Tech archeology: The frustrating experience of trying to identify mystery cards

well hello everyone and welcome back to Adrian's digital basement this is a continuation of the last video where I went into this Bankers box here and I found a whole Treasure Trove of very interesting cards like this mysterious video card here this is going to be continuation where I actually try to test some of this stuff and see what here actually works and what doesn't so without further Ado let's get right to it [Music] oh now when it comes to testing all the stuff that we took out of the box on the last video there's way too much to test in this one video the last video was already rather long and that was really just sort of unboxing and talking about everything so I'm going to quickly Breeze over some of that testing and cleaning that I did on some of the more run-of-the-mill cards and we will get to actually trying out some of the more interesting stuff well at least the stuff that I think is a bit more interesting first let's talk about my method for cleaning and washing cards and motherboards when I get them I simply take them up to the kitchen sink put some warm water on and I use a little brush and some soap and water and just scrub the cards typically what I do is I just do the soap and water and brushing of the front and back of the card and then before rinsing it actually stack up any of the cards I have to clean and what kind of lets the soap soak in a little bit more and then I go ahead and I rinse them all off for things like motherboards I will remove simple to remove Parts like the CPU but to be honest I don't even take stuff out of the sockets generally unless it's really really dirty or there's any kind of corrosion on the board otherwise I'll just leave stuff in the sockets as well and it's generally completely fine at this point I've watched hundreds of boards this way and I've never had any issues although keep in mind that I wouldn't wash something mechanical like a hard drive like this and I also tend to stay away from things that have Transformers on board so power supplies and stuff I won't generally do this method for washing but all the other parts that are on these cards are totally fine with water and whatever as long as you dry them off before you use them there won't be any problems next thing I do is I dry them off now a while back a viewer donated this blower thing that I have here it's an ESD safe blower it's basically like a vacuum cleaner without the suction part and it has this nozzle that emits a ton of air and as you can see here it really just well the water just sort of sheds off the board and I just spend a few minutes going over the front and the back but especially the front of the board where all the chips are and I just make sure that I don't see any evidence of any other water coming out of the board like from underneath chips and stuff like that you have to spend a bit more time if the board is very dense or say a motherboard which has a bunch of slot connectors because a bunch of water can get stuck in there so you want to make sure that you get all the water out I like this method personally because I'm only using soap and water and then air coming out of this blower motor so there's really no chemicals or anything like that that I have to breathe in the fumes of and with water you really don't have to worry about residue and stuff like that unless you have potentially maybe really hard water but here in the Portland area where I live water is very very soft and it doesn't leave any obvious mineral deposits behind so cleaning and stuff like this has always worked perfectly for me your mileage may vary of course and you might want to do a final treatment with some deionized water or distilled water like a final rinse before you then try to blow dry all the water off I'm sure a perfect good method as well would be just to hang the cards up like off a little clothesline or something and allow a breeze or a fan to blow on them and that would probably dry them off perfectly well as well I just find using this blower motor works well for me because it actually basically totally dries the cards and after a few minutes under the blower I've gone ahead and I've used stuff and it's always worked perfectly because it really does get rid of all the water in this case though I did do this washing several days ago so these cards have all had about three or four days to sit around and dry off in case there wasn't any residual water hiding [Music] 16 bit testing for testing all the sound cards I'm using the diagnosed utility that came with the sound blasters and who remembers these particular test sounds like they're burned into my memory from I don't know back in the day I guess when I was using my own soundbuster cards or maybe when I was building PCS or whatever I seem to remember all of these sounds really well foreign cubic player which is a module player for MS-DOS works really really well has excellent compatibility with all this down formats and does a great job playing back the modules in a way that sounds really authentic if you're playing really old ones from the Amiga they sound great and also all the newer impulse tracker and Screen tracker files sound really good as well [Music] I now have one of the r64 cards in the computer and I'm going through all the test Sounds here and everything sounds completely normal of course the one addition is it has wave table sound built in and here I am rocking out to that incidentally both of these r64 cards have 512k onboard memory there is some kind of a ram expansion you can plug into the board but it doesn't use normal memory modules like the soundbuster 32 I showed in the first video which I've expanded to 8 megabytes of RAM these seem to be compatible with the R32 I don't know what additional features they have but things that are written for the R32 specifically including ones that use the sample memory or the onboard Ram work without issue with these cards foreign files and they sound well they sound like General midi with lots of Reverb and whatever other effects that you get with that if you like the sound of this then it sounds great if you don't well you know it doesn't sound so great back to open cubic player but with the ah64 it does support using the car to do the hardware mixing of all the channels and that works perfectly I've tested this before on the soundbuster 32 or the auth32 works great seems to work just as well on these cards you are limited by the 512 KS sample memory though so large mod files don't work [Music] these r64 cards do have full opl2 and 3 compatibility and here I am using the ad-lib jukebox program and it works perfectly there's a little bit of background noise right now because the air conditioning is running and I'm sure that the emulation of the opl chip is not perfect but it sounds perfectly good to me foreign this is the result of the testing so we had these two r64 cards and as you just saw one of them was working but they both actually work perfectly and then these two Sound Blaster 16s these are the two that look very similar except one is missing the IDE interface or whatever the CD-ROM interface along with the audio amp both of these work absolutely perfectly and then this soundblaster 16 this is the larger of the soundless 16 cards I got here well this one works perfectly meaning all the sound tests I did worked fine but I wrote an N here next to the check mark because it's weirdly noisy and when I say noisy I'm talking about the background hiss of the card it's just much louder than it should be on any other soundbuster 16 I've ever come across these other ones for instance sound perfect you know there's like a tiny bit of background noise but at normal listening levels it's not really a problem but on this card it is a problem and if I turn down the gain and stuff in the mixer yeah the noise goes away but if you turn up the gain in the mixer where you can hear the card properly out of the outputs well then it doesn't it doesn't sound good anymore you get that that background noise but then the highs and the lows and all the other sound that actually comes out of the card sounds perfect in fact the weird thing is is while running the diagnose test that's the sound muscle utility you saw me running just a moment ago on this card perfect with no background noise