IBM's Eduquest: The Only Good 90s All-In-One

good morning everybody today we have two of them well there will be uh but first we have to finish talking about one of them over a year ago I made a video called beginning the eduquest about this computer the titular eduquest I decided to make another but I didn't and I'm here to talk about why and what I did about it The Edge request is an IBM PC from 1993 and a form factor sometimes called all in one because the parts are all you know in one specifically the monitor um all the other parts of pretty much in every PC foreign that makes it really hard to capture clean footage the monitor on this thing is like a mirror it was reflecting my entire studio and I didn't realize till after the shoot how distracting it was I went through and hand blurred every single shot of this machine so if the modder looks weird and unsettling at times that's why also yes I know about the haircut now I've always been fascinated by all-in-ones but I've also known that they all suck most of them anyway it was never all that popular a form factor for PCs it's more of a Mac thing so while I've always wanted to collect these most of them aren't really worth collecting for instance I got this compact CDs 524 a couple years ago and you've never seen it in a video because it's just not worth the video it works fine it has a 486 dx2 CPU it runs Windows 95 it has sound it runs games and I just don't like it very much it's ugly it's boring it's 90s Bland it's poorly built it has a terrible monitor it sucks to work on and the whole machine just reeks a cheap design but that's par for the course for all in ones it doesn't get much better than that I have no idea why I'm intrigued by these things I guess I just like their Appliance like nature but they're in objectively bad concept building the monitor into the machine doesn't get you anything other than a less convenient PC that's harder to fix and weighs more but we all have our fixations and this is mine I do still have some amount of taste though and for the longest time the only all-in-one I knew of that wasn't embarrassing to be seen with was the truly antique PS2 model 25. for years the model 25 was a beige whale of mine that's what I call something that I hope all stumble across someday but I won't put in any effort to get here's a picture of one and it might have you thinking that I finally got my whale but this isn't that fortunate see the model 25 sucks as far as I can tell I've never had one but it's one of the earliest entries in IBM's PS2 series which we're supposed to put them back on top of the PC market way back in 1987. I've always thought they looked super cool but as usual for all in ones they're just crappy low end computers really most that were ever sold had the same 4.7 megahertz clock speed as the original IBM PC from six years earlier in 1981. they did use a higher end chip the 8086 instead of the PCS 8088 but I already have my share of Old Slow PCS there'd have to be something else to sell me on this and it just really isn't the model 25 doesn't have the best hardware to begin with it doesn't have a lot of expansion options and the video Hardware leaves a lot to be desired a lot of them were actually black and white only in 1987 if you can believe that they did make color models they made somewhat 286 CPUs and even a few with 386s but both are fantastically rare and cost thousands when they show up even the original 8086s are pretty rare but even if I could get a hold of one of those at a price I liked they're just not all that useful they look cool enough but they were cheap and outdated when they were new and they've only gotten worse so I was never that fired up about them but you know I'd take one if it was offered and if one of the 386 models ever showed up on eBay for like five or six hundred bucks I would have snapped it up so I kept an eye on things periodically one of the low end color models would show up and I'd think about buying it and one time one of the 386s showed up broken and I put a huge bid down on it but fortunately I lost because otherwise I might not have gone looking for an edu Quest once I learned what they were The Edge request is much newer than the model 25 by about six years so while they may look similar it's a totally unrelated much better design to be clear this machine is like 20 bigger than that one see the model 25 only has two three and a half inch Bays on the front while this machine has room for a whole five and a quarter plus a couple three and a halfs and room to spare so it's a big boy that also means the display is much larger and all the hardware inside is of course completely different as far as I know there's no relationship between these machines other than the basic Aesthetics which I feel were clearly borrowed but I'm not sure if it's just because the same designers worked on both machines or if it was just a convenient place to start with this new model series and the edge requests were a series this is not the only one the models 30 40 and 50 were the original lineup sold in 1993 I believe a model 35 was added a bit later and the 45 and 55 5 came out in 1995 which as far as I can tell was the last year these were sold this one is the eduquest 30. the earliest lowest end model and the sticker on the back confirms it was made in 1993. all in ones generally suck but this one scores way above all the other ones I'm aware of in many areas and it's an intrinsically interesting specimen to boot it's not only an all-in-one which are relatively rare in the PC market but one made by IBM themselves they'd Fallen pretty far from grace even by 93 but it's still intriguing to see a unique design exit the halls of the ancient bureaucracy for context about a year later IBM would start selling the aptiva series the blandest dullest most 90s ass computers you've seen in your life and they would continue to sell those for like a decade so this machine narrowly avoided a fate worse than death it still actually looks like something so I was excited to get one for many reasons reasons that I'll go over and I made a video about it pretty much the moment it arrived where I spoke about the very basics of it and then promised to go into more detail later and then I never did because unfortunately the edge request 30 was a disappointment it didn't end up being what I'd hoped but fortunately I have a new favorite son identical looking box is an eduquest 40 the mid-range option from the original lineup and it's a significant Step Up In hardware specs they may look similar but these are totally different Generations one has a 386 processor and the other is a 486. this is actually really neat because despite being super different they both had to be packed into the exact same form factor and you'll see what that looks like later in this video but first the question why did I buy a second edu Quest when I hadn't even finished showing off the first one well we gotta put this on the table it's hard to talk about PCS because they're all the same they run dos you can type dur right how many machines uh do I own that can do that it's like 30 right now and in my lifetime it's been 500 they're all the same it's really tough to make a video about a PC at least for me even for a machine that has a bunch of interesting qualities it's still ultimately just dots and you type dur but in this case there were further problems uh for one thing it turned out I'd been a bit presumptuous about what I could find on eBay for the 30. it was missing some parts and I assumed I could just get those but I set some saved searches and then a year passed and I didn't see anything not a single spare part ever popped up whoops this kind of gets us into the question of what exactly these machines were and I can't fully answer that because there's very little info in the fossil record I get almost all the info from my channel from like consumer electronics magazines infoworld PC Magazine that sort of thing and they don't have anything about these presumably because they weren't consumer machines see what I can tell you for sure is that the eduquest PC was a product of eduquest the company a subsidiary of IBM they used to be IBM Educational Systems from 1985 up until 1992 when IBM did a big internal reorganization and renamed them to eduquest my impression is that these machines were designed to Target the needs of school computer labs in much the same way that Apple was doing with various Macs at the same time so they were probably sold almost entirely through cold calls to school administrators I don't think many individuals ever bought these they were mostly just packed into computer Labs kept way past their Prime and then thrown out as scrap except for the occasional unit that went home with a teacher which is I'm guessing how virtually every one of these made its way into private possession there were probably only a few thousand of these that survived the dumpster if they even made that many to begin with so it's not surprising that I couldn't find any bits and pieces online and you know these weren't critical Parts they were just options and the rest of the machine worked fine and it still does but does it work fine for me I mean the 386 is not an amazing CPU it's kind of neither here nor there it's the very first processor that resembled the ones we use now they're certainly more useful than a 286 but they're still very slow and ancient so there isn't that much I could practically do with it um to put to find a point on it even Doom won't run playably on here to get into the other problems though we got to look at all the hardware so we're going to play a game of what sucks about the 30 