Making a New Coleco Adam Internal PSU
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- Опубликовано: 19 окт 2024
- I got my Coleco Adam without a power supply, So, I made my own!
This video is sponsored by PCBWay: www.pcbway.com/
If you want to see more about this project the whole thing is open source and available here: github.com/AkB...
There is a v0.2 branch in that repo for the next revision, I will be getting those made soon and once they have been validated I will be production on those for sale like I do with the ATX2PCjr kits!
Despite the low side switching issue, I'm very happy with how this turned out. I made a lot of gambles in this design in testing a lot of new techniques for me and it worked great. I have the power switch sorted out in the next version's design so that will be fixed pretty easily. Getting the two SMPS's working was much more important.
On that note, these are not going to be easy to assemble for most people and cleaning them properly is very important. If I make them available as a DIY kit then it will be with a big disclaimer with no real guarantee.
Playlists of more stuff like this:
Computers: • Computers
Electrical Engineering: • Electrical Engineering
Repairs: • Repair
1980s: • 1980s
Other Links
RUclips: / akbkuku
Github: github.com/AkB...
Thingiverse: www.thingivers...
Patreon: / akbkuku
Discord: / discord
Do you have any suggestions for v0.2? Let me know here! I'm holding off on the orders for a few days in case someone has a good idea I should add.
Maybe put the db9 port and barrel jack on the other side so the power supply can hang out the side easier? If you haven't already.
I could potentially do that, but then the heat generating components would be on the bottom significantly reducing cooling efficiency. It may be able to handle that though, I'm not sure. I didn't think to measure the overall efficiency of the board, if I do that then I'll know what the total heat dissipation is and can get a better sense of how detrimental that would be.
I could add additional footprints to the board allowing you to choose where they are mounted. I could probably make an option when ordering to choose what kind you need and just solder on those part before each order is shipped.
If you're gonna be working on a power supply, it'd *definitely* be worth making a simple dummy load IMO. Won't cost you much at all.
That way, *you're* in charge of the current, and you're not at the mercy of whatever messy, noisy charging circuit is in a test device lol
I made mine with spare parts: An op amp, decent MOSFET, couple resistors, a pot, and a chunky heatsink. Nothing fancy, don't even need a panel meter since you have a good DMM!
Super simple: ruclips.net/video/8xX2SVcItOA/видео.html
I'd suggest a fuse on power input at least, status LED on the lines would also be nice for quick visual indication. Also reverse polarity protection is nice to have on input voltages.
@@leisergeist I'm planning on making a test board for checking voltage, ripple, current, etc that can be connected between the PSU and the Adam to power it externally for validation before I ship orders. I could probably add a custom load circuit to that as well to test independent of the Adam. This is a great idea, thanks!
My grandfather still has one of these hooked up to a TV in his basement. Colecovision had some pretty decent arcade ports and was my first exposure to games like Zaxxon and Phoenix.
It makes me really happy to see content creators get sponsors from companies that relate to their audience, not just clash of clans or world of warships. And on top of that, getting sponsored to help do things for the channel and not just shilling is also a really nice thing to see since you deserve the support for making such good content
My subscriptions made me expect you to say PCBWaaaaay.
Wow! I know this video is a couple years old but I just found your channel as a YT recommendation.
I had the Colecovision and played the hell out of Donkey Kong and Zaxxon. My neighbor had a Intellivision and we played some tank battle game for months on end. I’m 53 now and this brought back some good memories! There are so many pieces of equipment I wish I had kept lol.
Now, that's a great implementation of sponsorship - proving what it's worth!
Here's a question: Does the Adam still generate an EMP when powered up with the modern power supply, or was that an issue unique only to the printer? I seem to recall in the past that was the case.
That was unique to the printer. When I made a run of custom Adam power supplies a few years ago I was able to confirm this.
@@rey_1178 if coleco fixed that power issue from the printer in the first place then cassette tapes wich were left inside the adam computer wouldn’t have been wiped out by accident,but with this new power supply that should be fixed now altrough it’s 39 years too late.
My man couldn’t be bothered to answer that question 😂
The only thing any of us actually watched the video to find out and as always he omits anything truly tech savvy...
Oh man, I had the Adam Computer growing up. I think I got it maybe in 1986 or 87, it was on clearance for, I believe, $200 - which was my max limit for Christmas. I only ever had a monochrome monitor however, so seeing it here in color is the first time I've ever seen it color. It was cool to have the big daisy wheel printer since I could type stuff up in middle school, at a time when no one was doing anything using computers at home (at least not where I lived). The downside of getting a discontinued computer that late in it's life was that there was no software. As for the EMP - humm, I mean I guess it's legit, but I know I never took the tape out and it never failed. Additionally I don't recall that warning at all. Anywho it was a giant computer that I kept well into the 2000s before throwing it away while moving. I wish I hadn't done that now. I replaced the Adam with a C64 in like 1988, and I used that C64 as my only computer until I built a PC in 95.
to answer some questions people have been asking here... yes, you could make yer own data pack cassettes for the adam from ordinary tapes, and the adam pretty much came with one half of its own DDP Home Piracy Kit™, missing four key components:
- 2 jigs, one for drilling holes into the top of a standard audio cassette to allow it to be inserted into the data drive and a jig for drilling holes into the source DDP at the bottom so you could insert it into a standard cassette deck. you could easily make these jigs with a drill, a marker, a hacksaw, pliers, and some angle metal commonly found at hardware stores.
