HT, I totally agree. I've been watching your channel for years. And I always felt bad for you, because of your viewership numbers. Your videos are incredible. And I can't imagine the efforts that go in. It's actually motivated me to work harder, so I can contribute/support people like you. Sincere sympathies. I hope this platform wakes up. Hang in there! Much respect, from your fan.
From a certain angle it looks like a 1972 brutalist council building or a "new town" library...You Work In Slab Now - You Die In Slab Now! The ghosting screens have always made me queasy, my eyes are trying to outmove my brain looking stuff and it gets a bit pukey. Your vids are the best stuff on youtube. Period. I can't stand the shouty wank that gets millions of subs and likes, just unwatchable dross - plus the endless auto microcuts to remove "dead air" again me nauseous. Do more synth stuff or whatever you feel like shoving up, you'll always have at least 1 sub here...like that's an incentive!
Well, thanks. You know, it _does_ look rather brutalist. Could totally see it as a building on some kind of mid-century campus somewhere. I can imagine it in some grainy old video as the building housing the latest and greatest mainframe at some rich West Coast university or something. That or Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters Silences are underappreciated. Sometimes having a pause is good, say if encountering a questionable aspect of a design that speaks for itself, or purely to be awkward on purpose.
always enjoyed the content on this channel. think its the only one i have set to notify me of new content which tells its own story. do what makes you happy i’d say only upload if you want to
The legend returns. I have a Zenith Z-Star ES that's very similar to this laptop except it has an i486DX2 CPU, a built-in trackball and a grey plastic case. What's peculiar about that machine is that there's a battery compartment that allows the computer to be run with eight AA batteries. Presumably this expands the runtime of the laptop on battery power by 20-30 minutes, though I haven't tested this yet because I'm not quite keen on burning through eight AA batteries... I'm now trying to get my hands on an earlier version of the Z-Star that used the magnificently weird J-Mouse (not to be confused with the TrackPoint).
Ah, those ones with the AA battery compartment. I'm sure I've seen one, somewhere. Unfortunately it made the machine look like one of those kids educational things, V-Tech or whatever they were called. Then again, those things were probably still more robust than half of the trash that comes out now.
I think my cousins had a laptop similar to this one, it was white in colour and it was made by Zenith, and it had that status LCD screen. I don't know what its specifications. I think it was a 486.
Pack is Nickel-Metal hybrid. (NiMH) Can often just replace them with NiCad if you really wanted to but NiMh are easy to come by and fairly cheap if you don't go for maximum capacity so don't know why :)
The pack even has it printed on, but I somehow missed it until editing was already done and there was no real incentive to go back to fix it. In my defense, the print is small light-gray-on-beige and the glasses aren't on when filming. Could probably re-pack it, but not sure it's worth the hassle and I've had enough of NiMhs for now, given I've just finished with a project that added them to a 1920s bicycle dynamo light set to skirt the laws.
I thought you had taken a more softer approach in this video but the ending was excellent...Retro Tech WWF ! you'd make a good host for Notebook Wars though :). Hey, why don't you do more electronics videos, seems to be more popular than vintage gear. Searching YT for Zenith 386 notebook review didnt even show your video in the results.
Thanks. The laptop being largely underwhelming, as it never quite oversteps the boundaries into doing anything abhorrent, but also isn't really anything especially brilliant, was probably the cause of things seeming softer. It gave me little to work with when talking about it compared to some other hardware. More electronics is the plan. The clock, some extensive alterations to a terrible PCI sound card to make a music production solution and likely a repair of some 80s junk are already on the list. The C&T 386 video was the biggest mystery when it came to searches. It turned out that even using the exact title and tags would still result in it appearing on the third page of searches, despite being the only video of one at the time.
First I saw the title .. then I saw it was a High Treason vid and thought "alright then, this will be good". Your unique take on electronics is as richardsmith4992 said "the best stuff on youtube". Plus, on this side of the planet your accent and vocabulary set these videos apart from the cookie cutter approach that YT loves to promote. I was hooked when I first heard you trashing the Roland Sound Canvas in a previous vid, I couldn't believe anyone else heard it that way as well. I really hope you feel compelled to make more videos with your one-of-a-kind attitude, specific knowledge and wit. You cracked me up countless times in this vid. Thank you for doing it your way.