and then I'll show you the new hotness keeping in mind of course that I'm being hyperbolic it's actually a really nice machine I like a lot of things about it it's just not as nice as the new one so here it is the 30 and we'll sort of be going all over it but since I won't be opening up the CRT portion I'll just tell you this part virtually every all-in-one I'm aware of puts the power supply for the PC inside the monitor half since there's always some empty space in there and it makes the machine a little more compact than it would be otherwise so this power switch here turns on the PC and the monitor at once now here's a fun fact IBM's primary consumer PC line in 93 was still the PS1 series many of which put their power supplies inside the monitor as well but those monitors were removable so you could lose them and then your PC would just turn into a pumpkin anyway now IBM made a lot of crappy computers around this time but they always had an odd tendency to make their bio splashes look a little nicer than they had to the edge Quest actually fades in its splash screen that wasn't just the tube warming up let me show you okay so the tube's hot and it fades in and then fades in the text separately they didn't have to do that it's a cute little touch on the other hand uh since this is an IBM it doesn't print all the diagnostic spew that we're used to remember how computers used to before they went to EFI print all that stuff on Startup that would tell you you know the memory test and the hard drive detection and all that well that was normal at this time PCS in 1981 or 83 may not have printed anything on Startup other than error messages but pretty much every clone made after the at did IBM however was committed to living in the past so this one won't actually print any messages at all other than checking system configuration and then it'll give you an error message if anything goes wrong if your keyboard is unplugged or the BIOS has errors or whatever otherwise it just plays this Pleasant little booty noise and boots right into dos though my favorite thing about it is if something does go wrong it plays a very sad bee Boop [Music] there's a surprising number of things that can trigger this too for instance the machine remembers how much RAM it has so if you add or remove any it halts on the next startup and warns you about the change which I guess might be good if your students like to steal things now after this of course it just boots up into dos and it's a completely normal PC nothing particularly remarkable about how it functions after the post but there is one other interesting feature that you can trigger at post and that's dos in ROM the chips that store the system bios also contain a copy of Dos 5.0 that's what we have here and the Machine can boot from it either as a primary option if you want or a fallback if there's no other bootable medium now the Tandy 1000 the vendex Head Start and probably a couple other clones did this and IBM included it in some of the PS1 machines so it wasn't unheard of but it's still a pretty rare feature I'm not sure exactly why they included it I mean the edge request was probably derived from the PS1 so maybe they just did whatever that division was doing they definitely borrowed a couple other components like the floppy drive and bezel so maybe that's all there is to it but I'm not exactly sure why they did it in the PS1 I mean those machines came out after hard drives have been Universal and reliable for years now it did occur to me that this could have some value in schools since children are monsters who will destroy anything they touch this could make reloading a trash machine a bit quicker since you could just boot into ROM dos complete with CD-ROM support and start rebuilding it but I don't think that holds very much water and certainly they had some more interesting ideas than that because there's an option to boot from romdas but use the config sys and autoexec.bat from whatever floppy disk is inserted or even from the hard drive these are really strange options so I have a hard time guessing what their intent here was but besides that there's just not much to say about how the Machine Works after post it's just like any normal PC it boots up into dos and that's where the interesting ends it's dos now when I got this it was set up to launch a menu with links to a bunch of educational software mostly about biology and I'd hope to go through those and show them off but they didn't end up being all that interesting or they required CDs I didn't have so I just killed that menu and there wasn't much else of note on the machine so all that's left and honestly most of what makes this machine interesting is in the hardware so starting on the front here we have here three and a half inch floppy Drive which is fortunately a 1.44 Meg which you can tell because it says it right on the button that's an old IBM thing they introduced those on the PS2 and they were so proud of it that they stamped it into every single eject button and I guess they were still doing it by 1993. it's also fortunate that this drive is working because it can be irritating trying to swap these out when there's a custom face plate involved floppy drives are nominally the same but sometimes the slot lines up and sometimes the disc jams as it goes in not that these fully worked when I got them uh the drives in both this and the newer Edge Quest couldn't eject which is common in Old floppy drives uh give you a fun fact Greece is typically a mixture of oil and soap not exactly the kind you use to wash your hands but similar in ways and the soap is a thickener it keeps the oil stuck to the working surfaces rather than just dripping off but eventually that oil leaches out and it leaves behind just soap which as you can imagine is extremely sticky so often when you get drives of this age you can put a disc in okay but when you go to eject it it'll pop up but it won't pop out and that's because the eject lever is basically glued in place it might be able to move if you push on it but the spring can't actuate it anymore fortunately however with just a little bit of disassembly in this case just popping the spring off and slipping the lever out followed by a few minutes of scraping the grease off and scrubbing the remainder with with isopropyl everything cleans up and moves again I've never had this fail to date and these drives now both work perfectly the machine also has a CD-ROM of the old style which takes caddies like this since I finally have one of these it works let's enjoy a good eject together shall we oh my God it's not plugged in I'm not a smart man oh this drive's broken I forgot yeah this drive doesn't work at all now the upper left looks suspiciously like one of those primeval hard drives that had external faceplates but it's actually just a panel blank with an activity light the sticker fell off now around on the back we've got the power input of course and then shockingly what appears to be four expansion Bays which we'll get into in depth below those we've got the keyboard the mouse serial parallel ports and that's it now this is where we see the first outright deficiency in this machine there's no external video output and that's not surprising that compact all-in-one doesn't have one either probably a lot of aios don't The Edge requests video output is connected to the monitor with a special internal cable there's no standard VGA port in it anywhere and that's a reasonable approach most people would never want to use an external display and since providing that output would require either an active splitter or switching circuitry it's not surprising that IBM didn't bother putting one on the bottom of the line model but it's not very convenient for me if I want to capture video from this machine the only option I have is to point a camera at the extremely reflective screen that sucks so there you go problem number one that's only a me problem most of my other complaints are inside so we'll have to open it up now I told you that neither of these Edge requests actually suck and one thing I love about both of them is maintenance there are a lot of ways to make a tiny PC miserable to work on the compact again provides a great example the motherboard pulls out the back of the machine but it leaves the drives inside at the front to get to those you have to take out screws on the front of the machine and pull off the incredibly flimsy bezel which requires a bunch of wiggling and fiddling back and forth until the crappy little plastic tabs pop loose each drive then lives on its own little sled that you have to unscrew and pull out and when you put them back in you have to tease the cables carefully into place behind them so they don't get shredded The Edge request on the other hand puts the whole system on this sled so we just take out two screws and then there's one more on the bottom near the front and all the guts slide out at once the only thing you have to do is disconnect the video and the power cables coming from the monitor half so this guy here is the video cable that just pulls out and then you go a little bit further there's a tab you have to release back here and then this guy here is the power cable that just pulls out there's supposed to be a guide here but mine disintegrated unfortunately and now we have the entire machine just like that this is my favorite PC form factor for maintenance not only does it all come out as a unit but unlike virtually every tiny PC going back to the shuttles in the 2000s you can actually get to everything um the expansion bays are right up here you've got the cable connectors there the drive the ram it's all just right