- a dual cassette deck for dubbing
- blank 90 minute audio cassettes
an adam usually came with 3 tapes... buck rogers, smartbasic and a blank data pack.
make the jigs, drill the holes, put the tapes into a dubber, and 90 minutes later, you had yer newly-minted data pack for a fraction of the cost of the official data packs. when the computer was new, the DDP tapes were about $10 a piece (sometimes more) from Toys R Us or other retailers. usually you wanted to use decent quality normal bias tape. the local Adam users group i belonged to loved Sony brand tapes since they held up well to the abuses the tape drive would put the tapes thru.
believe you could reformat the newly copied tape with smartbasic. the built-in word processor might've been able to do that as well. can't remember.
those of us who used the sony tapes rarely had one snap or wear out too quickly, but it did happen. the lubrication strips inside the sony tapes could actually hold up to the abuses of the higher speeds, but the sony tapes would get noisier over time. then again, the original DDP tapes would too.
there were guys in the Adam user group i belonged to that had made high speed duplication rigs using the adam tape drives. don't remember if they'd copy the audio signal straight across or not, but i'm pretty sure they did. much faster than duping the tapes at the standard compact cassette speed.
other minutiae ...
imsc, the adam tape drive ran at 80 IPS when seeking and 20 IPS when in read mode (may be a little high on the seek time but it was stupidly fast, and the tape drive made horrible noises when in that mode, as depicted in this video). they were slower than floppy drives of the time, but were a DAMNED sight faster than yer standard computer cassette deck of the time that ran at 1 7/8 IPS (standard compact cassette tape speed).
i think the DDP shells were made of lexan.
there was no "rewinding" necessary when using an adam DDP. just put the DDP in the drive, close it, and pull the "computer reset" switch.
there was indeed a floppy disk drive made for the Adam. it came later, just before the system was orphaned by Coleco. you could buy them new from a place in Cherry Hill, NJ (M.W. Ruth? that's where i got mine i think), and they cost about as much as the system did -- $500. they were a single-sided 5 1/4" PC floppy drive with a custom controller built into them. adam floppies stored just over half of wot the data packs did -- i believe it was 160k on the floppies vs 256k (or thereabouts, probably have that number wrong) on the DDP tapes.
allegedly there's an SD interface for the adam nowadays, as well as hard drive interfaces, and of course sd multicarts for the colecovision side. the system can still be useful and fun, much like other platforms. people are still keeping it alive. and that makes me smile.
Your recollections appear to be spot-on, as they mesh with my own. Tape and disk capacities, lexan cased DDP's DDP speeds (even bought stuff from MW Ruth, like MMSG's Super Disk Copy). I have a pair of the Orphanware-modified 720K drives installed in the Coleco housings, equipped with firmware that allows them to identify as 3rd and 4th disk drives to SmartBasic
I have also dubbed DDP formatting to audio cassette. Used mostly Sony C-60's (but I did start with the device you hook up between the tape drives and motherboard to allow format copying). At one point I even formatted one of those "reel" cassettes that looked like a reel-to-reel deck. Didn't use them for much though--during rewind/fast-forward operations, the sheet-metal "reels" started swapping visible static discharges. Didn't harm any data or the drives, but I rarely used them out of caution after that. Besides, I had a stack of DDP's from American Design Components in northern NJ (that mostly went unused since I had the floppy drives by then)
I stil have my (exansion module 3) ADAM. I believe I need to bypass a crushed contact on the edge connector to get it working again, but space to set it up got scarce, so its components are mostly at opposite ends of the house.
Haha, the timing on this one for me is pretty funny, I've just started to get into stumbling my way in on PCB designing, and one of my goals is to create a TI-99/4A Internal PicoPSU board, with potentially some extra features, so this is good inspiration :)
Nice
0:20 Colecovision was NOT released in 1978, it was released in 1982!
Woops! Where on earth did I read that that it stuck in my head. Thank you for pointing that out!
I figured it was just a slip of the tongue.
I was just about to post this same comment. The ColecoVision was my first console and it definitely wasn't 1978 when I got it.
Tech Tangents there were Coleco Telstar consoles in 1978... but definitely not the Colecovision
@@TechTangents Probably just confused it with the Magnavox Odyssey II that was released in 1978.
that clock you fixed, looks so well in your setup.
Just like to let you know that the older atx 20 pin psu's with a white wire will provide -5v.
Older ATX PSU's (and AT before that) had a -5V rail for the ISA bus... when ISA expansion slots became obsolete, they stopped including the white wire on pin 20.
ATX Power actually has Standards with version numbering.
v1.2 had it as optional, and v1.3 removed it entirely.
