Mindset-The graphics workstation you've never heard of!

[Music] the story of the mindset computer actually starts in 1984 but for us here in the Dallas area as sort of starts around May of 2019 now many of you have probably seen LG r's video about the computer reset warehouse which is a place that's almost like going to an archaeological expedition only instead of looking for phones you're looking for vintage electronics well even before LG our film that another youtuber and a good friend of mine TX DJ had filmed the video exploring the depths of this place and posted the video online even though all of us here in the Dallas area including myself had already been to this place many times there's just no way to see or notice everything and plus things get moved around and new stuffs uncovered so many of us watch this 30-minute long video by TX TJ just a listen to his commentary and look for neat stuff that we hadn't seen while they're in person part of the reason why I wanted to get in here and make a video and even do it live and sure enough another local youtuber the UPS leak was watching and noticed an unusual computer in DJ's video he practically couldn't believe his eyes it was the mindset he'd been looking for one of these for years and never able to find one and there it was literally just sitting upside down on a pile of junk so he immediately called DJ and asked him to pick up the computer for him which he did unfortunately it was only the computer and not the keyboard and says the keyboard on this computer is proprietary it's pretty important that that be found so he emailed our local group and asked anybody who happened to be visiting computer reset that if they happened to stumble across the mindset keyboard he'd pay them a hundred dollars for and sure enough about a week later somebody was rummaging through a box of unrelated stuff and an unrelated part of the building and sure enough found the mindset keyboard and then about a week after that the mouse and joystick turned up and so now he has the complete set up which is good because he's loaned it to me and now I can make this video for you guys and I think you're gonna find this computer really interesting so stick around so let's take a closer look at the mindset considering this came out in 1984 it has a much more modern look than any IBM compatible desktop computer of the era being made of nice curved plastic instead of painted metal the keyboard also has a very modern appearance for 1984 and believe it or not in this top section with the disk drives actually comes completely off in fact it was considered an optional accessory so presumably this port would have had some kind of snap-on plastic cover for those that didn't have the district module also believe it or not this disrupt module is more than it appears as well it actually contains an additional 128 K of RAM for the system as well as three expansion ports in the rear but you might be wondering how you would use this computer in 1984 without this drives well I'll show you that too if you rotate this knob on the left it will unlock these two cartridge ports on the front and as you can see these are typical ROM cartridges for the era only these here are just cosmetic blanks there's nothing inside but they did offer a cartridge with gw-basic on it which means the computer would have booted to basic immediately on powerup and since it has two slots similar to the IBM PC jr. or the Atari 800 the idea would have been to have different application roms that work together although much like the PC jr. in the Atari 800 this never really happened and as you can see when I lock this back the cartridges will not come out okay let's mount the drive section back on top it actually glides in really easily okay now let's take a look at the rear of this thing these three areas are the main expansion slots and these cartridges are actually very much the equivalent of an ISA card like you might find on an IBM PC or clone of the era and now this particular one is a stereo audio card and the way this thing works is that the left audio comes from the main unit down here and if you have this module then it becomes the right channel however I don't think there's any software that uses it over here we have what looks like a parallel port card and sure enough they call it a printer module and I really like this setup as it is so much easier to insert and remove cards than a traditional IBM PC no need to take the computer apart no need to remove any screws or anything now what we have here is composite video output and RF output for a television now what we have over here is a little more complicated to explain there is also an RGB video port this is compatible with any regular CGA monitor and then over here is external sync and they also have an auxilary in and out the purpose for this is for video production so if you have two video signals that you want to mix together for example something as simple as overlaying some text onto an advertisement or something this would be difficult to do in real-time because the two different video signals would be out of sync with each other so this works like the gen lock on an Amiga so that the computer will sync its video signal with an external source thus aligning the two signals so that one can be overlaid on to the other one thing you probably haven't seen on the computer so far is a power switch well believe it or not it's on the back of the keyboard and unlike most soft power solutions it's an actual rocker switch but wait there's more notice that on each side of the keyboard you'll find a 15-pin d-sub connector and if you're thinking that looks like a PC joystick connector you'd be right in fact here's a really rare item it's the mindset joystick and has two buttons and it does have analog movement in all directions the cable is not very long but since it doesn't have to reach around the back of the computer it doesn't need to be very long and so that plugs in right there like so there are other peripherals besides a joystick for example they have a special Mouse and believe it or not it has a ball of steel which is quite interesting this mouse is also extremely heavy as far as computer mice go and it has the same connector also available for these ports was a touch tablet for drawing in a video fader switch for video editing ok so now I'm going to connect up a CGA monitor now this particular monitor is just a Tandy monitor for the 10 D 1000 but it's it's just a generic CGA monitor and any CGA monitor should work fine now the thing is a lot of people associate