but as soon as you exit the utility the background noise comes back and then any the other program I run with this card yeah it doesn't sound really good so that's a little mysterious and maybe there's a bad capacitor on here I'm not totally sure and it's something I haven't run into before on any other Sound Blaster 16 that I've worked on moving on to the non-sound cards we have the three com 3C 509 this card works perfectly I I ran it with a packet driver and got it working in DOS so that's pretty cool and then we have some video cards we have this trident PCI video card here this works fine no issues it's actually decently fast as well I mean it performs as you would expect a PCI video card to perform I have some other ATI PCI cards that perform terribly so this is better from that perspective and then we have this card here which actually is one card that is not working the issue is the video output quality is really bad it's very very dim and there are these vertical lines in it I think there might be some problems here with DAC it's a BT DAC that's on here I did take out that chip and I reseeded it with some deoxite but that didn't really seem to make any difference whatsoever so while there's something around this area might be bad or it could be that the main chip is bad as well although I really do suspect there's something wrong with this depending what was displayed on the screen you had varying levels of like kind of static interference and dark spots and stuff like that so unfortunately um yeah this card is not good performance testing seemed to indicate that it was an okay card nothing particularly special luckily for me I have a bunch of Isa video cards so I'm not like dying to have this particular card working but I was kind of curious to see how this thing worked with this particular S3 chip on here which I'm just not super familiar with but alas it doesn't work oh and I did uh try changing the switches here just different settings stuff like that and it made no difference whatsoever on the output quality of the VGA so like I said there just appears to be a fault on this board and then the last card I tested was this uh video card here this is the VTEC one 8-bit and it works perfectly and here's something that's a little bit amusing notice right here on the chip looks like someone scratched something off there well I have another one of these cards and while I was organizing last night I found it and it's identical to this and the other one just says VTEC right there and this one someone didn't like that or maybe this was sold in a non-vtec machine they wanted that scratched off I don't know what the deal is but like I said this card tests perfect and it is slow because it's only 8-bit but you kind of have to take that for what it is because if you want to use VGA in an XT class machine like a 5150 well this card will work perfectly in there and the compatibility seems to be fine it doesn't have a lot of video RAM so it doesn't have a bunch of Visa modes and stuff like that but it does output a nice clear picture as VGA which means it's widely compatible with things like LCD monitors which is great so that's it for the quick test of all these run-of-the-mill cards let's move on to some of the more interesting things all right here is that 46 motherboard now I did give this thing a nice wash I didn't really show that in the footage there but it's and span and looking absolutely brand new at this point first things first for testing this thing I want to get these little standoffs off here and a big pen that a viewer sent in is a perfect Implement for getting these off that really does make it really easy to get these off I wish I knew about this when I was working in a computer store in high school because I always struggled to use some needle nose to get these off and uh well just take a big pen pull the ink out of there and then that is cinch now we have two processors to test out on this we have one that is just a normal 46 32 megahertz here that is quadrupled to 133 and then we have this chip which is what was in this board when I found it which is an AMD dx4 120. so let's put the 120 back into this board and we'll start testing with this installed and the thing is about 46 boards that you may not be familiar with if your use of pentiums or later boards is you do have to set a bunch of jumpers on here for each of the specific CPUs starting with the CPU that was already in this board means that the jumpers are hopefully configured already in the correct configuration for this CPU which means that it hopefully it should just work for Ram we're going to use some of this fpm memory so there are two types of 72 pin memory which is what this motherboard takes here fpm I think stands for fast page mode or fast page memory and the other type is Edo or extended data out Edo memory only works on some specific 46s that have a chipset that supports it and fpm is the older type that should just work on everything so I went ahead and I tested all the memory I have with the ram tester and luckily that thing tells me if it's Edo or fpm because it can be very difficult to tell when you just look at the memory modules sometimes it's written on a sticker but it's not always so for the ram tester it's been very helpful for me because if this motherboard doesn't support Edo usually the system might boot but then it freezes at boot and won't work properly so just knowing that I have fpm memory is going to make it easier for testing this board now depending on how familiar or not familiar you are with different Intel processors the 46 processors and 386 processor has a 32-bit external data bus 72 pin memory modules like these also are 32 bits wide so on a machine like this you only need one of these to make the system work when the Pentium was released as a follow-up to the 486 the Pentium doubled the external data bus from 32 bits to 64 Bits And if you have a Pentium board that uses 72 pin memory modules like this you actually need two of them at a time of a match size to get a working system the later memory modules that came out after this were the 168 pin sdram modules and those are 64 bits wide so on a Pentium board you only need one of those typically and if you have a 46 board that happens to have those then one of those modules is going to take the place of two of these 72 pin modules now you're not really going to be able to see it but I could just see down there that this is Sim 4 3 2 and 1 with 1 being the one furthest away for me so I'm going to populate the memory modules so starting with slot one a lot of times it won't necessarily matter it just depends on the chipset and whatever but that's the way I'm going to populate this in fact I'm only going to put one of these modules in we don't need to put two in this is an eight megabyte fpm module and eight megabytes of RAM is plenty for testing this machine as I had mentioned in the last video this thing has plastic slots which is kind of annoying because plastic slots are really fragile although these seem to be pretty durable so I'm not as worried about these as I am with the 30 pin sockets that are on macintosh's those break all the time all right I use my power supply here for a little like test bench basically but I don't like to put the motherboard the bare motherboard right on here even though I have these little feet on here so I usually just stick a mouse pad on there put that there that way I don't have to worry about any potential short circuits that can come from the motherboard sort of bending and touching the metal of the power supply Now for PC motherboards that have Isa or PCI slots I highly recommend you use something like this which is a post analyzer card p-o-s-t power on self test machines from the IBM 5170 that's the 286 and Beyond produce postcodes which are numerical diagnostic codes that will show up on a card like this they're written to an i o port and you just plug this card into the slot and it monitors that I O port and was just displayed on this little LED display here that allows you to know if the motherboard is working even if it's not initializing the video or has some other problem as long as the CPU is executing code and it's running it from the BIOS then we should see a code on the the card here so I'm not going to even plug in anything else into this board except for the Postcard a