Sometimes older units that have that rail, and good capacitors, are worth hanging on to. Retro Gamers need them to power motherboards with ISA slots for old DOS SoundBlaster cards.
DOS doesn't play nicely with PCI slot soundcards.
Any standard XT / AT supply will also have this. It was used for the 4116 DRAM chips in some of the early PCs and clones, and was kept for the system bus to keep compatibility with IBM's 16/64K RAM expansion cards and other peripherals which used it.
Excellent video, thank you.
Ah, the Coleco ADAM - one of my favorite retro computers. A wonderful mix of really, really, clever design and absolute nonsense.
I can't help but think an engineering sample was shown to marketing at Coleco and it was pronounced "good" without any further development.
FWIW: I did near enough the same mod for my ADAM, although not as nicely designed:
-12v power brick
-Barrel jack for power placed so it would be obscured if the printer is connected
-Rocker switch for power tastefully selected to match the system positioned round the back
-Big space you noted filled with a 12v DC to ATX PSU. Not a PICO PSU, but something similar I had on hand
-Addition of a regulator for -5v (my PSU didn't have this)
-A resistor to add a little pre-load to the PSU's 12v line
...and done. Actually no. It took a bit of head scratching on my part to figure out that if the two 12v supplies for the electronics and DDP's had any kind of connection the computer won't boot!
In the end I routed the 12v from the PSU to the logic and the 12v from the power brick to the DDP lines respectively. Thankfully the 12v on my PSU wasn't just passed through from the power brick...
...Of course that means I *must* use a 12v brick regardless of the PSU's capabilities so labeling both the computer and the power brick I selected was important - some day this computer will hopefully belong to someone else so I wanted to be sure my mod(s) are as fool-proof as possible.
From the point of a retro computer enthusiast I think the ADAM is a wonderful machine and it's quirks just add to the charm. Such a shame Coleco didn't develop it properly and didn't re-think some of the crazier decisions...
...because I've designed my own expansion cards the thing that really gets me is those darn expansion slots:
-Why is every one different?
-Why does the pinout positioning make no sense at all?
-Why are some of the external expansion lines missing from *all* of the internal slots? (really annoying)
-Why only three slots in such a large case?
This machine was marketed as an Apple II killer... maybe taking a similar approach to the expansion slots would have been a good idea!
Back in the day, my neighbor picked up one of these second hand and asked me to help him load games with it. I was impressed with the Tape drive , because it could load faster than the C64 could load from a floppy. There just wasn't enough software for it. He only had the software it came with and there wasn't anything else.
Wow that brings back memories for me “the Adam”. My dad bought me one in 1984 for Xmas the first computer I owned. I thing I think must people do not realize about the Adam was that was compatible with the apple 2 cause I use to do my apple pc homework on my Adam pc at home. I was 14 when I got the Adam. I loved it. The one I had come with the dual cassette drive and we bought the extra memory upgrade.
If I remember correctly there was at some point programs that would allow you to format regular tapes. So you could just drill the extra holes.
There was an aftermarket device that you connected between the two tape drives that would clone the format onto a drilled cassette. I later found that if you placed one of these cassettes into a dual-cassette recorder, you could clone the format between ordinary cassettes--if the sound levels were high enough, the Adam would read/write to the cassette. Regular data packs had 256 blocks, arrayed on both sides of the tape, with a directory block midway through track one. Game packs placed the directlry at the beginning .
This video is excellent. Takes me back. I started learning how to type on one of these in 1995. It had a mode where you could basically use it as an electronic typewriter. There was also a typing tutor tape. Thanks for the stroll down memory lane!!!!!!
in reality the adam tape drive could use normal casettes, a company in my country designed an interface to use the digital data drive on the zx spectrum they do the software to control the drive. Broke the pins on the DDD that make inserting a normal tape impossible, on software they do their own formatting. The amazing thing is that using the drives on their software they work wonderfully to this day and on a 90m tape you get like 250k of storage. Also the controller have an snapshot switch that when press it dump the complete spectrum memory to a file.
Great now I can dig out may old Adam and power it up. Picked it up 15 years ago. Without the printer. Great to see this project come to life. Thx.
Nice work, I restored an Adam last year making it look brand new with the retro-bright treatment, This is a great idea for a spare base and keyboard set I have.
I'm so jealous of people who understand electronics, that is all just wizardry to me.
It's never too late to learn.
I have a limited understanding of programing and electronics, but I still indulge it it and try my damnnest to understand.
Watch videos on how the SNES hardware works or the Saturn hardware if you wanna just be fucking blown away and confused. But if you pay attention and try your best to make sense of things, you'll start to follow along with them, even if you don't get it.
it's easy when you start small
@@ManofCulture I've only noticed the guy on the motor age channel helps me to understand it more than most, but when people start talking about pull up and pull down resistors my eyes glaze over.
The "Adam Interal Power Supply"
AAddaamm IInntteerrnaall
AIPS
I saw the lengthy montage and then noticed the typo saying "oh nooo!!!!"