I don't have a Bull Zenith and I don't want one. The whole BT contract fascinates me so if you ever feel like making irreverent (obviously) documentary-style videos, I would watch the shit out of that one. There are so many other things you could cover, particularly the evolution of technology. You have so many awesome examples of CD-ROM drives that you could map their development quite comprehensively. Another thing I would watch is your top ten VGA chipsets, for example. The nuances of the Cirrus chip in this video is a perfect example of that - each chip has a personality and a use-case (some more than others) and this applies to so many other things as well e.g. motherboard chipsets. Anyway, thanks for providing some original viewing during breakfast.
The SlimsPort has Groupe Bull branding, but that seems to just be a badge swap as there are units with the original Zenith emblems on them in the wild. At one time there were plans to make a video about KCom, but it never happened. For CD drives, the one just out of the top of the shot of the Sanyo is supposed to appear at some point, as that one is interesting. Chipsets were something I tried to sneak into regular videos, where the progress was tracked from the early days of glue logic, the CS8210, the appearance of IPCs and eventual plastic QFPs that did all the work. It probably could be made into its own fairly comprehensive thing, though. VGA would be fun, if only as it would probably annoy people somewhere, given I didn't build computers for speed and hold somewhat contrary views on certain chips that may have been mentioned in this video. Still, hoping for the clock next. That's 1950s 'early space-age' logic and while it doesn't use modern integrated circuits, it does include several of their forerunners that were extremely difficult to make and act almost like a sort of ROM.
@@HighTreason610 oh yeah, I totally forgot to mention the clock project, that looks fascinating. I do love your synth stuff because I know jack shit about them, plus the electronics stuff you've done before like the CGA/EGA to VGA converter. Basically if you're making something viewers will be into it.
Things are mostly well. Just about have the Presler working again, anyway. Probably won't be onto video stuff until my house has a functioning sewer again, though.
Ain't stopping yet. Can't do anything right now, though, due to even more workstation problems. Cannot resolve these until yet more things are dealt with. I'll be back, but things will probably never be back to weekly or even monthly again, as I just don't have the time or now, the computational facilities to do it.
Great to see another one of your videos! Maybe you do not need to always show hardware (if you have trouble finding sth interesting enough), it could be so that you also have some videos discussing computer/technology and other "geeky" topics (?) :)
No question your channel could and should be a lot bigger. The problem is that you were shadow banned, the same thing happened to me after my first year. My channel blew up quickly and then it was artificially silenced by the algorithm.
It would be interesting to at least know what the magic words or magic actions are that result in this. It would also be interesting to dig through old records on old disks and figure out when things like partnerships and offers from networks appeared, and how the figures were before, during and after that moment. Can't really be bothered to do that, have spent most of this summer wandering and cycling around the countryside, and that makes me feel good, whereas rummaging around in hard drives doesn't. Still, knew I wasn't the only one.
WTF? Not 1990 capable, that's a shame, because I was born in 1989 and myself had broke the berlin wall and that Laptop didn't pass the aftermath of the breakdown of the german wall? :D
Man, I only just found this channel too, really been enjoying your videos. My girlfriend who is English likes the profanity when I am watching, she too cusses like a sailor, lol. Hope you come back dude. Wanted to add, I watch a lot of tech channels and was never recommended your stuff, I found you when searching, "286 vs 386", or something like that, and you made that awesome video comparing the two both clocked at 16mhz.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm trying to get things working to film again, but it hasn't been a smooth process. In regards to your other comment: While I can't vouch for 86Box, what little emulation I use tends to be limited to either a very 'normal' 8088 and a Pentium with the clock speed unrealistically adjusted up or down depending on what is being tested.
@@HighTreason610 I can't recommend 86box enough, just know it's single threaded so it is really taxing. My computers are pretty old now, I use 86box on an i7 2600 or 8350, and I can only emulate up to a pentium 90. I enjoy emulating the older stuff. It can be fun to push hardware further than it was intended for for fun, like running windows 95 on a 386sx, or xp sp3 on a pentium 90. I also got to experience geoworks again, something I only remembered as a toddler. I keep making more and more machines, you don't need a manager and each one is it's own independent file, no installation required, easily copied and pasted.