little bit of RAM and the CPU of course this wire here comes from the card and that's because this card has a little speaker on there so I'm going to plug this in and that way we can hear if it's beeping as well which is also a really good diagnostic Aid now remember I haven't validated that the jumpers are correct on this board the jumper configuration and stuff like that is available on the Retro web I already looked so if this machine is not posting in a second when we turn it on then I'm going to go and start to valet all the jumpers and whatnot I do not have a heatsink on the processor right now and this processor does require heatsink but if I just turn it on quickly and it starts to post then I will find a heatsink and stick it on here and then we'll go from there it'll be fine to run it without a heat sink for just a little bit of time all right so I'm going to hold the motherboard right here like this so when I turn it on you can see the postcodes as well and here we go good it's posting so that's a great sign that means that um well the CPU is executing code and uh we need to plug video cards in and I'll get a heatsink on here and we'll see how it goes from there we're going to use this video card here this is the Trident PCI card that I tested so I'll pop that in there I'm going to plug in this keyboard here this is my little mini keyboard that I sort of use for everything I have the open source scan converter connected to the video card right here so we can capture the output and then for a heatsink I happen to have this cyrix heatsink here and it has sort of a thermal pad on air that should be good enough for keeping this chip cool it doesn't really need a bunch of thermal compound or anything it's not like a high performance modern processor it just needs something Beyond this ceramic substrate here so like I said that should be fine if I was going to run this for a longer period of time you'd want to like stick this down and have a fan that blew on it or whatever but for short testing there should be no problems and the test pattern you're seeing right now is my open source scan converter being captured by the capture card let's turn this on see what we get oh wait I heard a beep uh maybe we're getting a signal here there it is everyone it's freaking working it's running 120 megahertz which is the correct speed now I think about it floppy drive failure yep there's no battery in here so what I should do is grab a battery and stick it in the motherboard alrighty I put a battery in there and the Machine was on for well I was on for a couple minutes and the CPU is not even warm not even a little bit that is the benefit of these 3.5 volt CPUs versus the older 5 volt Pentium or sorry 46 processors we got into a signal here let me get the remote for this thing up there it is let's get into the BIOS settings here will this capture profile on the open source game converter looks decent it's just shifted over to the side so just ignore that a little bit it's one of the problems with VGA cards and obviously if you've ever used an LCD external monitor you know how you have to Auto configure it periodically and the open source scan converter is the same thing but it doesn't have an auto mode so you have to kind of adjust the profiles yourself what kind of options do we have in the Bios here I don't know everything looks pretty run-of-the-mill let's just turn off the floppy drive because I'm not going to connect one up bios features we have internal external cache quick self test Auto configure on and off I think I'll just leave this as it is hopefully dram speed as slower is not well not automatically detected there as familiar as I am with PCS I'm not always familiar with all the settings like burst rate enable or disabled which one speeds it up I don't know right back or right through which is the faster way of working I think right back is the faster way you could enable or disable the onboard IDE ports that are on here so we'll just leave those enabled and the floppy control and parallel stuff power management wow we're just going to leave that stuff as disabled PCI plug and plug and play bios Auto config I don't know we'll just leave that disabled I guess it's the default because the battery was out of this thing anyways and there's some other settings here which we will just leave as they are alrighty and we'll save exit now of course there's no way for this system to boot because I don't have anything plugged into it so let me grab my XT IDE card even though this thing has IDE built on the motherboard it's just easier for me to use the XT IDE so XT IDE and we'll pull out this postcard because I don't need that anymore let's boot up into dos and we'll run a few quick performance benchmarks see how this thing is performing now the computer's been on for a couple minutes the processor is just ever so slightly warm and that's what this thing just sitting on there all right with the system booted up I'm going to quickly run speed 600 just the landmark speed test this is very fast 120 megahertz it shows there but those speeds are great and 10 000 characters per millisecond is really good performance this card when I tested it inside the Pentium system I was testing in my Pentium 200. it wasn't even scoring as high a score there I think it was getting something like 9 000. so it's actually a little bit better performing on this PCI bus now when it comes to 46 motherboards and all the different permutations you can get there are some that I'm aware of that have relatively slow PCI bus and there are others that are much better I'd say that this one appears to be working properly because at least this video card is fast I don't have anything else plugged in here for us to really test and you could ignore the disk speed in this program because of course uh this is on the 8-Bit Isa bus so it's really slow but let's look at the performance here so the processor itself is getting a 44.58 which according to the little graph there is nearly what the am 586 133 should score and remember that's this chip right here this is the 586 chip on a little accelerator board but maybe there's like a a few points difference or something like that but what I really wanted to see was the cache memory performance in this thing and you can definitely see that it's got functional cash in fact the onboard motherboard here has 256k of cash because you can see that yellow line there is very fast and that's the internal L1 cache in the processor then it drops down and then it goes all the way to 256k and then it drops down again and that is the onboard cache memory on the motherboard here which is quite warm by the way working properly and the processor itself it's warm but it's also not too hot what we can be sure of though is that the cache is not working at all for the writing because that blue line is just solid all the way across which means that we're not getting as much performance as we had hoped so there might be a setting in the Bios that you can tweak to try to improve that setting but I think for this video I don't want to go and spend hours tweaking all those settings to try to maximize performance of this board I think we need to move on to testing some other things so I'm going to power this off and I'm going to draw a check mark on this board just to indicate that yes for sure I have tested this and it works what would be a good spot for doing that hmm I'm going to do it right here in this green area so we get a little tick mark there and I'm going to do the same on this AMD processor just so I remember that I did test it and it does work now for testing this processor here what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my other 46 motherboard and this is one that has a dx266 on here the reason why this is good is because this is already configured for 5 volts and of course it's set for 33 megahertz and it has in this as long as none of the pins are bent should go in to the motherboard so let me plug this into power and let's see if we get posting on this motherboard and we should be getting some decent performance at that 133 megahertz quadrupled turn this on and we do not have a posting system there so let's uh try to see what happened here first thing I'm looking at are the pins on here and none of them are damaged everything looks completely perfect so that is not a problem but