Adam "Infernal" power suppply :)
I'm amazed. I have a similar setup. I used an AT power supply soldered to a db9 connector. Great video, thanks.
Our man, Mr. Ak Bk Kuku the third is moving up in the world! Excellent of you to get a sponsorship from a company that will directly relate to the video!
This is awesome. The printer had one annoying quirk in of itself. The thing was a daisywheel. It had more in common with a typewriter then a printer. Whenever you turned on the printer to turn on the Adam, it would run a reset on the daisywheel mechanism, This reset would often get stuck, and leave the daisywheel on the printer endlessly spinning. It wasn't good to leave it do this, so you would bounce the power switch and hope next time it didn't get stuck. As for the tape drives, yeah they were quirky, but we purchased the rather rare disk drive for it. I remember copying a lot of stuff off the tapes once we got it.
Man, the complete Adam setup makes the Sega Megadrive / CD / 32X tower of power look like the paragon of elegance. The proprietary cassette format is remarkably assholish, the only saving grace is that the cases are screwed-shut so at least you could fix the tape jam.
I had one of these when I was a kid. We only ever used it as a ColecoVision. Had no tapes for the computer, so It was useless that way.
My youngest brother tried feeding it mashed potatoes. I got it fixed. He fed it OJ later on, and it never came back after that. I was pretty good at Mr. Do.
Interesting useless trivia... They used an Adam in the incredibly cheesy TV series "VR.5", back in the mid 90s. Sydney Bloom's father brings a computer home when she's a kid.
my first computer was a adam, learned programing at the age of 6 yrs old with this beast back in 1983.
8:33 ah the paper
Reminds me of back in highschool where our electronics teacher would have us push every through hole component through the paper and draw traces before etching the design onto a board so we know it'll all fit.
If I remember correctly it was, lay it out on the paper. Align paper with PCB, and tap every hole on the paper with a drill bit so you mark where to drill.
Thanks for making these with all the diagnosis/imperfect pieces. Seeing the troubleshooting steps make for a great learning tool. Well done!
I don't typically comment on videos, but I just wanted to say that I absolutely love your content you put on on your channel. I love the more nitty-gritty information I get when I watch, thank you so much for all the content you put out!
I do so enjoy watching you engineer things. It is very satisfying.
Wow, this was riveting. I am really looking forward to the 'v0.2' (or will that be 'v1.0') follow-up video
You're definitely making me fall in love with Electrical Engineering lol
Some universities now have a specific computer engineering major which is a mix of computer science and electrical engineering
Have you made any progress on a revision of the board yet? I recently obtained an Adam with a Printer but the seller said it wasn't working and mentioned it might be a power supply failure. As I do not see myself using the printer ever, I would love to get my hands on an internal PSU. Also, there would be no need to add a power on light to the revision as the keyboard already has an LED that lights up when the computer is on.
The Colecovision was the very first games console I ever bought. In fact, the only one I ever bought. To this day it’s connected up to my Mitsubishi 78cm DIVA CRT.
Fascinating piece of history and another one of your clever adaptations. I was going to suggest a floppy drive interface but I appear to be behind the times with that suggestion :-) Great looking computer too. Cheers.
For a great cheap programmable load you can get a 500w (probably wouldn't run it at that though) buck converter with CV & CC and short the output. Slap a fan on the heatsinks and its great. I have personally run it to 3 amps. To change the load you just adjust the CC pot.
If you find a working SmartBasic cassette, could you please do a demonstration of SmartBasic for the Adam computer? If possible could you please do a side by side comparison between the Adam computer's SmartBasic and the Apple II computer's Basic?
dude youre a beast! thats awesome how you designed the board
I like the yellowing on the keyboard, I've never seen just the keys yellowed with the rest of it white.
I do like your soldering skills. 👍I am looking forward with dread when I have to unsolder the kernel ROM of my C64 in a couple of weeks to switch it to jiffy dos.
Sweet always nice to see retro tech alive again
Nice ADAM hack.
Great way to sustain the life of ADAMs- ie as Super Colecovision's!
Toss the printer and keep the base unit/keyboard and a (hopefully) working tape drive for sweet vintage gaming
If the Super games could be loaded onto an SD-based CV multicart, would be golden.
Regarding the enable pin for the negative regulator, "ground" may be high when the regulator is running but not before it starts running. Regarding the frequency it's common for switchmode converters to drop the frequency to maintain regulation when under very light or no load. This is why some power bricks buzz audibly when unloaded.
I don't own an Adam, but that's very cool! I'd always wondered what the engineers were on when they routed the computer's power through the printer... I mean, yeah, printers were often considered to be essential peripherals in the 80's, but still!
The Adam was my first computer, parents got it for me Christmas of 1983. Unfortunately, it was broken right out of the box (as many of them were). I cannot begin to tell you how devastated my 11 year old self was. Took it back, tried another one, and yup, that one was broken straight out of the box as well.
I wonder if it'd be feasible to do any of the following?
