in small amounts, and maybe a little raw umber, you can get tints in a cup at your local paint store. Be careful and add slowly. Your biggest enemy is adding too much. Use a heat gun to view your finished color in swatches before doing the whole panel. Use 220 grit sandpaper and a circular random orbital sander to smooth down the surface. Then use a tack rag. If you really want a smooth surface, rent a sprayer using a .412 spray tip. For ultimate results, spray everything that is blue in one batch (including the old panels.) then they are sure to match. Don't sand the old panels (I see some texture), instead use Wil-Bond or liquid sander. Remember to use PG29tape (not blue tape!) You will need a whole gallon to get this into the sprayer.
:)
enjoy VCF!
A quarter inch *or a centimeter* of clearance…
It might not seem much, but an American converting the Freedom-units to metric (eg _sensible_ units) is much appreciated 😊
A centimetre is actually closer to half an inch (12.7mm) than a quarter inch (6.35mm).
23:40 I bet old network cards that used the MII protocol could talk it over serial lines, If I'm not mistaken, that's how network cards used to be made, they had a PHY layer which did the signaling and electronics and a MAC layer which was basically a serial protocol of sorts, so you indeed would talk to the MAC layer through serial lines.
Then it was all integrated into one single card/device and connected to a bus driver/controller like IBM PC bus, so you could send ethernet frames and it would do all its magic.
I have experience with implementing a driver through reverse engineering for an old Conexant network chip and that was how it worked, that job was for a POS (point of sale) system. I don't know how other manufacturers create network cards nowadays, but back in the old days I guess that's how they did it.
For the top panel, I would have that made by a cabinet shop. They can put nice edging on the panel. Then stain. Finish with Urethane low luster.
to do some networking I think you could try the Kermit protocol over RS-232 to transfer files
3M super 77 for vinyl over MDF. Two coats for best adhesion.
looks good but why is it GREEN inside lol. Maybe use some sticky black foam on a double sided tape (for sealing something) to close the gaps between the parts. You should find something in the hardware store but not sure how its called but I have that.
You are real serious about the project with the color and the spacing - nice. And it's much better with the new PSUs, never trust an old capacitor that is big as your arm LOL
Happy bunny easter day
This makes the fellow protogens happy
Given the relatively small market for these back in the day (say, compared to the likes of IBM and Digital) you must be close to being a World authority on the Centurion system - certainly in the top tier of experts.
Lovely mini-Centurion project and nice FAQ too :). As for networking, you may try adding an Arduino with an Ethernet shield and a RS232/UART interface but then you'd have to write some middleware translating the raw serial data to network protocols.
It ain't gonna run Doom as long as there's no C compiler for Centurion. Plus, as you mentioned - graphics. Major no-go...
Good luck at VCF!
Thanks Keri!
We'll see what the boffins on the Discord come up with when we get to the point of networking stuff, they're all way smarter than I am for sure!
Hmm, good point about the C compiler. Doing actual networking on the Centurion could be done with SLIP (serial-line IP) or PPP (point-to-point protocol), but all that existing code is written in C. So figuring out a way to port that code to the Centurion platform work probably be a good first step. Once you get there, then it would be trivial to add an ESP32 to put it on a wifi network.
Nitpick: I think the game on TI was ray casting and not ray tracing. Castle Wolfenstein for example was made with ray casting. Its a vertical scanning technique and it as possible to get ray casting running on old and slow systems
I feel like everyone I follow (except David Murray) is close to VCF East or Midwest. Is anyone going to Southwest this year? So glad you got this thing running, it’s a beauty!
If it was me I'd paint the old panels with the same can you used for the new panel - job done.
👍Nice!
@Usagi Electric - Don't forget that developer who has those low hours Digital (DEC) PDP-11 machines with EVERY OPTION that he wants to donate to you or a museum. This guy wrote software for many big clients of DEC as well as the Govt. These are complete fully featured systems with the tape drives, hard drives and terminals/printers, and all software.