Oh, I'm not welcome around that dump. Nothing for sale, or I'd have sold it already. I gave away most of the surplus hardware over the years and don't really have anything left to part with now.
Places like eBay, generally. If you can dig up old manuals for laptops using this charger type, you might be able to find some model numbers to search for.
Good to see you back, I will comment on the video after I've watched it. When I saw Zenith in the title, I thought this is going to be fecking good HT video!
Perfectly fine, thanks. Just chasing never ending repairs, which I'll probably talk about whenever I get to make a video. Quite honestly, it's borderline unbelievable how much of a nuisance things have managed to make of themselves.
Believe me, I want to. Might be a Pentium III that appears first, though, as I need something more familiar to get back into thee swing of it and I also haven't gotten around to drawing fully detailed schematics that aren't just pencil drawings yet.
Look at Wolfenstein 3D on that inverted display. Can you change the inversion of the display? My cousin's laptop was in colour. He got it in around 1994 or so, a later/higher end model maybe?
The display has about ten settings, half of which are inverted. This one looked best to the eye but not the camera - the viewing angle required to get the camera into a spot where it could see the screen wasn't great, as the consequence was that I could then barely see it with the eyes. It does seem there were color versions of this (or else, one was intended to exist) and the chassis design might well have seen off a few motherboards before it went away, so it's entirely possible a machine with completely different specs existed in it at some point.
I have tried and tried to do so. It hasn't gone well at all and things only got worse with time. It has reached the stage where I've had to bite the bullet and allocate resources into building a completely new PC, but hardware availability is proving to be an issue and it will take several months to do, due to other obligations.
HT, I totally agree. I've been watching your channel for years. And I always felt bad for you, because of your viewership numbers. Your videos are incredible. And I can't imagine the efforts that go in. It's actually motivated me to work harder, so I can contribute/support people like you. Sincere sympathies. I hope this platform wakes up. Hang in there! Much respect, from your fan.
From a certain angle it looks like a 1972 brutalist council building or a "new town" library...You Work In Slab Now - You Die In Slab Now! The ghosting screens have always made me queasy, my eyes are trying to outmove my brain looking stuff and it gets a bit pukey.
Your vids are the best stuff on youtube. Period. I can't stand the shouty wank that gets millions of subs and likes, just unwatchable dross - plus the endless auto microcuts to remove "dead air" again me nauseous. Do more synth stuff or whatever you feel like shoving up, you'll always have at least 1 sub here...like that's an incentive!
I quoted you, couldn't agree more
Well, thanks. You know, it _does_ look rather brutalist. Could totally see it as a building on some kind of mid-century campus somewhere. I can imagine it in some grainy old video as the building housing the latest and greatest mainframe at some rich West Coast university or something.
That or Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters
Silences are underappreciated. Sometimes having a pause is good, say if encountering a questionable aspect of a design that speaks for itself, or purely to be awkward on purpose.
always enjoyed the content on this channel. think its the only one i have set to notify me of new content which tells its own story. do what makes you happy i’d say only upload if you want to
Nice to hear. Thanks.
This is how I've always operated, no schedules or deadlines, things just happen as they happen.
The legend returns.
I have a Zenith Z-Star ES that's very similar to this laptop except it has an i486DX2 CPU, a built-in trackball and a grey plastic case. What's peculiar about that machine is that there's a battery compartment that allows the computer to be run with eight AA batteries. Presumably this expands the runtime of the laptop on battery power by 20-30 minutes, though I haven't tested this yet because I'm not quite keen on burning through eight AA batteries... I'm now trying to get my hands on an earlier version of the Z-Star that used the magnificently weird J-Mouse (not to be confused with the TrackPoint).
Ah, those ones with the AA battery compartment. I'm sure I've seen one, somewhere. Unfortunately it made the machine look like one of those kids educational things, V-Tech or whatever they were called. Then again, those things were probably still more robust than half of the trash that comes out now.
Glad to see another video. Will watch it when I get in.
Love your channel and I’ll always stick around. It is strange yours never grew
I think my cousins had a laptop similar to this one, it was white in colour and it was made by Zenith, and it had that status LCD screen. I don't know what its specifications. I think it was a 486.