- Design an interface between floppy drives of some stripe and the Adam
- Design a flashcart for the Adam
- Mitigate or eliminate the EMP on startup
0:26 One might even say, a famicom ;)
wanted one of those, my dad got me an mc-10 instead. kinda glad though.
Simply amazing. Coleco was a wonderful system.
I think printing out the board on your home document printer (inkjet, laser, whatever) and spray gluing that to some piece of card to check fit is a good idea. You would have likely noticed a number of flaws that you're noticing now when you're holding the board in your hands.
The ColecoVision was my first console, I loved that thing. Still have to laugh though about the original power supply of the Adam being stuffed into the printer. If you weren't actually going to use the printer, it just essentially meant had an incredibly large power supply on your desk. Suddenly any complaints about the ColecoVision's power supply being the size of a Lincoln Continental seem inconsequential because you just upgraded to a semi truck.
How is this holding up? We would love to see an update!
Sorry just started the video. Haven't read all the comments but the colecovision did not come out in 1978. The collectivision video game console came out in 1982
Another marvelous treat from the best tech youtuber out there!
Gotta love aging hardware and those nicotine yellow keys
Super naive question, but I notice you don't depict any breadboard/protoboard prototyping in this video prior to designing the board in CAD. Did such prototyping take place for this project, and if not, is this because experienced designers don't always need to, because the CAD tools are good enough to not need it for a project like this, because this circuit is based on a familiar design, or some other reason? Seemed like magic to go from idea to board without wiring up components!
(I realize the sponsor is getting some love here so the focus is on the board, just curious what to expect as I learn more about this hobby.)
Breadboarding is more helpful when you are starting out and "feeling out" a circuit can help you under stand it more. Here on RUclips you are also likely to see more people do that because it adds another visual step to the process that helps the viewer follow along with the what is going on. But it isn't necessary or even always possible.
These parts are very sensitive to EMI and trace lengths and are not available in DIP packages for breadboarding. They wouldn't do well on an adapter either. If I just put my finger on the chips while running they start having problems. So for these you essentially have to do a full layout and hope you get it right. This is why I assembled everything in stages. It let me test the separate parts of the board as if I were bread boarding it. But experience and spending a lot of time fully reading datasheets is a large amount of how I was able to go from concept to physical thing in one step.
(Also, this project was in the works before it was going to be sponsored. It was more of a happy accident that they reached out when they did because it worked well for both of us. I didn't mean for it to be more about the PCB but I recorded 9hrs of screen capture while designing the part and realized I would be better off skipping past most of it since people may not know or care what is going on in the EDA program.)
From an EE that works on PCIe and 10G designs for my day job and hobby projects at home...
For ~22$ shipped, my time saved from painstakingly and frustratingly soldering components onto a protoboard is well worth it, even if i have to revise the design. I tend to design a PCB during the week and order it at the end of the week. the next weekend i already have a board ready to be assembled.
Something else worth noting is Tech Tangents had a pretty rough time with those switching power supplies. I find it incredibly useful to model the design in LTSpice. Free and easy simulation software, and most manufacturers are going to offer a Spice model you can easily import to your favorite flavor of spice simulation software. It is also good to start from the IC manufacturers reference design and make tweaks where you need to. To help with ripple you definitely want some good electrolytic bulk capacitance with some smaller ceramic capacitors in parallel. because electrolytic's have higher ESR, they cannot effectively filter out the higher frequencies. that is what the smaller capacitors are for.
Once you have a few designs that work, if you want to prototype something quickly you can take multiple pcb designs and cut out sections and piece together something that works. i had a couple batches of PCBs not work, but the voltage regulators still worked on them which could convert a noisy 8-40V down to a 5V rail and 3.3V rail. i have used a few of those for prototyping designs. The only real time i find prototyping like this, or protoboard, useful is when i am reverse engineering something so i can figure out how to achieve my result. Like figuring out how the electric gate controller on my gate worked so i could connect it to WiFi with an esp8266.
Are you selling these yet? I would be interested in purchasing one for my Adam. Thanks.
You could have used a charge pump IC to convert +5v to -5v ... for example TI LM2776 or MaxLinear / Sipex SP6661 ... all these can do min 200mA but there's also loads of cheaper lower current ones which can be paralleled for higher current.
Love to see this as a kit. Thanks
Because as we all know, PCB stands for Powers Colecovision Beautifully.
I think it's fun to see which Distro is being used in in each video. Normally, I am assuming Kubuntu but I saw Fedora on this video. It's just nice to see Plasma. I know, nothing to do with the video but just saying.
❤ Coleco. Thanks for share the video!
Similarly, the IBM PS/1 (the home-bound cousin of the PS/2) had its power supply built into the display. As well, the earlier PS/1 systems did not have ISA slots. Both of those reasons are why when I got outbid on a PS/1 system on eBay, I didn’t counter-bid.
I'm glad someone has detailed the Adam. I've been looking for an obscure 80s 8bit computer to tinker with and the Adam seemed interesting since it doesn't get a lot of attention but that cassette issue is a deal breaker for me. I know they were thinking of piracy considering by the time it was released, the c64, zx spectrum and other computers were already spooking companies with the piracy issue (despite the fact that many software companies still seemed to thrive if they put out quality software...I hate the 'piracy' argument in general, it's a non-sequitur...) but these kinds of proprietary issues make owning an unsupported machine very difficult.
