What Should I Do With These Cards I Found At E-Waste?
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- Let's explore this massive collection of ISA cards from the 80s and 90s in this E-Waste Wednesday video. Tech archeology is fun, nut it's a frustrating experience of trying to identify mystery cards. Thanks to PCBWay for supporting this video! pcbway.com
Be sure to subscribe to the main channel: / @retrohackshack
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
02:24 - Identification
06:20 - PCBWay Ad
06:49 - HD And Floppy Controllers
09:13 - I/O Cards
10:39 - Sound Cards
12:05 - Video Cards
17:13 - Memory Boards
18:58 - Other Boards
22:17 - RTI-800 Signal Processing Board
23:32 - Hard Card
Music used by permission:
“Fakebit World” by Malmen
/ malmen
Other music from the RUclips Audio Library
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#Retro #Computers #pc #ibm
You guys are awesome! Thanks for the help identifying these cards and for subscribing to the second channel!!
Something to look for in old video cards is an EEPROM. They're often there, although I don't know if they're to hold character definition tables for text mode displays or to hold internal programming for the video generator.
I grabbed an EEPROM out of an old EGA card which is surplus to requirements. I don't think there are any non-proprietary chips on the card. It would be nice if there were some logic chips or common RAM to recover.
What should you do with them? I’ll buy the sound blaster.
The large Arnet at 21:07 card is a multiport serial interface card for connecting lots of serial terminals up to a server. The card came with a break-out cable that split to many RS-232 or similar serial lines.
Thanks!
Wow... I haven't seen an Arnet since 1989! We used to run an OS called BOS that made a 386 "pretend it was a 1970s mainframe."
Wow. That sounds cool!
At 17:33 regarding the QC checklist:: "CSR" stands for "Computer Systems Repair". They were an outfit located in New Jersey that repaired all sorts of out of warranty electronics. You had to keep an eye on them because they would charge $55 to repair a Western Digital hard drive controller when you could buy a new one for $40. (1987 pricing). If you sent them a computer or printer to repair in it's original box, they would keep the original box and sell rebuilt items as new ones. Just an example of how cutthroat the computer business was back in those days. :)
Wow. Thanks for the info! Awesome 👍
The NOT a floppy controller card @21:07 is a "Sync/570 2-Port ISA Card" multi serial port card that uses breakout cables on the 37pin connector
Awesome! Thanks.
I think WDC on the one graphics card is not Western Design Center but actually the Western Digital Corporation we all know from hard drives, as they were liaised with Paradise at that time around.
The Heath card should actually be a VGA card. There have actually been some 8-Bit VGA Cards. I never had one in my hands but Adrian Black has one of these, and some (including my ET3000) are backwards compatible to 8 Bit ISA if you let the 16 Bit portion hang out of the slot. The Heath card has some space where the 16 Bit portion of the bus normally goes (so it will not be obstructed b a 16 Bit Port) and the DB9/HD15 combination was quite common on cards around the transition time from EGA to VGA. You could use them with your EGA Monitor using the DB9, surely only with EGA modes, and then later upgrade your monitor to VGA and use it with all resolutions. My ET3000 has also both ports, being such a transition card. However, I think your Heath card is a bare MCGA/VGA and not a Super-VGA with higher resolutions like my ET3000. So clearly a transition period card for those who wanted to make the expensive upgrades step by step - first graphics card, later monitor.
The small SCSI card does not have a BIOS, such cards normally did not come with a hard drive etc. but maybe for an external SCSI CD-ROM or Flatbed Scanner (surely could do both but came with one of them)
Thanks 🙏
Definitely interested in watching some projects with the signal processing card
The FCC ID database is a good reference for IDing cards - if they had the FCC ID on them, they don't always.
Yeah. I've used that in the past.
@5:02 - It´s always helpful to check the ID of the big chips, like the monster "D765AC", in this case it is a "NEC Floppy Disk Controller/Formatter".