there and you can rotate it on your workbench in whichever direction you need to get the stuff it's fantastic the only thing that it's at all inconvenient are the hard drive and CD-ROM but even those are accessible pretty readily through these access panels so this guy here is for the CD-ROM there's the cables and you can remove these four screws to take the optical drive out and then to get to the hard drive we just spin out one screw here on the side and there's the hard drive bed now I won't say there's no compromises in this design for instance the hard drive is IDE and the port is right above the drive bay you can see the drive is in there it lives on this little mac style sled which is probably a lot easier to get out when it was new anyway since the IDE port is right here they use this custom cable it's only like two inches long and that means if you install a new drive that doesn't have the IDE port in the exact same spot there's like no flex to twist it to make it fit irritating but I mean IBM couldn't have known and you know there's a couple other minor irritations for instance if you want to read jumper your CD-ROM well you can't really do it through this port here so you got to spin out the four mounting screws pop the data audio and power cables loose and Slide the drive all the way out the front and then you have to reverse all those steps just to test it and if you find out you didn't get it right you got to pull it all out unplug everything and do it all over again and you know in general I don't know how this machine goes every where everybody want to do anything you have to pull the whole sled out pop the video and power cables make your changes and put it all back together you can't run the machine if it's at all disassembled so that's a step back from conventional PC maintainability but people who are just using computers instead of experimenting on them like weird creeps would never notice it and I'd still rather work on this than most systems up from that time which had those awful u-shaped steel covers you had to struggle with to get on and off whenever you want to do anything inside so anyway now that we're in here's the machine not that you can really make much out since they kind of folded a normal PC back in on itself you know we've got the floppy Drive cage obscuring part of the board the add-on boards obscure even more it's just kind of a visual mess but trust me there's a motherboard under there speaking of add-ons though uh yeah pretty decent expandability here the board has four Ram slots and the riser offers four Isa expansion slots or at least you'd think so at first glance this is where we run into our second problem see these two slots are 16-bit Isa which was pretty much state of the art for the time I mean there was PCI but that was only on 486's for a 386 this was as good as it got and PCI was still catching on so this was still fairly hot in 1993 and having four of them is a pretty good allocation I've seen bigger machines that had less the problem is that you can't actually put four regular cards in here I'll show you what I mean so for instance um here's a completely ordinary three-com ethernet card and I can install it right here okay no problem that's normal eyesight and it works just fine I've tested it now below that we have a scuzzy card now that one I didn't add that came with the machine uh to provide CD-ROM support this seems peculiar you know why use an add-in board for an accessory that's included with the machine but we'll address that later it also seems odd that they wouldn't just use the built-in IDE controller but at this point in time IDE Optical drives were still relatively rare so the drive that shipped with this is scuzzy at any rate though this card is also ordinary Isa and I could put it in any other computer and I could replace both these cards with anything I want but now let's take a look at the other side it's um a little weird here we can see what looks like two more identical slots now the top one came populated with uh you can believe this a network card doesn't look much like one but this is actually a token ring card I don't know much about it except that the that Port is for an adapter that's what lets you plug into the actual Network the bottom slot was empty when I got the machine but it does have labels for a sound card stamped into the metal which is bizarre I mean who would do that why would you do that what if you wanted to put a different sound card in there or another kind of card entirely it's a wild decision but hey who might argue let's put a sound card in it here's an ordinary 8-bit Sound Blaster let's go ahead and pop it in hmm things are they're not working it just doesn't really fit for a whole bunch of reasons for one uh there's this little metal tab at the end of the slot that won't let the back plane bracket slide in all the way see the uh blank that came with it has a little Notch taken out of it which is unique but also the card doesn't quite line up vertically with the back panel the back is lined up with the slot in the back plane but the card is completely missing the connector and if I move so it hits the connector it doesn't line up with the back at all so this just doesn't work at all okay so what about the top slot uh I don't need a token ring card I'm never going to mess with that so let's go ahead and take that out just take the screw out but it won't budge because there's a second screw around here on the back going straight in through the back plane that's weird and when you go to take that out you'll also notice that the back plane hole is about a quarter inch shorter than it should be so needless to say if we try and put our sound blaster in here yeah it it doesn't even get close to seating so this is a total non-starter this is some spooky business what exactly is going on here well basically um it seems that IBM just coming off their proprietary high from MCA decided they just couldn't stand a machine that had only standards compliance slots even if it didn't make any sense so these look like Isa but they're not quite I can illustrate this uh with uh the network card here if it was installed over here in the normal slot all the components are facing up and when I take it out and flip it over as if I was going to install it here they're all facing down but now let's take the IBM token ring card and install it over there and look at that all the components are facing up what IBM has done here is they've made special boards for these slots that are upside down that is to say if we take two cards the IBM and the ordinary Isa in the same orientation with the slot pointing to the left you can see that the bracket and the components stick out the bottom of this card but the top of that one and that means that if you try to install this card over here it's going to misalign with the back plane by one card width this is incredibly irritating and I have no idea why they did it maybe they had a reason or maybe they were just being Pricks but effectively it means that these might as well not be Isis slots at all and the real misery is I'm pretty certain electrically they would work just fine I checked the pin out in a couple places and I'm pretty satisfied that it would be safe to plug an ordinary card into these if you stuck say an XT IDE in there a card that doesn't need a backplane bracket I think it would work just fine you just have no way to secure it you could mutilate the case of course but please don't don't do that so this is the other big disappointment or really two of them one uh the eduquest as designed is supposed to have a network and a sound card that's what these two ports are for you can't even swap them because they're keyed differently the top Port only accepts IBM proprietary network cards and the bottom one only takes IBM proprietary sound cards because this machine was supposed supposed to have one of each of those but I can't get them because nobody has spare parts I don't have any use for the token ring card but nobody's selling the ethernet card and well I did find the sound card on eBay for a cold 50 bucks but that won't solve the problem by itself because there's even more parts to that that nobody else has we'll get to those later but besides that even if I wasn't trying to make this thing you know Museum grade and like new if I was okay with putting inauthentic third-party cards in there this damn scuzzy controller is taking up one of the only two normal slots in the machine so I could put in a sound card or an Ethernet card but I couldn't put in both what a bone-headed decision but it is to be fair one of the few things that they screwed up like I said the edge Quest 30 is a remarkably nice machine for an all-in-one it's pretty it's nice to work on the CPU doesn't predate subphylum vertebrata and honestly it would work great for a lot of people if you find one you should get one you'll like it the things that bug me about it mostly just bug me but none of those complaints are actually why this sat around and did nothing for a year and a half instead of appearing in another video that was for a much sillier reason which is that I couldn't get the CD-ROM to work well I'll never get this one to work this was actually in the 40 and it's actually completely dead uh but this came with a different one and I couldn't get it to function I mean it's not surprising a drive this old would be broken it's been around for over 30 years when I got it I put a disc in and it just spit it right back out at me and I thought well that's fair I'd be done too but I tried switching it for another drive and it didn't work the scuzzy controller wouldn't recognize