CGA with only having 4 color graphics but that's actually not a limitation of the monitor that's usually a limitation of the CGA card that's why the Tandy machines were able to display full 16 color graphics on these monitors the mind set can also display a full 16 colors on a CGA monitor and interestingly enough of the documentation for the mindset says that it can display 512 colors which the CGA monitor is not capable doing I don't know where the rest of the colors come from I have a suspicion that this computer does have a composite output and maybe the 512 colors is only available on composite I really don't know I've been able to find a good answer for that but for the time being let's hook up the CGA monitor here and see what we can do when you power on the mind set it shows this logo on the screen which is actually cooler than just about any computer from 1984 if you insert an ms-dos disk it will boot to das on the surface it would appear to be just another IBM PC clone but the mindset is very different for starters it uses an Intel a B 186 processor and that alone makes this computer very unique is there were very few desktop computers that ever used this chip the only other one I can think of was the Tandy 2000 the mindset sold for a base price of 1000 $99 with just the base unit and 64 K of RAM apparently for $17.99 you could get twice the RAM and a single floppy drive however I haven't been able to find any photos of what a single floppy configuration would look like and for $23.99 you could get the 256 K version with dual floppies which is what I have here the keyboard is pretty normal but I want to show you these two keys one is sis config and the other is reset the way these work is if you hold down the Alt key and press this config you get this screen here and one of the things you can do is select TV or monitor and that will change the color palette for that mode so we'll leave it on monitor for now over here you can turn the beeper speaker on or off oh and this is neat and you can adjust the screen position here with the cursor keys and when you're done you can reset the computer with alt reset the mind set will boot ms-dos but it was not entirely IBM compatible and this was probably one of the biggest reasons that failed in the market place according to this article in infoworld and the company had verified it to work with 60 off-the-shelf software titles and the magazine listed a lot of them here but as you can see most of these programs are text-based business applications virtually no existing games would work on the mindset as an experiment I tried Planet X 3 since it will run on a a 56k system it appears to start and I can pick CGA graphics and PC speakers sound but then it goes to this blank screen and the whole computer locks up so let's take a look at some programs that do actually work so apparently all mindset computers came with gw-basic now whether on a cartridge or disk the one I have here came with a disc version so let's try it out listing the directory here I can see there are a few example programs so I'll be sure to try those out here all right here is gw-basic which looks pretty normal compared to other IBM compatibles I'm gonna load the sample program called Saturn listing it I noticed that you're using a lot of graphics commands let's run it what's happening here is that our pre rendering a rotating planet and you'll see why shortly and there we go now what they're doing here I'm pretty darn sure could not be done with basic on a regular IBM compatible at the time they're using some of the hardware accelerated video features of the computer to do this in fact I'm about to press control-c to stop the basic program and I want you to watch what happens yep I'll show that again in slow motion the program is stopped and yet the sprite keeps moving proof if anybody needed that this is definitely using hardware acceleration now I'm going to load another program have this one is JS Bach which I suspect is a musical demonstration and when I listed I see a lot of play commands with notes which confirms that it's a music demo well let's try it out okay [Music] um nothing terribly exciting here it only uses a single voice and doesn't sound much better than this would on a regular PC speaker so nothing to see here moving along there's another program on the disc called a tee not sure what that means admittedly I have no idea what is going on here they've created a pacman figure doing weird things and that's all I can tell you ok enough of basic let's move on this is Viper it's the only game ever made for the mindset to the best of my knowledge you can at least hear whatever sound chip they're using does at least have more than one voice that's about all I can say for it so here we go I can use the joystick to fly around this 3d world and there are a few things to take away from this game first of all the game is terribly boring after about a minute of playing it so this game gets an F for gameplay but I am very impressed with the graphics and you have to keep in mind that this is running on a six megahertz computer that was designed in 1983 and sold in 1984 the only reason it's able to play at this speed is because of the vector processor used in the video chip in fact this may be the first personal computer ever to be sold with what we would call a GPU these days also um here's what it looks like on the CGA monitor now the colors are much more saturated which if anything is simply because the limited palette on the CGA monitor is by its very nature extremely vivid colors it's kind of like the difference between looking at games made for the Sinclair spectrum versus the Commodore 64 at least from a palette perspective and the last piece of software I'm going to show you is PC paintbrush this version is designed for the mindset and that these are the video modes it supports only one of these modes has 16 colors so we'll pick that one okay here we go ah this looks pretty typical for a paint program of the era I'll just play around here a bit I'm definitely not qualified to draw anything exciting but you definitely have free rein with the 16 colors I don't really understand the palette at the bottom of the screen since many of the colors appear duplicated so what happened to the mindset well the company barely sold any computers and went bankrupt in the first year it briefly saw some use in the video production market such as this video made for the US army explaining how computers work and what you're seeing here are the mindset graphics being overlaid on an external video source so