we obviously did not have a working system you know what I don't think this was in all the way I think that was the problem okay let's try this again here see if that makes a difference yes we have a postcode there oh and it's beeping yeah this motherboard I hot glued a speaker on here I hot glued a power LED and there's a little reset switch on here as well all right cool so it's working let's plug in the video card and the XT IDE for video how about we use this VTEC card here even though it's 8-bit I know but that's good enough for testing purposes why do we have no picture oh there it is just took a second 132 megahertz uh looks good the image quality through the capture device not super great I wanna hooked up to the LCD it looked fine this card that is uh 5x86 133 and it's getting 42. were we getting 44 on the last one here goes the memory test so yeah 16k of cash oh the memory band with this 46 megahertz or megabytes per second much faster on this motherboard than on the last one I think we were getting 20 something megabytes on the last one so the BIOS on the other motherboard definitely needs some tweaking to maximize the memory performance and it does kind of suck because back in the day when you didn't have tools like this for you know tweaking and testing your your performance you didn't always know like the right settings to get the maximum performance look at this the right line is the same it's just going straight across which means that the cache I don't think is working here either anyhow as I was saying if you didn't have tools like this you didn't have to know how to go in your bios and tweak all those settings you were probably maximizing the performance of your system kind of like this motherboard right here like whatever the settings are are just a lot better than the settings on that last motherboard hence the ram performance here is just far greater now as far as like the performance of the processor it's a 42 whatever we were getting last time are the 42 or 44 whatever it was the thing is your memory speed may have a big effect on certain programs and other programs not so much but definitely if you are not tweaking those settings you are leaving stuff on the table so there it is 16k of l12 just K of L2 and the memory throughput is 25 and that includes I think the reading and the writing so you can kind of ignore that I'm noticing here in the landmark speed test well look at how slow the video is 677 characters per millisecond that's on this 8-bit video card right here and yep we're getting like over 10 000 or is it 12 000 or whatever it was on the other motherboard so more than 10 times the performance of the video but the CPU speed is 624 megahertz here and I kind of recall on the last one it was like 500 and something so this processor is definitely faster at least in this particular Benchmark and it does show 134 megahertz in here although this is not the best uh performance test it does show that this CPU though is running at full speed and uh what a cool little processor you just dropped it into whatever computer you had as long as it supported 33 megahertz 46 and it would just freaking work massive massive performance Improvement right there I'm going to pop out of this processor and I'm going to stick back in the original dx266 which I normally keep in this motherboard and let's see what we get on speed 600 with this thing in here and we are getting 316 and 453 and I wrote down what the last one was it was 624 and 771 so it's basically double the performance of this dx266 which is definitely this chip is double the performance of the original 33 megahertz at least in this test so really this uh little chip does what it promises and it quadruples the speed of your 46 with a simple drop in chip that is freaking cool so I went over to the table there and I grabbed a few more of the cards here that I want to test out and I think at least some of these I should be able to get working this card on the top is the heath 150 307 and while this looks just like an EGA card because it has an 8-bit bus here and the chips and Technology chipset on here it seems very much or kind of Screams that's the EGA card apparently from my reading this is actually an EGA card but it can an output VGA resolutions and it actually has a VGA 15 pin connector on here to Output an analog video signal from what I was reading those when you have a VGA monitor connected to this you're still working with an EGA card so software that's written to talk to EGA cards which is what this is going to look like are only going to Output EGA resolutions and the 640 by 480 which is the typical VGA graphics resolution won't be available and I'm assuming that that is possible on this card if you have software specifically written to use it so let me clear away these other two cards actually and let's just focus on this one first see if I can get this thing working and figure out how it works so the thing about this card it has a cutout here for 16-bit slots but the problem is this part hangs down which means it's going to interfere with all this stuff so I'm going to need to grab another motherboard that doesn't have as much junk in the trunk so to speak and that honestly is why I keep my 3d6 SX motherboard handy because that motherboard is much easier to use cards like this that have like weird stuff going on so first I'm going to plug in the capture device which we were just looking at with the other video card let's see if we get any kind of output of this card whatsoever but we have no video whatsoever I switched over to the RGB to HDMI and I have it set for EGA model 2 and we have a cursor let's reset this computer here see if we're getting anything I don't know why we're not getting any image well other than the cursor but that is saying that it's initializing although why is it that sort of teal color that's a bit funky now even though there's a flashing cursor the postcard is showing a code of 36 and it seems like the computer is not fully initialized so the card's initialized but the computer's hung so I'm going to need to try to figure out these dip switches here well after a little fiddling around I was able to find the right switch settings to Output VGA and we have a cursor there and according to the open source scan converter it's actually running at 31.46 kilohertz at 70.39 Hertz so that's close enough to the VGA text mode but we are getting exactly the same flashing cursor thing going on there as we were before when we were getting an EGA type output so I'm wondering if there's something wrong with this car that's it we get no beeping on this motherboard it's stuck at postcode 36 for an Ami and I cannot hit control delete that does not do anything at all in fact the keyboard appears to be totally dead so what we can tell is that this thing is definitely initializing the video correctly we're getting a correct VGA output with a flashing cursor and we were getting an EGA cursor before and the only thing I'm thinking is I wonder if I need to switch this jumper here it's set to the top setting let's move this down to the bottom setting see if that has any effect there are a couple more jumpers over here as well vga1 and vj2 so we'll start with this in the down position and we'll see if that makes any difference at all so we're getting no output at all at this point so for the jumpers by the way this lower one up down down up up down is VGA and that's what I found on the Vogons thread it was set to up down down up down up originally so I don't know if that's EGA or what but I'm writing these down so I can figure out what the right settings are and we know here with this Jumper in the down position that results in a system that doesn't work at all and here on the Vogons thread as well there are the two jumpers there and those are both not populated on both of these cards so it seems like everything on here is configured in exactly the same way as these cards on the vogon's threads oh there's another jumper right here let's double check that one it's moved towards the video connector on that card and this card is the same thing and on this card it's configured just like that as well and there are also some pins right there that aren't plugged into anything that almost looks like a light pen connector and then on the Vogue launch thread there's a picture right here yeah there's nothing