9:55 nailing from the back side heh
Raycasting! Common mistake amongst non graphics nerds 😊 They're similar, in that they both at a very high level work by following the path of light rays backwards (i.e. from the camera out to the world, rather than from light sources to the camera). But where raytracing works over the entire pixel grid of the screen, and once it determines what geometry is visible in that pixel, can do fancy things involving casting further secondary rays to determine how that geometry is lit/shadowed, reflections if it's a mirror, etc., raycasting is much more limited: only one ray is cast per vertical column, usually they are limited to being cast into a 2D grid of squares, and there are no secondary rays. Basically, for each column, you're figuring out how far away the nearest vertical, 90-degree, grid-aligned wall is, and that distance determines how high to draw that column segment. A common optimisation, as you can see in that TI99 demo, is to divide the screen more coarsely than one column per pixel, trading casting fewer rays for lower horizontal resolution.
(I'm Depthbuffer on Patreon btw, but don't have my db RUclips account active on this phone)
You're totally right, good catch!
They sound so similar, I always get them backwards in my head.
Another option to painting and label printing would be to have a custom "wrap" made. Provided you got the right people to apply it, I thing the effect would be pretty cool.
It looks beautiful. If you had'nt pointed out the faults, I would'nt have noticed.
I wonder if there is a BASIC interpreter for the Centurion? That would make writing software so much easier. :)
Wish I could come to VCF. I'm in the neighborhood (Connecticut) but unfortunately work commitments will keep me away. :(
Sorry to miss you. If you have any questions or something you want to see on the Centurion let me know and I can maybe incorporate it into a future episode!
I'm sure I'm far from the first person to say this by now but for attempting drive emulation you wouldn't really want to do it by directly twiddling signals from software, it would be more a case of either figuring out how to use/abuse some hardware peripheral (like SPI) to do most of the heavy lifting, or using something a little fancier like an RP2040 with its PIO stuff to do it more "properly".
The point of old stuff is that it is old stuff.
Yes, we could put a modern engine (or electric drivetrain) in our 1916 fire engine, but what would be the point of it then?
Similarly, the Hawk drive is part of what makes the machines worth conserving.
I hope to See You There..
Look for tolulene glue. Paint both the mdf and the vaneer and it will never come off. Good tutorials are out there.
Talk with "8-bit guy" (he'll be on the panel with you @ VCF). Maybe he can hook you up with one of the "Vera" FPGA based video solutions they're using in his Commander X-16 computer. As I understand it, it has a pretty simple interface for interacting with it at a low level, and it's an 8-bit computer, so might be relatively doable to interface with.
I'm sure James Sharman (weirdboyjim on RUclips) wouldn't mind you using the VGA resolution graphics card design from his own-design CPU. He even has a simple version of Wolfenstein graphics working on it. I believe the default clock speed on his CPU is around the same speed as the Centurion, but the graphics are surprisingly smooth. As if you didn't have enough projects!
And PLEASE do something to put the heads into a safe mode before triving cross country with the system. Would HATE to see the drive crash again on the way here thanks to NJ's numerous potholes!
Of course!
When the drive is off, the voice coil retracts and unloads the heads from the platters. They ride up on little bearings to keep them from banging into each other as well. There's a simple cotter pin that is kept on the side of the magnet that you can slot into the armature that locks the heads in place and prevents them from sliding forward. Should keep the heads safe and sound for the drive up!
@@UsagiElectric One would think, but I NOTHING is certain going up against NJ roads... I've broken the strut mounts on my explorer like 5 times in the 10 years I've lived here thanks to the crap roads.
@suckerpinch tried to emulate an old NES with a Raspberry PI, and it was a nightmare to just get it half right. Even an old ROM will answer within 70ns and the timings will be always perfect, reading and switching an IO pin on a PI takes 10-20 times as much.
FPGA is the way to fly for this application
Sometimes I just ask myself what I am doing here, watching this channel about ancient computers that I never heard before, because in my country we basically jumped from typewriter to 486 and pentiums (Brazil and its military dictatorship things from 60s to 90s)... Well, keep going fedding my curiosity!
Just for clarification, we had some apple 2 clones, one Amiga clone, MSX clones. For enterprises, I really don't know, but I assume that probably large enterprises used IBM or another mainframe-kind-of systems.