that new drive at all now my memory fails me as it often does but for some reason I remember that I got it in my head I needed to access the CMOS setup in the machine to diagnose this and that's when I found out that it had a password I know right what luck it's astonishing that the battery on this thing was still good after all these years but it was and it still had a password and I could not find a way to reset it there's no jumper on the board there's no battery to pull out you can look as hard as you want there's nothing there I was understandably puzzled by this for a bit until my eyes landed on this little monolith which many retro Computing fans will recognize it's a Dallas ds-1287 Dallas or compatible anyway which was a once popular real-time clock now is a great time for a little PC history lesson the original IBM PC didn't keep track of time when it was turned off whenever you powered it up you had to type in the current date and time it would keep track of it as long as it was on but as soon as it lost power it would forget again because it didn't have a real-time clock or RTC which is literally just an electronic clock with a battery that lives on your motherboard as late as 1983 if you wanted an RTC you had to buy an ad on board from a third party and stick it in an Isis slot but then in 84 IBM finally added one to the PCAT and there's been one in every computer designed since then even the one you're on right now the RTC was long ago absorbed into the chipset but there is still a distinct clock module in your computer's design now since these have to run off of battery when the PC is off they need to pull as little power as possible the tiny coin sell on virtually all motherboards Only Stores about 238 milliamp hours and your RTC is expected to run for years so the original ones used a semiconductor technology with the lowest power draw which was CMOS now that's actually extremely commonplace technology and was almost meaningless even at the time but it got used in marketing and IT wound its way into the computer lexicon anyway all right I just got that part about CMOS wrong but that's okay because it means I get to read you the funniest quote in the history of electrical engineering it's from the oral history of the Intel 386 as recorded by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and it's an absolutely incredible document that tells the story of how the 386 almost never existed because Intel considered the 286 an abject failure you really should take the time to read it yourself it's a blast but at one point they talk about the Silicon process that Intel used see I thought that CMOS was commonplace in the 80s but apparently that was only in the back half of the decade prior to that virtually everything used the nmos process including the 286 CPU the 386 was Intel's first CMOS chip and so we get this conversation the interviewer Jared asks what led Intel to go from nmos to CMOS one of the engineers prac replies well intel was really late there was an overall trend towards CMOS I think people realized it reduced power consumption and the other benefit was it provided cleaner logic levels the zeros were really zero and the ones were ones and nmos didn't do that they had the zeros but they didn't have the one the one wasn't very good and his buddy slager pipes up it was only about 0.8 but what does the clock have to do with the password well the password is in what we call the CMOS setup notice the synchronicity here machines made before the PCAT didn't have a CMOS setup because they had no non-volatile memory on board the only settings you could change were made through physical jumpers on the board but when the RTC was added to the at design suddenly the PC had a little tiny bit of storage on board the internal memory in these clock modules had more room than was needed for just storing the time there were a few spare bytes which the PC could use as general purpose storage so to be clear what I'm telling you is that PCS stored their configuration their hard drive assignments AGP speed settings and overclocking config inside the clock and I mean that's not as absurd as it sounds it's not like putting them on the graphics card or something the clock was an intrinsic part of the motherboard it was as permanent as anything else unless it was this style which sits in a socket you can just pull it out the CMOS password is inside this little black Lego brick and I don't know how to get rid of it you'd think just unplugging it would do the job right it's lost power so the settings should be wiped but it's not that simple there really isn't a battery anywhere on this motherboard because this style of dialish clock integrates its own battery cast right into the epoxy you can't remove it this situation is just goofy not only it has this battery lasted far longer than it has any right to but there's no way to disconnect it there's no reset pin you can't short it out and you can't remove it or replace it it's all one part I mean to be clear it's running right now in my hand if I had a logic analyzer I could hook it up to these legs and read the time out of it and the password if I knew how they aren't encrypted or anything lots of people know how to wipe them but I don't so I got clever I thought what if I unplug the clock block power the machine up and then jump into the CMOS setup it'll try to read the memory but it won't get anything so it'll assume it's corrupted and load the defaults with no password then I just plug the clock module back in hit save and I've unlocked the machine this was a great idea except that apparently the RTC serves some critical function on this machine and it won't even post without it so I was completely out of luck except not at all I was just being lazy the actual solution was to just order a new blank clock chip and replace it which is what I did they're readily available in fact the one I have in here now is a modded version of a different model that's meant to go into a device that does have its own battery but it's pin compatible with the one that was in here so a kind person is selling them on eBay with this mod this little PCB that adds a coin cell holder on top so you can pop it into a machine that's designed for one of the fully integrated modules but you still get the removable battery you can pop it out to replace it if it goes bad or if you want to erase the contents and sure enough I popped it in here it worked perfectly and I got into the CMOS setup no password and I had no idea why I was trying to do that I cannot figure out what I thought that would get me um but I decided to just take another run at figuring out what was going on with the CD-ROM with a fresh mind I asked around and learned that scuzzy drivers in this era were often locked to a list of specific drives they'd worked with anything else they pretend isn't there which explained my problems so in a whim I put the original drive back in not this one the one that actually came in this machine and I found that it worked perfectly I just only tried a cdrw if I put a CD-ROM or a CDR in here both of them read no problem I'm not surprised the 30 year old drive won't read cdrws I just didn't expect it to get spit out at me so I assumed it was a mechanical failure I lost a year to the Assumption take what you will from that so after 16 months or whatever sitting on shelf I finally had a way to get data onto the machine and just not much reason to I sort it back at square one so I was feeling like a total clown at this point and then eBay sent me an email that made me feel worse another Edge request had finally shown up at a reasonable price or well somewhat reasonable I mean I knew I shouldn't spend that much on it especially since it probably wouldn't make it here intact you really shouldn't ship CRTs they have about a 50 chance of getting pulverized in transit I've had a bunch of friends lose precious devices this way and I always tell people not to do it no matter how much you want the thing or how rare it is it's just not worth it so anyway I went ahead and did it since this is the only Charmed part of my life and it arrived perfectly intact just like every CRT I buy I don't know why this keeps happening there's no good reason I should be this lucky so yeah I never expected to even find a PS2 Model 25 worth buying but somehow I've ended up with two whole Edge requests and that makes me one of the few people who can put these side by side and show you the differences and there are some intriguing ones so welcome to beginning The Edge Quest chapter 2 part 3 you can begin again [Music] the 30 the 40. they look pretty damn similar in fact as far as I know the chassis are identical I could probably swap the boards with no trouble although I suspect the CRTs are not compatible they are different tubes this one is a lot glossier than that one trust me that's made filming really annoying there is a very similar Quirk between the two though it's a really strange one the brightness knob on the CRT here spins forever when you get uh to the end of it it just goes from Maximum brightness to minimum and back and I thought it was damage on this one but they actually both do it I can't imagine it was intentional but they seem to have the same design defect never seen anything like it besides the case however this is in every way a better machine it fixes every complaint I had about the 30 while retaining all the things I like about it but let's be frank here I didn't know that at the time I don't think I even looked up the specs when I made up my mind I bought this not because it was a superior system but mostly because it had a few extra parts that I was missing my 30 