Pack is Nickel-Metal hybrid. (NiMH)
Can often just replace them with NiCad if you really wanted to but NiMh are easy to come by and fairly cheap if you don't go for maximum capacity so don't know why :)
The pack even has it printed on, but I somehow missed it until editing was already done and there was no real incentive to go back to fix it. In my defense, the print is small light-gray-on-beige and the glasses aren't on when filming. Could probably re-pack it, but not sure it's worth the hassle and I've had enough of NiMhs for now, given I've just finished with a project that added them to a 1920s bicycle dynamo light set to skirt the laws.
I thought you had taken a more softer approach in this video but the ending was excellent...Retro Tech WWF ! you'd make a good host for Notebook Wars though :). Hey, why don't you do more electronics videos, seems to be more popular than vintage gear. Searching YT for Zenith 386 notebook review didnt even show your video in the results.
Thanks. The laptop being largely underwhelming, as it never quite oversteps the boundaries into doing anything abhorrent, but also isn't really anything especially brilliant, was probably the cause of things seeming softer. It gave me little to work with when talking about it compared to some other hardware.
More electronics is the plan. The clock, some extensive alterations to a terrible PCI sound card to make a music production solution and likely a repair of some 80s junk are already on the list.
The C&T 386 video was the biggest mystery when it came to searches. It turned out that even using the exact title and tags would still result in it appearing on the third page of searches, despite being the only video of one at the time.
First I saw the title .. then I saw it was a High Treason vid and thought "alright then, this will be good". Your unique take on electronics is as richardsmith4992 said "the best stuff on youtube". Plus, on this side of the planet your accent and vocabulary set these videos apart from the cookie cutter approach that YT loves to promote. I was hooked when I first heard you trashing the Roland Sound Canvas in a previous vid, I couldn't believe anyone else heard it that way as well. I really hope you feel compelled to make more videos with your one-of-a-kind attitude, specific knowledge and wit. You cracked me up countless times in this vid. Thank you for doing it your way.
Cheers.
That bloody SoundCanvas. Have to write music for it at some point for a Duke 3D related project. That's gonna be hellish to do.
I don't have a Bull Zenith and I don't want one. The whole BT contract fascinates me so if you ever feel like making irreverent (obviously) documentary-style videos, I would watch the shit out of that one. There are so many other things you could cover, particularly the evolution of technology. You have so many awesome examples of CD-ROM drives that you could map their development quite comprehensively. Another thing I would watch is your top ten VGA chipsets, for example. The nuances of the Cirrus chip in this video is a perfect example of that - each chip has a personality and a use-case (some more than others) and this applies to so many other things as well e.g. motherboard chipsets. Anyway, thanks for providing some original viewing during breakfast.
The SlimsPort has Groupe Bull branding, but that seems to just be a badge swap as there are units with the original Zenith emblems on them in the wild.
At one time there were plans to make a video about KCom, but it never happened. For CD drives, the one just out of the top of the shot of the Sanyo is supposed to appear at some point, as that one is interesting.
Chipsets were something I tried to sneak into regular videos, where the progress was tracked from the early days of glue logic, the CS8210, the appearance of IPCs and eventual plastic QFPs that did all the work. It probably could be made into its own fairly comprehensive thing, though. VGA would be fun, if only as it would probably annoy people somewhere, given I didn't build computers for speed and hold somewhat contrary views on certain chips that may have been mentioned in this video.
Still, hoping for the clock next. That's 1950s 'early space-age' logic and while it doesn't use modern integrated circuits, it does include several of their forerunners that were extremely difficult to make and act almost like a sort of ROM.
@@HighTreason610 oh yeah, I totally forgot to mention the clock project, that looks fascinating. I do love your synth stuff because I know jack shit about them, plus the electronics stuff you've done before like the CGA/EGA to VGA converter. Basically if you're making something viewers will be into it.
My uni had tons of Zenith machines in our labs. Haven’t seen that Group Bull logo in years. Hope all is well!
Things are mostly well. Just about have the Presler working again, anyway. Probably won't be onto video stuff until my house has a functioning sewer again, though.
Love your videos man, please don't stop.
Ain't stopping yet. Can't do anything right now, though, due to even more workstation problems. Cannot resolve these until yet more things are dealt with. I'll be back, but things will probably never be back to weekly or even monthly again, as I just don't have the time or now, the computational facilities to do it.