I looked up the names on the repaired board, and Lenny did in fact work at IBM according to his LinkedIn Account.
The card at 21:50 is a syc controller card, for machine control, ie CNC machine.
Ah! Sweet.
21:00 The SCSI card is a typical card for a flatbed scanner, not for disk. Disk controller SCSI cards always had an internal connector.
Thanks
Aaron , I Love collecting Cards too , this was a good intro video for a 2nd channel , Liked and Subbed , Thanks to PCBWay for supporting this video too :) QC
Awesome
Stepping with the right foot on the new channel, Aaron! I love videos with less scripting, more in line with that "anything goes" spirit! I hope some repairs will make an appearance, too! Best of luck to you!
Yeah. For sure!
+1 for new old school fun
Thanks Aaron!
@7:24 As far as I remember, MFM/RLL hard disks needed 1 power cable and 2 flat cables. Of these 2 flat cables, one was common to all hard drives (the same way you can connect 2 Floppy drives on the same cable) and the other cable was 1-to-1 - you needed 1 cable for each hard drive.
On the missing chips on the multi io card hopefully just missing the chips for one of the serial ports. Sometimes they would sell you a board with one serial port active and separately sell an additional serial port expansion kit which would just be ICs to plug into the board and maybe a bracket to plug into a header on the board. The ega/vga card was likely sold with an old cga/ega monitor. Again selling customers on future expandability.
That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it makes sense.
oh ok this is where the e-waste episode was hiding. just caught up on everything with the second channel and sounds exciting.
regarding the ending of what to do with them, i guess my thoughts is how many of them work? as you never know if this was one of those "untested" bundles on ebay that someone bought and then later dumped at e-waste while muttering a few mean words about the ebay seller.
I'll definitely be keeping some of them to test.
The older, all discrete parts cards are pretty easy to repair if you have a bit of experience and an oscilloscope.
interesting - just saw the Tech Tangents channel where he reversed engineered an ISA card to interface with the first CD Rom for computer.. amazing
Wow. That's cool.
8:20 the two 6116-2 chips make a 4k track buffer, that is a 1:1 interleave buffered HDD controller
15:02 definitely MDA, only has 2x2KB RAM chips so can't be anything higher
... will add more if I find
Awesome. Thanks!
From the 6845 and 4K of RAM, I'm pretty sure your mystery card in an MDA. The ROM is not BIOS but is actually the character mapping memory.
Ah. Cool! Thanks!
@@RetroHackShackAfterHours yep, it has the font 'bitmap' , so you could have your own 'custom' font if you wished😉
Grate score! I've been subbed to your main channel for a while but only just discovered this second channel. The SCSI card you found in the lot isn't a full SCSI card it was intended to be used with ether a scanner or a tape backup device. you can tell because it doesn't have a boot ROM or an internal SCSI connector on it. some of those video cards look very interesting especially that 8 bit card with the 9 and 15 pin outputs on it, I'm thinking it may be a combined CGA-EGA-MCGA card MCGA was the very short lived precursor to VGA same pinout but only 640 by 480 at 2 colours or 320 by 200 at 256 colours as it only had 64K of video RAM.
The signal processing card is soo cool, I wish they would still make those for modern PCs. Instead they transitioned to crappy plastic USB devices for that purpose
I see my old Ti994a behind you. my first computer and programming experience
Basically the hard card is a what seagate did in 2011 hybrid drives ssd with mechanical !
Love the "16,000.00 kHz" crystal marking at 5:00. That would be 16.00 MHz. Like the ewaste finds topic and I'm thinking about seeing if it's possible to do the same here.
Yeah. Took. Me a few years to find the right places and make relationships.
A lot of the IO cards like the RTI-800 still has manuals online. I see that the RTI-800 would use software package called "SW-800" for example. The "datasheet" for SW-800 can still be found on a lot of the datasheet archive sites, and mentions for example a WIN800 and LLWIN dll file pair. This also mentions other compatible boards you can extend the search with, in order to see if there are information for those that can be contribute with technical info about the RTI-800. If you find the main manual, it will usually contain a full set of register descriptions, if you want to code for the card directly using bare metal type coding.