was incomplete the 40 isn't it's all here you'll notice that it has the IBM ethernet card and the IBM sound card for the special Isis slots which I couldn't find in 16 months of eBay searches but more importantly it has the front audio panel total unobtainium but in my opinion a critical part of the whole ensemble the following this is a school computer and in 1993 educational software was very much the CD-ROM multimedia type that is the first year that Microsoft and carda was sold to give you an idea now CD-ROM encyclopedias textbooks interactive Anatomy explorers and whatnot were all over the place they were packed chock full of video and sound Clips so a sound card was an essential component of a school computer but you wouldn't want a dozen machines in a computer lab with speakers hooked up all howling about the mitochondria so headphones would have been mandatory and of course you could plug headphones into any sound card but let's think about the minutiae here what was it like using headphones at a school at this time well um they would need to be unplugged and plugged in constantly like when a kid blows snot into a pair so they have to be replaced or if there aren't enough to go around you'd have to keep loaning them from Kid to Kid getting behind the PC over and over every time to plug it plug would suck so putting a jack on the front saves a lot of hassle but also we know exactly which headphones they would have been using schools had the same headphones for like half a century they used them for slideshows audio books hearing tests The Works everyone over 30 remembers these and I wouldn't be surprised if even some Zoomers have seen a pair of school cans they were dour and institutional I think California was probably the most popular brand they looked something like this I almost bought a pair for this video since they're incredibly cheap on eBay and very on brand but man I didn't want to because I knew they were going to be terrible I almost talked myself into buying the clear blue ones since the 90s aesthetic would make up for a lot but before I could do that I came across a post on Usenet from somebody saying that they had a pair of the original IBM telx headphones for the eduquest and that piqued my interest I went and looked them up and I knew I'd found the right ones they're perfect so I got two pair of those just to complete the look although now I'm pretty sure they aren't the look see these headphones are mono but the eduquest sound card and headphone Jacks Are stereo so you really can't use these I mean you can but a mono plug will short the two channels together which sounds extremely bad and might even burn out the amplifier I did try it but it was so crappy that I I didn't even really get an impression of what the headphones sounded like so I'm certain these aren't the right ones now I don't know what to do with them in fact when I went back and looked at the caliphones most of them seem to be mono as well so uh maybe I'm wrong here maybe IBM didn't intend for you to use just whatever you had laying around of course since I have them I might as well review them they aren't as bad as they could be they're over ears and I hate on-ear headphones so I'm all about that and if you were a kid with an unusually big head they wouldn't have been painful or embarrassing because they actually fit surprisingly well on my enormous foreign adult head even if I do look very silly wearing them I have nothing with a mono output so I can't actually test them review complete anyway regardless of what headphones you were expected to use they almost certainly had a quarter inch plug that's just what you'd find in institutional use back then but the only sound card I've ever seen with a quarter inch Jack was the original ad-lib in 1987. pretty much everything after that used a hitch including the second version of the ad-lib so you could use adapters but that's a bunch of extra parts to buy and more things to fail so this is a pragmatic decision another one is that there's two Jacks and they output the exact same thing so you can plug in two pairs of headphones presumably a lot of schools couldn't provide one computer per student or at least they couldn't get that many copies of their software so putting two kids on one machine would be a necessity since no sound card ever had dual headphone outputs this provides a built-in Splinter there's also a mic input and that one is eighth inch because while schools may have had headphones laying around they probably didn't have any mics other than the ones in the auditorium which would have used XLR plugs so they'd have to have gone out and bought cheap PC mics which were all eighth inch by this point the panel also has a volume control and that's a huge feature at this time most software had no built-in volume control and a lot of it ran under dos so you couldn't use the windows mixer I don't think there were any sound cards yet that had a software mixer you could control with a utility but even if they did you couldn't do that in the middle of running a program so software from this era just assumed that you had a pair of speakers with a volume knob on it which is pretty much what this is in fact the speaker in the eduquest uh very unusually isn't just for beeps it's hooked up to the sound card so you don't need to use headphones or a pair of external speakers and it shuts off when you plug in headphones and the volume knob works for those as well so this is a complete audio solution and you can see now why I felt that the 30 was in complete a school lab computer in the 90s was meant to play in karda videos it was meant to have two kids huddled around it on headphones that's a huge part of this machine's identity without the sound card and the front panel it just wouldn't be finished with its readily accessible quarter inch Jacks and volume control this panel adapts the machine to its expected environment and that's why I almost went for the eBay listing just to get this now the sound card itself we'll talk about later because it's a laugh Riot but let's finish talking about the good things first there's nothing else new on the front so let's flip it turn ways because there's a bunch of new stuff on the back let's pick somewhere to start um the ethernet card far more useful than token ring to me ethernet in this era wasn't very convenient and this card is a proprietary IBM option that can never work in Windows 95 apparently but it's still a genuine GM part for a genuine GM car below that there's the sound card which still has the use usual eighth inch jacks on it but they're in this very weird up and down configuration never seen that on any add-in card but who am I to judge so both of the proprietary slots are populated and with the right things this is exciting but there's more cool stuff we can see back here for instance a VGA port look at that this model does have video out and it's the best kind you don't have to pick between internal or external displays or configure anything in software this just mirrors exactly what the built-in monitor is receiving a perfect setup for video capture so that rocks also while the E30 has serial and parallel ports this one has a second serial Port which I may not ever use but it is a conversation starter see IBM used this eight pin mini din plug which is super unusual for a PC you would find it on Max of the same era and I don't know if it's pinned out the same way or if Mac compatibility was the intent but it could have been in 93 there were probably a fair number of Macs floating around schools and being able to reuse peripherals might have been valuable but I think it was just a necessity because the gigantic 25 pin connector they used for serial Port 1 just doesn't leave any space for most of modern PC history serial ports used a nine pin de9 connector one of these and a pair of those was a very common sight on motherboards until the 2000s it still generally recognized as the default serial port and I thought it had been like that since the first IBM PC I knew that db25 used to be common for serial ports back in like the 70s but I thought it was a relic by the 80s at least in the world of PCS I only recalled seeing it on peripherals like modems cameras scanners or on dedicated serial terminals I didn't remember ever seeing it on a PC but it turns out I just wasn't paying attention db25 was the standard serial Port throughout the 80s everywhere including the original IBM PC the de-9 was first used as far as I can tell only on the combo serial parallel card the IBM sold for the PCAT in 84 and they only used it because they needed to fit two otherwise enormous ports onto one card they couldn't shrink the parallel port down because it needs nearly all 25 pins but serial can work with only nine so there you go I don't think de-9 existed as a standard serial Port before then except for the version Atari was using a couple years earlier which doesn't seem to have been compatible apparently it took a really long time after IBM introduced it to become Universal even in the world of PCS however as late as the 90s it was apparently still not unusual to see full-size db25 at least on IBM machines so with the port 1 taking up all this space there's just no room back here they could have used de9 for both ports of course but since most cables at that time were probably 25 pin on both ends that was counterproductive especially since most folks never would have used the second serial port at all so we end up with this very strange juxtaposition of an extremely old standard and one that didn't even really exist in the PC World because it was almost a apple proprietary option so that's all the outside