installed on that so that is not a jumper block so I'm wondering if the problem maybe are these dip switches here they're a little Dusty maybe I need to blow some contact cleaner into there and move them up and down I've definitely had it before where some I don't know like Gunk or Whatever Gets inside the switches and it prevents them from Reading properly so just moving them up and down seems to kind of help the situation and no difference we're just getting a flashing cursor now it's quite possible this motherboard is not compatible with this card maybe or maybe that these like large plcc chips aren't in these sockets properly we're getting a good picture though that's the weird thing so the cards being initialized but it is not working so let's pop these chips out of here and then I will uh deoxit those sockets I have some deoxid in this little drip bottle here to be honest I'm not really holding out hope that this is going to improve the situation at all but you never know I think I've had this uh fixed problems on Amigas before so let's just keep trying right and last but not least let's take this uh bios chip out of here and we'll deoxite this socket as well this card's in really good shape I didn't have to wash it or anything like that so this has not gone through the cleaning cycle there we go uh this is the DAC that's working because we had a good video output everything else on here seems fine and I think we are in the same boat yes we are the last thing I can try here is swapping out this motherboard with something else let's just see if that makes any difference whatsoever but I'm not not holding out hope unfortunately all right we've swapped over to the 46 motherboard and see if this thing makes a difference power that on it's posting whoa it's working but why is it all red what the heck is going on there so it didn't like my 3d6 board come on go into the setup the card is causing weird issues on this machine too it seems to be frozen here and I switched back to the RGB to HDMI which is what we're looking at here let's see if we get an EGA signal out of this thing I mean it's beeping it says no signal look at that I know you might think this is the VGA output but no this is the EGA output and it's working but it's doing the exact same thing although it's funny because when I had the other card in there I noticed the EPA energy preventer pollution preventer whatever thing faded away and I wonder if this bios is trying to do that and this EGA Card cannot handle that and is freezing and maybe that is also why we have this red color so I think I need to grab yet another motherboard and we'll see if this works on on something else now we're back on the motherboard that has the one 20 megahertz processor in it still has the EPA energy preventer thing but look there's no red on this one and it did work and I hit Ctrl delete that rebooted the system now this motherboard might have the exact same problem as the other one with that EPA logo trying to fade away and it's causing some kind of an issue here because it's just hanging up as well all right yet another motherboard here we have a 386 DX motherboard I've previously had this on the channel at some point it's got the math code processor in it and look it's counting up memory now at this point you might be thinking I have been fiddling around with this card for quite a while and yes that is true and this is kind of the reality of this like weird unknown Hardware there's no documentation for this card and all you can really do is just trial an error keep trying different cards and different motherboards and different settings until you get a system that maybe works well this card is just really a curiosity because you know what use is it really when you have VGA cards like this look it's actually trying to boot it's actually freaking trying to boot that's amazing uh when you have VGA cards like this that work in xt's and they're fully compatible just easy to go you just plug them in and they just work properly it's a much better solution than a car like this that has these weird limitations where well what is this the fourth motherboard we tried and now finally it's actually booting the system C prompt s there we are wow it's really really slow this is a 386 DX motherboard it's pretty speedy but this card has some really poor performance 440 characters per milliseconds remember when I have this card in there I think it was the VTEC card we were getting like 770 over the 8-Bit bus so way way faster than than this card it is working at least you know we're getting EGA out of this and the resolution looks correct and everything and ignore the fact it's not taking up the full screen that's the RGB to HDMI and we'll do some video tests here and check it see what we're getting here so this should have 256k of RAM so it's acting like an EGA card so far so good everything looks like it's working here a few of the modes are shifted over the side but that's not a big deal so there we go normal TTL colors all looks correct oh this is weirdly squished so CGA there are the TTL 16 colors and all looks correct there it is again in the 640 by 216 color mode there should be one more of these there we go 640 by 350 16 colors look so I'm here in the program vid test and this actually is going to use more of the EGA color so CGA doesn't support a lot of these colors notice there's like three shades of green three shades of red three shades of blue and that is part of the 64 color palette that EGA actually supports this is beyond just having a single intensity bit it's actually having I think three intensity bits so we're talking about RGB plus three more bits instead of one extra bit and that gives you more colors there are more than this that are possible but this particular program only displays these and I actually don't have any other programs that can display all of the 64 EGA colors so we're kind of stuck with this one as a test now I'm curious if we swap these switches back to the VGA mode and we turn this on while the EGA cable is still connected what are we going to get exactly on the RGB to HDMI I'm assuming we're gonna have like some kind of a rolling image or nothing it looks like we have nothing at all so plug in the VGA cord I switch back to the open source can converter and I can't see it just syncing up right now 31 kilohertz and like I said this is a very interesting mode because it it appears to be VGA at least from a resolution perspective but if we go to check it I think it's still going to show up as an EGA card and indeed it says EGA here and if we look at the graphics tests let's see if we actually have that 640 by 40 like the VGA test I don't think we're going to have that so for all these tests are looking fine and you could ignore a little bit of the like fuzziness or whatever that's the scan converter again so this is the EGA 640 by 350 which is why there's a little bit of a bar at the top and the bottom and no instead of going to 640 f480 it went straight into the CGA test so indeed this is not going to try to use this or treat this like as any kind of VGA card it's strictly EGA and very slow EGA although EGA is always quite slow outputting on a VGA connector that really is an odd thing because generally VGA cards are fully compatible with EGA and yet obviously they work on the VGA Monitor and they support all the additional modes like the high color modes and stuff like that that this does not support this doesn't support 320x2 40 or 320 by 200 or two for six colors none of those modes are supported and sure enough we go to vidtest here and it thinks it's just a regular EGA card let's look at the 64 Colors oh come on it's resyncing now there we go so that is working properly but if we go to the VGA menu we try to do well 2v6 colors what's this going to do warning error has occurred yeah it doesn't work and it took us back to the EGA mode well so there we go I think that's pretty much it for the testing this card does work it just has those weird limitations basically it's very fussy about what motherboard it's in it seems to only work in this 36 DX motherboard I'm sure it would work in older motherboards like XTS and 286s but those later motherboards that have that EPA logo and tries to do a color fade none of that works and of course I can plug a regular EGA card into those motherboards and it will work but this