Thanks! I found the datasheets but not the programming manuals so far.
@@RetroHackShackAfterHours If you check out the link I posted, I think the software disks may contain sample-code and more information about the API. I see for example a "Program for exercising and learning more about the functions of the 800 Series Boards".
Odd, I thought I for sure posted a link in a message as a reply here.
RUclips has been deleting links in comments automatically for years now. @@TheMovieCreator
Could make use of one of those 8 bit ISA IO cards maybe. I don't have any kind of floppy controller. Also a sound card? I'm in Toronto, Canada though.
Yeah. Shipping might be prohibitive.
Depending on how prohibitive, I might be okay with it. 🤔
Send me an email. I am happy to look into it.
Wow, micro channel. We had two test machines on our bench in 1994 for legacy compatibility. One of those nouns buried in my lizard way back brain.
With graphics cards, you can often find information in the ROM chips even if the board has no branding.
We're gonna have to call you Monty Haul after this one, Aaron! 😁 Wow, you ran off with this stuff!
I am super lucky! Not everyone has access to this stuff.
The mca/ps2 card at 19:50 I identified direct as token ring as I saw the 16/4 sign.
Nice find !
I would love to have an MFM controller board, because I have 2 MFM hard drives but I dont have any controller
Cool. You can email me if you want. Just keep in mind some cards only work with certain drives.
i got hold of a load of isa cards a few years back, not as many as your lot, though, quite a few MFM hard drive controllers, 2 long cards with 80186 cpus on?! a few with bnc connectors, maybe some sort of network card, a few IO cards, a few 'unknowns'
The long card with the daughter board is possibly ARNET SMARTPORT PLUS 64K 16BIT NETWORK ADAPTER or a multi-port serial board for terminals
Yeah. Thanks! One of my Patrons suggested it was a Digi Sync/570.
CG-150 is from DFI.
TY!
Subscriber number 130 here!
Take it to the vault overseer.
Someone needs to write a driver to make the RTI-800 into a sound card.
I'd be really curious about all those chips on the board @23:00. What is on them? Do you reverse engineer.
The EGA card at 15:15 has a 16450 serial controller on it, which is an odd combination. Probably uses that 9-pin header below it. Given the 25-pin header nearby, maybe this is an EGA + serial + parallel card?
I also think so as there are also the typical 1488/1489 chips next to the 16450.
no a/rose nubus cards? hoping someone eventually finds some of the battle tech cards and posts some hd photos and maybe a rom dump
I just one mini 8-Bit CGA card to test and debug my PC-XT
That CL-SH260-based ST-412 card is a really good choice for people still running original hardware, since the 260 and the ENDECs these cards use are IDE hard drive parts and can do 1:1 interleave (I had an Everex card back in high school that was like that one).
Nice. Good point. I didn't realize that.
You could of course see if LGR or 8Bit Guy and RUclipsrs need any of them.
13:54 WDC=Western Digital Corporation.
Yeah. I always get it confused with western design center.
Yeah. I always get it confused with western design center.
C13/C19 on the first card looks a bit broken...
Nice catch
@@RetroHackShackAfterHours It's the power of the space bar :D
Do from it big big mosiac buzzul on wood board you can sell it after that in high price i want half of price
That full size EGA Card is an ITT PC Xtra card.
Thanks!
You should fix them.
Love the shirt. That game is notoriously hard, or at least was for me. Lol
Comp
e waste ben youtube channel
Sorry. One note. Moving the cards all around is giving me motion sickness trying to follow what your showing us. Other than that, very nice haul. Thank you sir.
DE? Yeah ok… whatever… nobody ever called it that in the history of ever.
I've always said DB-9, but apparently according to my comments it's against the law here on RUclips 😀