stuff let's go ahead and get inside this machine opens up the exact same way as the 30. you gotta pop the same two cables there's the video and then here's the power which has to slide out of this little cable retainer here I really hate this cable retainer it is super fiddly there we go I actually don't bother using this thing I just had it in there for your benefit but is the edge of quest 40. now with this out we can actually do something pretty cool we can get rid of this chassis and look at these two machines side by side [Applause] and here we go 30 over here 40 over there Stuck In The Middle With You at first they look similar but once you start looking closer it becomes clear they're nothing alike let's make some rooms you can actually see the motherboard foreign s are of course from completely different Generations so you know the chip layout isn't similar in any way uh but beyond that there's one major design change in the 40. it has not one but two scuzzy ports built right into it instead of on a discrete card like the 30. this seems to make a lot more sense I mean they've shipped the machine with a CD-ROM so why use up an entire expansion slot just for a necessary component I mentioned this was odd earlier or we're coming back to it now the answer is it was almost certainly not necessary I would be shocked if you couldn't order these without a CD-ROM they weren't assumptions in 1993 but more importantly um well I can't find that much info about how these machines were used what I can find it makes it clear that they were expected to be networked pretty much universally and even in 1993 it wasn't uncommon for funded schools to have network servers with multiple CD-ROM drives so you could share programs among multiple users making the scuzzy card modular meant that at the very low end of the market they could sell a machine that not only had no CD-ROM but didn't have the dead weight of an expensive useless controller chip in it both for cash strapped customers and networked classrooms that had no use for local Optical drives I'm guessing at all this anyway I don't know which options were actually available or how much these machines cost I can't find a brochure or anything and for all we know there was no sticker price at all if they were intended for education then well anyone who's worked in an office knows there's no fixed price for business to business sales everything is negotiable the price is whatever the sales rep thinks will get them a commission and let's be real the eduquest is the kind of product that IBM probably donated in great quantities in an attempt to drum up interest often that sort of thing never turns into any actual cash sales so for all we know nobody ever bought a single one of these machines but for what it's worth when they first announced the eduquest PC electronic games magazine scene whatever that was said that the 486 version which included a sound card and modem would be two thousand dollars which is about 4200 in today's money so if they had hoped for anyone to actually buy these at sticker price there would need to be a lower spec model than this one so a machine without scuzzy made sense just as much as the built-in scuzzy on the 40 makes sense I think it goes without saying that at the top end of the market the people buying the high-end version would want the CD-ROM without a doubt uh building this in freed up an extra Isis lot in addition those users were probably more likely to have additional use cases for scuzzy you could probably run a cable from the second scuzzy Port around through the drive cage if you wanted to install a bigger or higher performance scuzzy hard drive or you could get an adapter bracket that would convert this board level Port into an external Port so you could plug in an external scanner or a CD-ROM burner or something like that moving on another difference between the two machines is in the video Hardware it's all built into the motherboard of course but the 30 has a chip I can't clearly identify that just says ACI 28600 on it some online info suggests that's a VGA Wonder a pretty old chip that apparently can only do 640 by 480. it will do it at 256 colors though which is better than plain VGA could only do 16 colors of that resolution the 40 on the other hand uses an ATI Mach 32 which I think uses the Visa local bus internally that was sort of the AGP of the early 90s that's a slightly newer chip which is good but I'm not sure exactly what its capabilities were as shipped because my machine has actually been upgraded this is the video RAM that came built into the machine but this is an upgrade socket for doubling your video RAM and it came populated when I got it so that would increase your resolution and color depth options for sure and as it sits right now this can do 1024 by 768 at 256 colors which was pretty dope in 90 E3 definitely beats the hell out of the poor 30. but I'm not sure what it could do without that upgrade I don't want to pull the chip to find out because I'm afraid it won't work when I put it back in see there's two popular websites for info about the edge requests one is named Walsh computer technology and the other is Ardent tool of capitalism the latter says they've never seen any chip that worked in this vram socket but mine does it shows one Mega vram so presumably the machine came with 512k and this doubled it you can do the math if you want to figure out what resolutions that would have supported but since I'm apparently quite lucky I don't want to mess with success if I pull this chip out to see what it can do and then put it back in it might not recognize it again although I did email the maintainer of ardent tool about this and my name is now on that website for all future eduquest owners to see finally I'm famous but speaking of upgrades uh there's another that's far more visible and you may have noticed it already the CPU the 40 came with an Intel i486 SX soldered to the motherboard the SX was the lower cost version of the 486 DX but they're literally the exact same chip this one just has its floating Point math unit disabled it's not clear to me whether that was just because the fpus in these chips failed tests so Intel disabled them and sold them at a lower price to increase yield much like they do today or if this was weird capitalist brain worm where both chips were perfectly intact and they just wanted to make one that was artificially cheaper but at any rate the SX is literally an incomplete 486 although it is better than the 386 in the 30. this chip is soldered to the board you can't replace it but fortunately IBM provided this upgrade socket which is kind of a peculiar phenomenon this was originally meant for adding a 487 math co-processor to give your SX a floating Point Unit there have been a tradition in Intel chips going back to the original 8088 if you had an IBM PC you could add an 8087 FPU to just enhance your math capabilities but the 487 wasn't really just an FPU it was an entire 486 DX and when you plugged it into that socket it disabled the original CPU and replaced it entirely this is a silly approach and I'm not entirely sure why they did it this way instead of just making an add-on FPU the end result however is that even with machines with soldered on chips like this if they have a co-processor socket you can actually use that to install a completely different CPU so what I have in here is a 46 overdrive which is basically a much later revision of the 486 with a built-in clock speed multiplier and an interface designed to work seamlessly in an original SX board with no overclocked bus or anything like that they came in a few speeds but this one is 75 megahertz version I couldn't find any documentation on what was compatible with the edge request so maybe it would support the full speed 100 megahertz upgrade but this was what I could get at my local junk store so that's what I went with I'd love to show you some comparison benchmarks but the reason I got it so cheap is that all the pins had been smashed over I had to spend about 40 minutes with a pick and a razor blade bending them all back into place without breaking any I was shocked when it actually posted I didn't think it would work so I hadn't run any benchmarks ahead of time and if I take it out now there's a really good chance that I'll snap a pin when I put it back in it's staying in there forever so we can only guess but it's probably a pretty good bump in performance since the stock chip was a 25 megahertz 46 with no FPU and this is a 75 megahertz with FPU now I doubt it's a perfect one-to-one Improvement there are probably bottlenecks all over this thing but for the numbers at least this is a 3X overclock so again why is this machine more exciting to me than the 30. well 386 at 25 megahertz no FPU 486 three times the clock speed with an FPU now there's one more upgrade while we're in here and it's another conversation starter that would be the ram you'll notice there are Ram slots in both machines but one's populated with two sticks and the other with four there's a very confusing reason for this which I got blindsided by and you might too if you work on anything from this era both these machines came with four Megs of memory soldered to the motherboard whatever you put in the ram slots stacks on top of that and I'd read that the 40 could be upgraded all the way to 20 Megs but I didn't have any of the right RAM on hand so I just pulled the two sticks that came in the 30 and moved them over I was surprised to see no improvement the machine still reported just four Megs of ram I didn't know if I was getting an accurate reading though so I left it in there and went about my business