motherboard or this card is fussy it's a very very fussy card it did figure out without a doubt these are the two configuration modes so up down down up up down that's VGA output and then up down down up down up is EGA if you want to use this card with an EGA monitor there are probably some other configurations on here that give you other types of TTL output but like CGA monitor compatibility maybe even MDA but without any documentation which I definitely could not find there is no way to know that for sure very Oddball card but it is working so it does get the tick mark but maybe I should put a tick mark and an F for fussy because this card is fussy all right let's move on to another card that's probably going to be far easier to use this is the compact card that should output CGA and MDA at the same time like I think it goes it'll auto switch or whatever um are there jumpers on this thing there's a jumper there I don't know I plugged in the RGB HDMI all right and I put it into some auto mode seems to be running in some kind of like CGA type mode yeah okay this lost all of its CMOS settings that's a sign I'm going to switch back to the 36sx motherboard that's my go-to for testing these old style cards alrighty so this one worked it did show up in 40 columns mode so we'll switch this to 80 by 25 and there we go and look how much faster this is I mean this is a 40 megahertz board and that thing I think was 33 but yet this thing flies in for comparison all right and as I thought um notice when I hit enter it flickers so that's typical for an actual CJ card in fact you can kind of ignore that it was kind of like blank at the top there that's just the way the blankie works this will be a normal CGA card at this point Why Don't We Run The CGA compatibility test this is Jim Leonard's utility here do I degree to those terms yes I do let's check out some of the 6845 compatibility so display positioning yes look it's able to move the image around the picture cool yeah it's doing some scrolling now I think this has more video memory than a typical CGA card which is why maybe it's shifting over like that but notice we're getting some smooth scrolling raster bars and those are working properly as well none of this works if you don't have proper 6845 compatibility on your card I don't know if this thing is emulating that inside one of those custom chips or whatever and yep there's the row reprogramming and that's working perfectly as well so this is like a low resolution 16 color mode that looks really good and the final test that we go mode mono function is not supported so I was under the assumption that this compact card supported both monochrome text and CGA so let's exit out of here and let's go to here and let's switch this to monochrome let's see if that does change this into mono mode no it didn't it just went to 40 columns mode and it's complaining about being in the wrong setting yep okay well anyway this card appears to definitely be working properly and that's a good thing as far as it's supporting like some kind of mono mode definitely let me know don't think you have to set a jumper there is a jumper right here that maybe changing this would do that I don't know for sure maybe only when you have the internal monitor connected here does it do that either way this vdu controller from Compaq is working properly so this gets the tick mark of success alrighty moving on to the next card it's this one here this is the Orchid car that was from 1985 based on uh the marking over here and when you remove this memory module here with 320k underneath on the main PCB it silk screen turbo graphics and that's all we really had to go off with this card I did some quick searching around in the last video there's some barge wires on the back and I really couldn't find anything but since releasing part one some patrons have been doing some sleuthing and one of my patrons uncovered this little gem about this card here this little blurb was in a technical Magazine from 1985 and it says a new product for the high performance Cad and professional graphic art Industries has been announced by orkid the turbo Graphics controller or TGC which is functionally compatible with the IBM professional Graphics controller but it runs 4 to 25 times faster than IBM's product it offers 640x40 display and can run on less expensive displays than ibms the IBM card required a special monitor which looked very much like the normal IBM CGA monitor but it was actually an analog RGB Monitor and I think it was a pretty expensive Monitor and a precursor to the VGA or mcga this card writes directly to screen memory and has Ram designed specifically video applications approximately two thousand dollars that is it when it comes to information about this card there is nothing else about it available anywhere on the internet at least that we could find I will add one caveat that I'm recording this before the main part has been released to the general public which means that there might be some more information that's uncovered thanks to the sleuthing ability of more of my viewers but at least at this point this is all I know about this Orchid card now you might be asking what is the IBM professional Graphics adapter well let's take a look at that a little bit first I found this webpage here talking about the professional Graphics controller and please note that some people call the PGC or perfect external Graphics controller the PGA or professional Graphics adapter so I think those terms are pretty much interchangeable when talking about this card so the general gist is IBM's professional Graphics controller came out for the XT so in 1985 and it was extremely expensive but for the time it was also very very capable 640 by 480 by 256 colors out of a possible palette of 4096. now the Amiga was coming out around the same time here 1985 right it was very capable from a graphics perspective but it could not do 640 by 40 by 256 colors which when you think about this particular resolution this didn't really become more standard until well the later VGA standards came out in 87 and Beyond and of course the Macintosh 2 line came out supporting this resolution there were probably some sun workstations and things like that that might have supported that resolution as well with those amount of colors but in the PC space in 1985 not super common the IBM car did support CGA emulation although you could disable it and then run a CGA card in parallel for dual monitor support and speaking of dual monitor remember that that is not like extended desktop dual monitor like we're used to now this was like two separate screens so you'd be running say something like AutoCAD where on the PCG you'd be having your high resolution graphics and then maybe you'd have like a toolbox with some text mode stuff or rudimentary color graphics on the other screen so it was very application specific now scrolling down a little in this article shows the original PCG was an extremely complicated and very expensive card it had three pcbs including one with all the memory and then this middle one which had the CGA emulation on it which I guess was optional so you didn't always have that it did have an nine pin connector so that's matching how this Orchid card is here with a nine pin connector so I'm going to hope that it's the same because the pin out for that connector is available in this article notice here that the original PCG does have a processor so that means that you could send commands to this car for drawing boxes and shapes and things like that and theoretically this card would accelerate that and do it more quickly than if the PC was actually trying to write to the video memory directly across the slow 8-bit bus and to facilitate the communication between the host computer and the card with the processor it used 2K of ram up here in the upper memory space that was shared between the PC and the PSG that allowed that two-way communication to the processor now the original PCG actually has an 8088 processor with 64k of ROMs so it's an entire like mini computer there on the card so you can imagine how expensive this card probably was there isn't really a lot of information on what it actually costs because it really sold probably to super high and customers and in very small numbers at that now here's a pin out for the nine pin on the IBM card we'll have to plug