Still, very cool exploration of the machine. Thanks!
Aside from modifying all the physical cassette holes. You can probably "format" a tape buy dubbing a working cassette on a stereo deck. I'm guessing it's probably just some noise on the "B" track or L or R. Maybe you can find a WAV file of the formatting to record.
Proprietary media is evil. Thankfully its use is often fatal for any company that goes that route.
SONY seems to persevere to this day somehow, in spite of their recurring insistence on proprietary media, like custom flash cards (MemoryStick series), ATRAC instead of MPEG-Audio, and so on. It appears some products were hampered by the proprietary lock-in - they could have been the largest and most successful MP3 player manufacturer in the world, but their digital pocket audio players were a predictable failure in spite of affordable pricing, premium feel, impressive engineering quality and heart-warming Walkman brand - and others really weren't, because they were SO GOOD that you just couldn't ignore or sidestep them.
Siana Gearz MPEG audio didn’t exist when Sony developed ATRAC. (MiniDisc had already been on the market for a year when MPEG-1 was released.) Hardly reasonable to expect Sony to have a time machine. ;)
Sony’s proprietary formats were frequently the result of Sony being the first to make something. But first isn’t always the format that wins...
What WAS dumb was Sony’s refusal to add real MP3 support to MiniDisc, which would have been a trivial thing to do. But while Sony (electronics) was doing great work, Sony Music forced the electronics side to add copy protection and other crap. This unhappy duality led to a sort of corporate schizophrenia. Heck, at one point, Sony ended up suing itself...
@@tookitogo They were perhaps parallel developments, with MPEG being finalised in 1989 and original version of ATRAC in 1992. But also given this timeline, it's impossible for them to not have known of MPEG, and instead of collaboration, they chose competition, and they're similar enough for it not to be a coincidence. It was a sensible decision at that point - ATRAC debuted as an encoding on MiniDisc, and there was no standard that could compete with it head on - basically high density magnetic storage digital audio. ATRAC also solved an issue that MPEG didn't - it allowed realtime encoding on low-cost hardware.
It's also irrelevant, because... MiniDisc is more akin to a cassette player/recorder, it's not a PC accessory, you don't (you could but most devices couldn't) transfer data from MD to PC and back. In contrast the usage of MP3 was PC-centric, you'd take your audio CD, convert it to MP3 on your PCs, which PCs could do quite swiftly by late 90s, and you'd copy the resulting MP3 files to your portable player whenever you needed them. MP3 made sense in this usage, ATRAC didn't, and it didn't make sense to develop new versions of ATRAC and try to force people into a proprietary format when they were already coming late to that market, having stuck to MiniDisc for so long and MP3 being already established. People had MP3 file libraries and not ATRAC3 libraries. Some of these libraries were obtained via less legitimate means of course, but that's just how it is. In a competition between single-vendor and multi-vendor or open standards, all things being equal, the latter have a huge tendency to win.
Siana Gearz I don’t think you understood my point, since I literally was saying the same thing as you did in the entire second paragraph rant there.
Anyway, some points:
1. What’s your source for MPEG being finalized in 1989? Wiki says work on it didn’t even begin until May 1988, and that the standard wasn’t approved until late 1992, by which point MiniDisc was already on the market, and wasn’t released until mid-1993: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1. This places MPEG’s completion at well over a year behind ATRAC (since Sony would have had to finalize the spec at least a year before the first product shipped, in order to get the custom silicon made, designs tested, submitted for compliance, etc). Even if Sony had been inclined to cooperate in principle, it would have delayed the MD a lot. (And Sony obviously knew about MPEG’s development, since they held some of the patents used in it, though they’ve since expired. Also, Sony (together with JVC, NEC, and Fujitsu) submitted one of the proposed codecs for MPEG. But it was another proposal that was selected and was subsequently developed into MP2, with some leakage into MP3.) The “coincidence” is simply the technology of the day.