Great to see another one of your videos! Maybe you do not need to always show hardware (if you have trouble finding sth interesting enough), it could be so that you also have some videos discussing computer/technology and other "geeky" topics (?) :)
That's pretty much the intention, primarily electronics, repairs and tampering.
No question your channel could and should be a lot bigger. The problem is that you were shadow banned, the same thing happened to me after my first year. My channel blew up quickly and then it was artificially silenced by the algorithm.
It would be interesting to at least know what the magic words or magic actions are that result in this. It would also be interesting to dig through old records on old disks and figure out when things like partnerships and offers from networks appeared, and how the figures were before, during and after that moment. Can't really be bothered to do that, have spent most of this summer wandering and cycling around the countryside, and that makes me feel good, whereas rummaging around in hard drives doesn't.
Still, knew I wasn't the only one.
WTF? Not 1990 capable, that's a shame, because I was born in 1989 and myself had broke the berlin wall and that Laptop didn't pass the aftermath of the breakdown of the german wall? :D
Man, I only just found this channel too, really been enjoying your videos. My girlfriend who is English likes the profanity when I am watching, she too cusses like a sailor, lol. Hope you come back dude.
Wanted to add, I watch a lot of tech channels and was never recommended your stuff, I found you when searching, "286 vs 386", or something like that, and you made that awesome video comparing the two both clocked at 16mhz.
Thanks for the kind words. I'm trying to get things working to film again, but it hasn't been a smooth process.
In regards to your other comment: While I can't vouch for 86Box, what little emulation I use tends to be limited to either a very 'normal' 8088 and a Pentium with the clock speed unrealistically adjusted up or down depending on what is being tested.
@@HighTreason610 I can't recommend 86box enough, just know it's single threaded so it is really taxing. My computers are pretty old now, I use 86box on an i7 2600 or 8350, and I can only emulate up to a pentium 90. I enjoy emulating the older stuff. It can be fun to push hardware further than it was intended for for fun, like running windows 95 on a 386sx, or xp sp3 on a pentium 90. I also got to experience geoworks again, something I only remembered as a toddler. I keep making more and more machines, you don't need a manager and each one is it's own independent file, no installation required, easily copied and pasted.
I like your videos
Hi. Do you have some old pc hardware for sale ? Are you on amibay ?
Oh, I'm not welcome around that dump.
Nothing for sale, or I'd have sold it already. I gave away most of the surplus hardware over the years and don't really have anything left to part with now.
So when are you getting back to Blood? ;) Just kidding.
No time for that pale imitation. Too busy with Duke.
Where could you find a charger for this laptop, because I have one of these and I would really like to use it.
Places like eBay, generally. If you can dig up old manuals for laptops using this charger type, you might be able to find some model numbers to search for.
Good to see you back, I will comment on the video after I've watched it. When I saw Zenith in the title, I thought this is going to be fecking good HT video!
Come back!!!!!!
Trying. Mostly failing. Taking a week to do other things before I even think about trying again.
Hope you're doing well bro
Perfectly fine, thanks. Just chasing never ending repairs, which I'll probably talk about whenever I get to make a video. Quite honestly, it's borderline unbelievable how much of a nuisance things have managed to make of themselves.
give us the clock!!!!
Believe me, I want to. Might be a Pentium III that appears first, though, as I need something more familiar to get back into thee swing of it and I also haven't gotten around to drawing fully detailed schematics that aren't just pencil drawings yet.
Look at Wolfenstein 3D on that inverted display. Can you change the inversion of the display? My cousin's laptop was in colour. He got it in around 1994 or so, a later/higher end model maybe?
The display has about ten settings, half of which are inverted. This one looked best to the eye but not the camera - the viewing angle required to get the camera into a spot where it could see the screen wasn't great, as the consequence was that I could then barely see it with the eyes.
It does seem there were color versions of this (or else, one was intended to exist) and the chassis design might well have seen off a few motherboards before it went away, so it's entirely possible a machine with completely different specs existed in it at some point.
Come back!!!
I have tried and tried to do so. It hasn't gone well at all and things only got worse with time.
It has reached the stage where I've had to bite the bullet and allocate resources into building a completely new PC, but hardware availability is proving to be an issue and it will take several months to do, due to other obligations.
27:58 what game is this?