this card in see if it does anything by looking at the outputs here with an oscilloscope to see if we're actually getting anything that even mirrors this that one little snippet on the Orchid card mentioned it uses cheaper monitors and the only thing I can really think of is that maybe the fact that this is composite sync which was a little unusual maybe the orcid card uses a horizontal and vertical sync which would be more like a normal VGA monitor at the time now this article then goes on to talk about well the memory map and some of the emulated modes but then all of the commands and stuff that this card supports what's really not clear on this card is how compatible is this it said it was a clone that little snippet said it was a clone But ultimately we don't really know and of course there were some other cards on the market that were replicas of the PCG but not all of them supported all of the commands and maybe they worked a little bit differently the fact that this says it writes directly to screen memory bitmap and has me thinking that maybe this lacks the processor because I don't remember seeing a large IC on here that would act as a processor there is a 40 pin dip right here but if I recall that was a 6845 which is not a processor that's just a screen controller which begs the question is this car really a PCG clone and even if it is how do we even test it I think I'm getting ahead of myself talking about all this PCG compatibility because the first thing we need to do is put this into this computer here and hook the oscilloscope up and let's see if we actually get any output at all from this nine pin connector and if we do then I can build the cable we can try to hook it up to the capture device and then see if this card is truly a PCG compatible card okay so for the oscilloscope because I don't need to see exact signals I'm just going to use my little portable hand Tech here I'm clipped onto the first pin and with the system booted up I've gone through and looked at all the pins and only pin four on this connector is actually getting any kind of useful signal 9.7 kilohertz it's 5 volts Peak to Peak it's a square wave and you can see it right there on the oscilloscope every single other pin on here is not outputting any kind of signal and that's a bad sign the system is stuck at 40. I don't have the speaker hooked up I'm just going to pull this out of the board here and let's just see if this also gets stuck at 40 so we're at 31 yeah 40. so I have a feeling that 40 is what you get when the computer is not seeing a video card and I'm sure if I hooked up the speaker we'd be hearing beeping so this card does not appear to actually be initializing at all there is a jumper right here so I'm gonna take the jumper off and we'll pop this back in we'll just see if this does anything it may well be that this car doesn't do anything unless you have a CGA card and see how this expansion connector is not connected to anything it could be that there's an extra module that goes on here that gives it CGA compatibility kind of like the PCG card and without it this is a card that doesn't do anything on its own and you need to use a regular video card and with that jumper removed there's no change on the output we're still getting the exact same signals we were getting before so I'm just going to set that jumper back to what it was the card's pretty warm that's for sure let's pop in a CGA card into this system here and I'll plug it into the RGB to HDMI and then maybe we can well I don't know see if we see anything visible in any programs or whatever okay so I have the XT IDE there and looking good now I found a few PCG utilities which I copied onto the compact flash card here there were two utilities here PCG talk and PCG BMP with PCG BMP supposedly allowing you to look at 640 by 480 by 256 color bmps I copied one onto there let's see PCG BMP PGC BMP I would say PCG Flames BMP okay it didn't it didn't complain let's get the oscilloscope running here let's see if anything has changed and no unfortunately nothing has changed we're getting exactly the same output so this program didn't seem to complain about anything it's just sort of Frozen now but my assumption is it would have done that if there were no card even installed let's try the PCG talk or PGC talk I probably said it wrong a million times enter command dollar sign one I mean I don't know yeah this doesn't seems to really do anything okay so I do have Compu show on here comp you show is an image viewer that seems to support like every card okay so let's try to look at this Flames picture so we're getting a couple different options here IBM generic CGA let's just try that see what K looks like okay so this is actually using the pseudo high-res mode or pseudo low res but high collar Moda CGA so it's reprogramming the the rows and yeah that's what the BMP looks like but it did not offer us an option for the PGC the professional Graphics controller which supposedly it does support let's try the setup utility here okay so select video driver oh look at this IBM PGC 18 is right there let's give 18 a try and hit enter adapter or interface not found Okay so that didn't work all right well I think that's it for this card I think it's not possible for me to really do any more about this not unless anyone has any additional information about this like they can find pictures or they have one and they can let me know that yes it is missing a module here that is going to prevent this card from working all together it's a real shame because 320k of video memory in 1985 is staggering amount of memory and clearly well this thing is uh got capabilities but we don't know how to use it and I couldn't find a single photograph of it or any additional information about this card whatsoever the one silver lining about this card is this memory is really unusual I've never seen this stuff before so if I ever come across another card that needs this type of memory well I have an entire board filled with it so that's a positive so since this was a fail this board gets the good old question mark don't worry though by the way this type of Sharpie comes right off with isopropyl alcohol 99 so if I ever do get this card working some miracle that is I can take that off and put a check mark there alrighty so moving on now we're in the territory of cards that I'm pretty sure are not going to ever do anything at all so we're just gonna have to talk about them a little bit with this card right here this is that video card that has that TI video graphics processor on it and a ton of bodge wires well it turned out that I have another one of these cards so I forgot about it but it was in a mail call episode and this was sent in by a viewer on I don't know super mini mail call like episode seven or something like that and take a look at this this is the exact same card although this has this color expansion card I don't know module on here now what this card actually is and identified the brand name vectrix in the last video but it turns out this card is called the ex1280 there's a little bit of information on bit Savers where there's actually a photograph for the front and back of this card including this module here but that is it there's no drivers no manuals nothing else really about the fact this card exists other than I think there were some tiny blurbs written in Tech magazines kind of like with that last Orchid card and that's all there really is to it these two cards here are not even exactly the same notice this has two crystals here and on this one they're side by side so there's a slightly there's a slight difference in the revision of these two boards they're very similar on the other hand this has additional RAM here plus this module of course but the DAC and everything else is somewhat similar looking at the back of the board that I've shown previously on the channel well there's no bodges on this one but this one on the other hand as we said it's bodgetastic now I did a ton of looking with the microscope to look for any evidence of any bodges and the whoever did the soldering on this thing there's a lot of flux residue so it's actually really easy to see where these bodge wires have been attached and you can see here there's been some rework if I zoom in right here you see all this flux residue rework well unfortunately for this little wire here there