2. MD is magneto-optical, not magnetic. (That’s why the media is so incredibly robust.)
3. As a former MD and later MP3 user, I’m well familiar with the overall usage models of each. Yes, Sony envisioned it as a successor to the cassette, but also to the CD, as well as a data storage medium. MD is in every way a data disc, with music stored as what are essentially files in a file system, complete with fragmentation. That’s why I said it was a mistake for Sony to not embrace native MP3 support, since it would have been absolutely trivial to add an MP3 decoder and another format flag for the track file. As I said, that was without doubt due to Sony’s unfortunate chimerism, of being schizophrenically torn between being a hardware maker and a record label. Having been scared shitless by Sony’s prior recordable digital audio format (DAT), the record industry worked to scuttle DAT and made sure to threaten Sony, such that it not dare release another recordable products without insane copy protection. That was Sony’s impetus for using copy-protected ATRAC well into the 2000s instead of adopting MP3 and AAC. Now, I think that was a mistake, but then again I’m sure Sony’s hardware side knew that, too. I mean, as you said, Sony’s hardware was fantastic. Imagine if Sony had been allowed to make a real, unconstrained competitor to the original iPod? It would have been half the size and had 4x the battery life. And if Sony had allowed real MP3 onto MD, I probably would have stuck with MD for many years longer, instead of getting an iPod. Similarly, Sony might have been wise to license ATRAC outside of MD and SDDS, since ATRAC files on computers would have been a superior alternative to MP3. (I think that ATRAC sounds way better than MP3. For sure, a 1995 MiniDisc deck sounded way better than a 1995 MP3 at the same bitrate (256Kbps). It took MP3 several more years just to catch up to that, and by then Sony’s ATRAC encoder had gotten even better. (Just talking about ATRAC, not ATRAC3 with its lower quality modes.))
4. Open standards often lose, because frankly, most people don’t care about whether a standard is open or not. (As long as you can buy the products, people don’t give a crap whether it’s an open standard, or merely that the product manufacturers paid for a license. DVD is patent-encumbered and nonetheless possibly the most successful format ever. The CD was patent-encumbered, too. And so was MP3, for that matter.) Now, you probably don’t actually mean “open standards”, but just liberal licensing, such that you’re not tied into a single vendor. But dozens (!) of companies made MiniDisc equipment, a handful even used MemoryStick, and the CD (which was a collaboration between Sony and Philips) was licensed to countless manufacturers. Sony likes to invent formats, but is far more liberal about licensing them than people give them credit for. That other companies didn’t WANT Sony’s formats didn’t mean they couldn’t have used them! Frankly, in many cases they should have, since so many of them were extremely well engineered.
@@tookitogo the proprietary media is as old as piano-player rolls, record cylinders/platter/rpm, reel-to-reel/8track/cassette/Beta/VHS, IBM/Apple... greedy idiots will never change. The only reason we have IBM PC clones is that it was seen as a dead-end by management, and gave low funding on the project so it needed to use off the shelf hardware and subcontract out the OS. BigB never reviews history or sees any parallel products.
3:22 - Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by this? They would always include the printer because of the physical dimensions of paper? Please elaborate! Good video! :D
I approve of the Redragon Kumara K552
Thanks for another great video! When I saw you using your tablet/laptop-hybrid I was wondering whether it ran Linux, or if you only use it on desktop machines. I'm asking because I'm on the lookout for exactly that type of machine, and I'd like to run Linux on it. So, if you are in fact using Linux, could you tell me which model it is and if you would recommend it?
It's an Acer Switch 10 running Fedora 30 and I would absolutely NOT recommend it! It, as well as many other inexpensive early tablet PCs, uses eMMC flash for the boot drive. That is essentially an SD card soldered to the motherboard. It is painfully slow to load as a result which is a shame because everything else about it is great. It took about 5 minutes to load the PNG file for the schematic for those shots, I am not exaggerating. Anything that uses lots of disk activity, like web browsing, is unusable on it unfortunately. I have another 7" tablet that also has an eMMC boot drive and is painfully slow. It's almost funny, I installed Burnout Paradise on it and it ran great, if you didn't drive anywhere. The instant you started moving it would stop while it loaded the map, continue to let you drive for 20 seconds then stop for more map loading. Over and over.
Basically, I would recommend almost any tablet PC that doesn't use eMMC. I have loaded Ubuntu onto an older Microsoft Surface before when I borrowed one. I'm also chasing the dream of a tablet Linux system, and those look to be the most promising to me.
@@TechTangents Thanks for the answer! I've heard that eMMC is ... less than ideal, I'll certainly stay away from that! Maybe a newer Acer or a Lenovo (with some kind of SSD) might be an idea. But yes, it would be satisfying to install Linux on a Microsoft product :).
@@TechTangents Also to remember with those cheap tables is that many of them use an Intel Atom variant which chipsets can cause driver (or rather kernel module) issues because of unsupported devices or variants of those devices like WiFi, audio or touch. I tried to install Ubuntu 18.something last year onto one of those Windows 10 Atom tablets and it was horrible to get it to work but was fairly usable when it finally worked.
Oh, and a 32bit EFI which appears more often than not on those low end Windows tablets will cause trouble as well with most mainstream distros since many don't ship with EFI on 32bit variants and without 32bit EFI on 64bit variants
Generally with my supplies, I will have an electrolytic 10uF along with either a 0.1uF, or a .01uF for additional filtering and load capacitance, Helps reduce ripple and keeps the circuit stable.
Wow, first machine as a kid... so rare to even hear it mentioned..
Great idea with the custom psu. A possible idea for an addon would be to 3d printable case for the psu.
A noob here: What's the reason behind the switch controlling the mosfet, instead of it just closing the circuit?
Switches are not perfect and when they are closed they have a slight amount of resistance. When you have a lot of power going through a resistance it generates heat. If the switch isn't design to cope with the heat or have especially low resistance it can actually burn and fail.