but then I started having weird problems particularly when I tried to install Windows 95 which basically sat for half an hour and then gave me a memory read error I consulted some friends and I learned that I had committed a faux pas that I never would have figured out without help because the ram format used in these is weird it's called a 30 pin Sim and they used to be common as dirt but I've learned they were actually very strange I'll keep this as short as I can but there's a really wild history lesson here the RAM chips that home computers used in the early 80s only output one bit of data for each memory address when you ask them for a given location they just responded with a single bit but computers back then worked with a word size of 8 Bits meaning they needed to receive one whole byte for each memory access so one bit chips wouldn't work on their own to fix this they stacked eight chips side by side wired them to the same address lines so when the CPU asked for a given memory location all eight chips would respond with one bit each producing one full byte that's how the Apple II the ZX spectrum and the original PC worked and that meant that if you wanted to upgrade your PC's Ram you had to do it in quantities of eight chips at a time or well more than that because the PC used parity which is a sort of error correction and that required one more chip so with four Ram banks at nine chips each if you were maxing out your PC you needed 36 separate chips and if you had a memory error you had to diagnose 36 this was obviously absurd and it was quickly recognized as such in 1982 Wang a major name in Computing at the time developed the sim a 30 pin module that integrated multiple chips onto a single board it was a great idea it pretends to be a single 8-bit wide Ram chip but the way it was adopted was ridiculous they went to all this trouble to make an 8-bit wide memory module but they never deployed it in an 8-bit system it would have been really convenient in Say the original IBM PC whose CPU only had an 8-bit wide bus but that never happened the earliest machine I'm aware of that used these was Wang's APC sold in 1985 with a 286 processor that had a 16-bit bus so we were right back to the same nonsense Sims only produced 8 Bits so you needed two side by side to get 16 bits out you didn't have to stick handfuls of chips in the machine at least but you could still only upgrade it two sticks at a time so their solution was outpaced before it could even get adopted but it did get adopted anyway just very very late everyone started putting these slots on their 286s and then the 32-bit CPUs came out the 386 and the 486 and we kept using 30 pin Sims except that now it took four sticks side by side to assemble a full memory bus a absolute clown college design nonetheless these were made and sold in great quantity and you'd think we would have recognized this format wasn't adequate and we did a couple years into it the 72 pin Sim was invented which was 32 bits wide it completely solved this problem and there were tons of motherboards that used it but they also often included 30 pin sockets as well so there were all these boards that spent almost 25 percent of their surface area on different kinds of ram slots this went on for years I guess it was just in case you had a bunch of the old stuff laying around apparently it took at least a decade for this to finally resolve because while the edge request 55 which came out in 1995 did take 72 pin Sims the 40 from 93 doesn't so although I had put in two Megs of ram it wasn't the right shape I would have needed four separate sticks for that to work but wait a minute then why does the 30 work with only two sticks the 3a6 is a 32-bit processor shouldn't it need four as well this confused the hell out of me until I learned more ancient Shenanigans the chip in the 30 which you can't see I think it's under the floppy drive here is a 386 SLC which is an IBM adaptation of Intel's 386sx which was in turn a Cut Rate version of the 386 which only had a 16-bit bus so it's 32 bits internally it just only reads or writes 16 bits at a time this sounds like a performance disaster and as you might have guessed the narrow bus forces the chip to spend two clock cycles for every memory access which is bad but from what I understand due to other bottlenecks in the 386 Design This didn't have that much impact so the SX was actually not all that bad and it has the side effect that these CPUs will work with only two sims you look on the bright side there if you want I guess so I went to eBay I bought four sticks of four Megs each and I got this thing slammed all the way to 20 Megs of RAM for like 30 bucks which is kind of absurd because for that much I think I probably could have bought like 16 gigs of ddr4 but anyway there's the Whirlwind tour of both machines uh but before we put these back together uh let's take a moment and find out what the wonky jacks on the sound card are all about well if we take a look at the card on the inside you'll see that the two outer Jacks use a sort of upright connector design well the middle one uses a low profile connector which puts the Jack much closer to the board so that's the literal explanation it's two different Jacks I'm just not sure how or why this happened the upright ones are line in and line out and based on their contact pattern here on the bottom they seem to be switching Jacks meaning that they have a signal routed through them when nothing's plugged in and then when you connect something it breaks the circuit and replaces that signal these are the sort of things you use if you want speakers to cut off when headphones are plugged in for instance but I'm not sure what signal they'd be rerouting here still that is what makes the difference the mic Jack is a non-switching type and presumably those were a little cheaper and IBM probably couldn't find them in the same form factor so they designed the card around mismatched connectors resulting in this visual discontinuity this sort of thing isn't that unusual for board level components you know capacitors and stuff companies frequently make accommodations in case they can't get enough of something you'll see for instance circuit boards that have two different hole patterns for the same component but it's very weird to see it in such a visible place it almost seems unprofessional but with that minor mystery solved you've now heard everything there is to say about the guts but like I said with it all back together even the 40 is just a normal computer I'm sure this machine came with DOs but I put Windows 95 on it because I could it functions there's nothing to talk about it is like every other computer with Windows 95 in history I have it running at 1024 by 768 with 256 colors the best this Graphics chip can deliver it's a bit flickery even to human eyes but it works and display is just big enough for this resolution to be barely readable that is all there is to say about it if you want to play games on here well unsurprisingly pretty much every 2D game in DOS history will run on here perfectly and look fantastic on the built-in display this is actually quite a nice monitor in my opinion the machine has no turbo Switch so anything from the early PC era will be unplayably fast but that's okay you don't actually want to play any of it and unfortunately even with the CPU upgrade it's still just not quite hot enough for the 3D era despite all the extra memory and megahertz I poured into this thing it will technically run Quake but not really the way anyone wants to it's usually below 10 FPS and just not a whole lot of fun Duke Nukem 3D struggles pretty hard especially in larger areas rise of the Triad even stutters and doom regularly sinks below 30 FPS but at least if you're a Wolfenstein 3D fanatic this machine will serve your purpose at a clean 70 frames per second and again these are pretty much Universal qualities of any pre-pentium machine it is working exactly as expected so let's talk about what's still broken even on the 40. you'll have noticed I didn't include the distinctive Windows 95 startup sound despite how aesthetic it would be nor did any of those games have audio and that's because I can't get the sound to work probably because the sound card sucks ass on a genuinely unprecedented level it's just terrible you don't understand listen this card sucks so much that IBM got sued over it successfully the eduquest sound card is based on the IBM M wave a blend of herbs and spices built around a DSP chip which was supposed to be a brilliant wave of the future not just a Next Generation sound card but a modem as well the edge request card doesn't have the modem feature but I have another M wave that does I believe this is an M wave dolphin the Standalone version and it has a modem Jack look at that this leverages the fact that a modem in the modern era is just a sound card with a special interface and while it meant that there were some peculiar limitations around what things you could do simultaneous geniusly on paper it was supposedly quite a nice design in practice it apparently did nothing right among other things the modem couldn't run any faster than 14.4 kilobits while playing audio so dial-up gaming was a bust it had no support for the new breed of digital gameport joysticks it had terrible midi support it didn't work with a ton of software had no DirectX support drivers had to be reinstalled constantly and it caused tons of system freezes IBM still shipped these inside a bunch of aptiva PCS and they were apparently so unusably bad that the owners got together and filed a class action suit they didn't win but nobody's ever won any lawsuit against