the floppy disk dude is generated by the mindset and everything else is from a separate video stream now this was accomplished using that video sync feature that I talked about earlier I think there were two major issues that killed off the mindset and the the first big one was the lack of compatibility with existing software this was an easy mistake to make in 1984 in fact Commodore made the same mistake when they brought out their +4 Series in 1984 which also completely failed to get any market share due to lack of software compatibility a lot of companies simply didn't understand the change that it had occurred in the software market over the last two years the software market had grown substantially and suddenly compatibility with that existing software was a more important purchasing decision for customers than to have fancy graphics or sound according to this info world article mindset officials decided they already had most of the desirable software included so they froze the operating systems read-only memory and thus locked out perhaps 20% of the total IBM PC software base however from what I can see it was more likely they locked out 95% of PC software especially games and games that was the second mistake I mean yes there was some small market for video production and things like that but if you're going to bring a computer to market 1984 that has advanced graphics and sound the primary market for that graphics and sound is going to be games and mindset just completely blew it on that one there was only one game for the system and it wasn't even any good ok well now it's time to take this thing apart and see what's inside I will know this isn't the first time it's been taken apart the obsolete geek took it apart when he first got it because the fan was noisy he compared it to the sound of a Vespa so then he replaced a fan with a modern one also a blew a filter cap which is pretty common for these old machines ok so I'm gonna take the mindset apart and there's something I wanted to mention right quick about it so if you look right here you'll notice there's a little bit more discoloured plastic than the rest of the computer yes this whole computer could use a retro write job but this isn't mine so I'm not going to do that to it but yeah you'll notice it's a little bit more yellowed here and the reason is because the power supply in this thing runs all of the time it has a soft power on the keyboard just like Macintosh computers do but the power supply never goes into a deep sleep like those so it stays hot even when the computer is off we're taking it apart check out the serial number it's number 854 and he might think that's a really early unit but I don't think it was made long enough for any high serial numbers to exist so this is probably pretty typical for these surviving machines anyway let's take it apart interesting said it has like a riser card this goes directly into the motherboard and there's an identical connector here which the disk drive you know so it just passes the entire data bus straight through in order to see the entire motherboard I'll need to take the front off as well well I've got to admit I don't recognize much of anything on this board I'm about 95% sure this is the CPU but even it is not marked with anything recognizable other than it was made in Malaysia I did at least get a high-resolution photo of the board and taking a closer look these two Intel chips here are identical other than the date codes and they are both considered slave microcontrollers now if I had to guess I'd say one of them is for communicating with the keyboard and the other one could potentially work in conjunction with the video chip if you remember where I showed you the program keeps running even after I stopped execution of the basic program perhaps one of these slave microcontrollers was doing that job obviously this is the system ROM here on a pair of eeproms and here is 32 K of dynamic RAM now moving over to this part of the board my guess is these two chips are for the enhanced video and there's another 32 K of RAM over here so that gives us the 64 K base Ram of the system which means all of the rest of the RAM must be in the drive expansion unit of course I didn't expect to see any chips on this board for disk drive controllers or anything since I knew all of that would be in the drive unit but what I was not able to locate was a recognizable sound chip now I could be totally wrong about this but I did manage to locate a chip over here next to the microcontrollers that is an 8-bit digital to analog converter basically this could be used to play digital audio samples it is also possible that one of these slave microcontrollers is used to multiplex some square wave voices together maybe that's where the music comes on Viper although the only music we ever hear happens during the title screen and nothing else is happening so maybe the main CPU is used for that and maybe that's why we only hear sound effects during the gameplay one possible way to get an answer would be to open up this stereo sound module because I'm sure there would be a matching sound chip inside this one but I haven't figured out how to take it apart without damaging it and since it's so rare I don't want to risk it so I guess the sound will remain a mystery for now there's a few more interesting tidbits about the mindset that I should mention Bill Gates was working directly with mindset during the development of the very first version of Microsoft Windows the mindset was going to use its hardware video acceleration to make Windows operate at a much faster speed than other computers again putting it way ahead of its time we wouldn't see this sort of hardware acceleration used in Windows for probably at least another decade after all so there is a mindset on display at the Museum of Modern Art and last there are some credible evidence that Jack Tramel the CEO of Commodore may have tried to buy the mindset company either to bring it in to the Commodore brand or perhaps after he left Commodore in 1984 he ended up buying Atari instead well I hope you enjoyed learning about this obscure rare computer that was very much ahead of its time but it just didn't quite make it in the marketplace for various reasons so as always I encourage you to stick around for the next episode and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 1,009,761

Keywords: GPU, video, graphics, workstation, MS-DOS, computer, retro, vintage, Tandy, CGA, monitor, composite, games

Id: 3a_qJFD80_c

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 27 2019