The power input into the device could reach up to ~27W according to the Adam's technical reference manual. The 12V PSU would need to deliver about 2.25A for that into the power supply. The switch I used here is only rated for 300mA, so running the full power through it would not work. I could have found a switch capable of passing more current, but those are also more expensive because they have to be better designed. It is actually cheaper to use more parts to turn a mosfet on and off than it is to get a better switch.
@@TechTangents Ah, I see, thanks for the explanation. :3
Also, there's the problem of turning it off. When current flows, it doesn't want to be suddenly stopped (i.e. inductance). Think of it as suddenly closing a water valve: There will be a so-called water hammer, a pressure spike that can damage the pipes. Similarly, with electronics you get a voltage spike. This can cause an electrical arc over the switch for a split second, every time you turn it off. Over time the switch will wear out, and one day it might simply weld itself closed and not turn off any more. You can fix this problem by using a beefier switch, but since electrical components are often cheaper than mechanical ones, it can be better to use a MOSFET and some basic protection circuitry instead.
I'm really ignorant on these older computer formats, but can you do a dump of the tape, and replicate the hard sectors on a new piece of magnetic?
Hi. Was a follow up video ever made and issues resolved? Are you selling these still? If so, where can I buy? Thanks!
You know what, after watching this, I've finally come to peace with Apple getting rid of the headphone jack.
Nothing will ever be able to top "that one computer that won't work without a printer".
Its probably not a bad idea on these kinds of projects to print out the board, glue it to a piece of cardboard, cut out any holes etc, and verify the fit before ordering the boards.
I love this 2019 video and am a fan of this 8-bit computer in particular. I noticed some other PSU projects for ADAM seem to NOT provide a -12V rail. I am confused how they successfully do this. Is it only needed for the (discarded) printer? Any ideas?
I think they shot themselves in the foot with that properietary casette format. And then in the other foot with that PSU/printer thing.
Can't you dub an Adam data pack onto a regular compact cassette to get it formatted in the right way?
it won't fit in a normal cassette player in its current cassette shell, but he could find a functioning data pack and transplant the tape reels to a standard cassette shell and record it that way
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 And remember to use a fairly high sound level so ADAM will read the formatting. It took a bit of fiddling using a dual cassette boom box with adjustable record levels before I got this method to work way back in the early days of this computer's orphanage.
9:10 The PCB rendering shows a 3 row DB-15 socket and underneath, the PCB shows a two row DB-9 connection. How did you manage to do that?
How's the 2-in-1 experience on Linux? I'm tempted to get a 2-in-1 because I want a laptop but also like tablets. Might even go for something full tablet with detachable keyboard. I hear the Surface Go runs linux well... But I'm curious how your experience with using Linux on a touchscreen is.
I heard that UDE is pretty good with touch screens
It's amazing that what was advanced technology back then, can be replicated and reverse engineered by 1 rather normal albeit rather clever guy today.
This video is awesome. Keep up the good stuff
it had to fail. such a cumbersome design, no separated external power supply, no external tape drive with standard tapes.
and slightly less graphic resolution than the c64. with a nicer case and modular design for audio and video, they would have had a chance.
but thank you for your motivation to preserve that piece of history
This vid came out on my birthday
Hey AkBukU would you be able to remake the diagram and turn it into a HIGH Res one instead of a LOW res diagram? as you said in the beginning that you were disapointed in the low res?
2 things I wanted to point out that you got wrong, 1.) colecovision was released in 1982, not 1978 2.) Coleco Adam wasn’t only available in this stand alone configuration, it was available as an add on to the Colecovision, you’d plug it into the front on the Colecovision.
I stand corrected, later in the video you do talk about the expansion version of the Adam.
Really cool that you’re sharing your knowledge and helping to keep some of these old computers alive.
Fun fact: the earlier revisions of the ATX standard DO have -5V
-5v was on the the very early atx power supplies and since removed in letter revisions
:52 The Adam had 80k RAM, not 64k as mentioned.
Hey man did you ever encounter an IBM PS/1 model 2011 or 2133? This PC is literally the PcJr v2 and its PSU is integrated into the monitor so imagine what a pain if it breaks beyond repair! What do you think? Possible next project?
You can actually make compatible blank tapes by simply copying a pre-formatted tape onto a standard blank cassette.
Great concept,but would it be not better just to make a cable to plug right into the adam rather then sticking out a motherboard next to it?
keep hearing "atom" instead of Adam xD
Rion Steiner so does RUclips’s speech to text
@@danieldaniels7571
That's now reminding me of 2 different hilarious (to me) RUclips automatic subtitle errors.
*insert intel jingle*
*Netbook vietnam war flashbacks coming*
Are there any PicoPSU-like devices that support the -5v AT standard? I know I can get a cable that converts ATX to AT with a dummy load and -5v board but I was wondering if there was a PicoPSU that supported -5v.
When this "computer," came out, my dad cut out a headline from the newspaper and hung it on my door "Coleco says ADAM is behind schedule." We both were. Cool project.
Adam Payne it’s a real computer, not sure why you felt the need to put it in quotes