any business in modern history they did however get the closest equivalent IBM settled for I don't know how much it doesn't really matter it is extremely funny though I mean look at this website is this not the most dad is angry website you've ever seen the M wave cards are bad by all measures and apparently the one on the edge request is basically the same thing so despite all my excitement about finally getting the special eduquest sound Hardware I have had almost no luck getting it working this dolphin seems to be completely screwed I can't make it do anything the software won't even detect it uh The Edge Quest Card does a little better um still not great though the best success I've had is with the diagnostic utility that came with it that I found buried in a driver folder it'll successfully record and play back wav files so I know the card is you know alive and it includes a mediev player which up until today uh would just fill the screen with divide by zero errors but while I was shooting this video it inexplicably started working so now I can play midis on here foreign [Music] yes but they don't sound amazing and I can't get anything else to do this other than this diagnostic program there are no Windows 95 drivers unsurprisingly and I've had no luck getting the windows 3 drivers to work I just can't get them to do literally anything at all and while it's supposed to have sound blaster emulation for dos titles that just doesn't work most games say they can't communicate with the sound card others claim to be working but they don't output any sound and several of them just hard freeze the whole machine as soon as I start it it also emulates an ad-lib card and that does work about half the games I've tried with it will output sound but it is horrendously comically inaccurate I'd hope to demo how bad this is with Dooms readily identifiable soundtrack but while it seems to start up okay and it says it detects the ad-lib card I don't get any actual sound so instead dead um here's a few others this is a game called major Striker which was a pretty good shmup from apogee with really fantastic music so let's hear what that should sound like [Music] and here's what it sounds like on the M wave foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah yeah it's um it's rough I'm not really sure what I'm hearing it sounds like maybe there aren't enough FM operators and it's like assigning things to the wrong channels or something uh the volume parameters aren't being honored correctly it's bizarre and it gets even worse if we listen to some of the level music uh here's world one as it should be [Music] and here it is on the M wave [Music] you notice how the noise channel on this one is just completely hosed it's it's just totally unlistable um I also tried the Dos version of chips challenge which probably isn't as well known as the windows one but this supports ad-lib music and you can tell it too does not sound the way it should [Music] for comparison here's how it ought to sound [Music] the music is bad enough but this game uses ad-lib sound effects and when you start pushing blocks around it produces these horrible screeching noises [Music] I can't even imagine what happens in later levels I also fired up this game called zeliad that was a like a Japanese action RPG that uh Sierra imported and the music there is well just give it a listen [Music] [Music] I don't think I even need to play the comparison for you it's just trashed so this doesn't work at all and on the one hand um I'll be fair I don't have the original drivers that came with the machine um they've all been lost to time uh so I had to scrape them together from various sources maybe I have the wrong ones uh on the other hand though that doesn't make any sense if I loaded the wrong drivers then they should just you know not work like every other driver uh but of course this being an IBM product you know one other than the original PC the only good thing they ever made I wouldn't put this kind of stupid failure mode past them and the drivers themselves are pretty clearly a total goddamn disaster you might recall that most of the early sound blasters required maybe a couple files to operate and the very first Sound Blaster required none whatsoever the M wave however installs hundreds of files in dozens of directories and stuffs multiple lines into config.sys loading all sorts of tsrs uh the drivers for the dolphin version inject at least a dozen lines in each file respectively and at a program that runs every single startup interrupting the boot process to ask whether you want to optimize for gaming music or applications on this particular boot up I have no ability to critically and technically analyze this product but I don't need to it's obvious at a glance that it was designed by aliens who had been told what a sound card was but had never actually seen one it's a particular shame if you ask me because while I've only found a couple recordings of an M wave playing midi music um they do sound horrifying here here's Doom [Music] foreign that's what the wave table sounds like and I really wish I could reproduce this myself so if anyone knows how to make this go so I can either make use of it or make fun of it please drop me a line the network card unfortunately has its own raft of problems networking and machine this old doesn't serve much purpose Beyond bulk file transfers and there's other solutions for that so it's not really a critical component but it would be nice if it worked particularly under Windows 95. unfortunately it doesn't there are no official drivers and while Windows thinks it's an ne2000 compatible of some kind it's unable to talk to it this isn't shocking of course since this card predated 95 by almost two years frankly this just isn't the right OS for the machine os2 warp might be a better fit and I'll probably give that a shot at some point but I still wish I've been able to make it all work under 95 because that's just where I'm most comfortable uh the network card ought to work under windows for work groups but I can't seem to get the drivers to work and and besides that I can't really even get as far as testing it because for some reason if I plug in a network cable and then power the machine up it throws an error which IBM seems to have no description for in any other docs so I suspect the card is actually busted and that's a bummer um but on the other hand it is just an Ethernet card it was never going to be unique in the way that the sound card was so I guess I could tolerate putting the 3com in there and using that it just would have been nice if I could get all the proprietary IBM crap working but that really is just about all there is to say about it the nature of old PCS like I said is that they're all pretty much the same which is why I own several interesting ones I've never done videos on uh that compact for instance there are intriguing things to talk about but only about five minutes worth and I've got other things like this IBM PC convertible one of the most interesting PCS ever made but almost entirely because of its shape yes it looks very strange and I could talk about that for about five minutes and that'd be out of things to say because it boots up into dos it says C and you type dur wait no it comes up it says a and then you type dur but then it's just like everything else honestly it took months of having the eduquest around and poking at it from time to time to come up with even this much to say about it and now it's just another PC I own although you will be seeing it again I promise this time because the eduquest division made another product that uh well you don't have to use it with an eduquest p see but I think they hoped you would and I found the software for it on this machine when I got it it's called The IBM personal science laboratory and it's a remarkable concept um far more interesting than the edge request PC uh but it will unfortunately have to wait for another time because it's it's a bit much for now though that's all I've got and you know I always wish that PCS had been more distinct I think we all do it'd be nice if different models had had more unique Hardware features or you know weird software like the funky GUI operating system that I found built into that Head Start Explorer I reviewed a while back that sort of thing is neat and even the little graphical launcher that was built into IBM's ps1s was pretty neat but there's only so much room for that sort of thing and the PC's value as a platform was always its consistency so it's not surprising that this isn't too common PCS are doomed to be boring it's what made them valuable but don't worry people like me will keep trying to turn the tiniest distinctions into hour-long videos and I hope you enjoyed enjoyed this one if you did maybe consider subscribing to my channel so I know you're into this sort of thing and remember to turn on notifications if you want to find out when I upload new videos but if you really enjoyed this then consider supporting me on patreon like these people here are doing and especially these people here I depend on their support to do really dumb things like buying a whole second computer that I already have just because it has a face plate I want and also to do slightly less dumb things like paying rent on my studio or buying cameras I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who's making this possible thank you all so much and everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]

Views: 149,943

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics, CRD

Id: ip32N476eaw

Length: 81min 58sec (4918 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022