is just no evidence of where this was attached it doesn't make sense like that it would be over here there's a little bit of flux there because it's um it's too long so I kind of looked in the area over here you know where this this wire reached and there's just nothing I couldn't find any evidence of where that wire went now this wire was also detached but it seemed like it probably went right to that point right there and there's a little um Crystal oscillator on this side of the board there so someone has bodged that on there so I reattached that but without this being in the right place I don't have a lot of confidence this could work now people pointed out that bodge wires aren't always there to fix functionality sometimes it's a stability thing and it will work without it it just maybe will crash or be less stable problem is with this board is it's in such rough shape and it's clearly missing whatever this add-on board that this thing has so I just I don't have a lot of confidence that this thing's going to work but the worst thing is really though is that when I got this thing back in uh on that mail call episode I never got this board to do anything either now I did do plenty of testing off camera never got to do anything and unfortunately none of my viewers were able to come up with any additional information basically manual or software for this card so really uh it doesn't really do anything now what we can do is plug in this working card here into this motherboard here while working a better shape at least and let's see if we get anything out of this card whatsoever now I don't have the CGA card plugged into this thing it's just the postcard and my IDE card so when we turn this on the system isn't even posting let's just try that one more time oh now it's posting okay so it's beeping and it's stuck at 40. it's acting as if it has no video card installed in the system at all now of course the thing is this has got some switches on the back and maybe it can act as a video card but the switches are in the wrong position you can't really say but we can do here is we can plug in the CGA card here and then we can kind of look around and check it I guess and try to see if maybe the ROMs show up in there or something like that I did dump the ROMs and there wasn't really any kind of like text strings or anything in there to give away anything the system is not even posting right now just sitting there with dashes okay there we go now keep in mind that this card might only work with a monochrome card so we're going to switch this into mono mode there's a little toggle switch here all right in mono mode the system is booting without any issue it's seemingly booting without any issue let's try C show maybe C show has something we can do with it oh attempt to identify super VGA not VGA okay t-i-g-a let's try that one let's try that one I think t-i-g-a is typically the Texas Instruments like these types of cards adapter not found yeah okay and how about this 11 dgis adapter not found and I don't know what else it could possibly be in here but I think uh like I said there is really just no chance of getting this thing working in any kind of reasonable fashion now this card here has been in the computer and turned on for a little while oh it's really stuck in the motherboard it is quite warm so it's definitely getting power um oh yeah that that ship is really hot everything on here is quite warm so it's running so I think that's about as much as I can do for these cards the fact is I have a really pristine example so if we ever turn up the drivers and the manual for it then I can actually try to get this thing working I can certainly figure out how that video connector works and wire up a modern monitor but as for this card here this bodgetastic one probably never going to work the only good thing about it is potentially it could be repair parts for this card but the problem is of course as I just mentioned without knowing how to use this card there's no chance of trying to repair it that's kind of unfortunate isn't it okay moving on this is the Periscope and I did wash this so it looks really clean now I haven't tried to repair the ribbon cable just that cut who has that cut in it but what I did do is I tried to repair just put this down here I tried to repair this take a look at those pins now they're not perfect by any means but they are a lot better than they were now people mentioned that this is a sacrificial socket so I could pop this off and try to replace it I don't really know if these pin grid array type sockets are easily available and if they are like what is it going to cost like 50 bucks or something to buy a new one but I guess worst case scenario is I could try to pull one off a motherboard I'm pretty sure I have a 386 DX motherboard that is scrap like it has really bad damage on the motherboard and I keep those around for uh you know rainy days so I might be able to desolder that and then if this does end up breaking or whatever the pins on here then I can steal that but I think I did a pretty good job bending the pins it's not perfect but I think with careful insertion into a motherboard it's probably going to be fine I think I mentioned this in the last video as a little like overlay that I did manage to find the manual and some software for this I found the manual for sure for the Periscope 4. I don't know about the software though there were several different software versions and what I don't know about the Periscope software is are those software versions compatible with all the various Periscope cards or what I looked through my parts and I ended up finding a periscope one card now the funny thing about the Periscope one is it still has the RCA connector right here which I think is the foot pedal or whatever but it does not have any connector like this to go to a pod and this is called a pod by the way this thing that plugs into the motherboard so I don't really know how the Periscope one worked I'm assuming that car just plugs into a motherboard and allows you to freeze the system and maybe there's some software that is able to be called up or whatever through like an interrupt but obviously the Periscope 4 has the capability to interrupt a system like at a hardware level which means it's probably a much better debugging tool what I'm probably looking for is someone who has experience in using the Periscope 4 card that way they can give me some insights into how it works and how the software works and stuff like that and that would have to be for a future video where we could try to get that card working and we're getting almost to the end of the cards here so this is the mqx16 I don't have any drivers for this but I definitely don't have any pin outs for this de-9 connector here to create the midi cables that this works with it's a midi interface card and I don't know what these RCA jacks here do maybe it's like simplistic sound output or something I don't know either way if anyone has one of these cards handy and they're able to figure out the pin out all you have to do is use a Multimeter to tone out the pins that go to the de9 here to the two din connectors which are the MIDI Jacks and then I could replicate the midi harness for this and then potentially get this working if anyone's ever used this card and actually had it running in a system like how does it work you need drivers or et cetera et cetera definitely let me know there are some jumpers on here as well so if you have one of these cards that is actually in a working system if you could let me know the jumpers that would be very helpful this card here is an apple talk card this connector here would plug into an apple talk transceiver that's designed for the Mac 128 and 512 that has the same exact connector for Apple talk and serial so that's what this card is and it runs the tops software which says tops up here somewhere there it is tops so there's special software that was designed for transferring files between PCS and Macs the thing is this card apparently needs some drivers and those drivers are unobtainium or lost so without those drivers along with that top software package and then the similar software that runs on the Mac that's able to talk to this it's not going to work so that's kind of unfortunate and then that brings us to these cards here remember I had a whole bunch of pcbs and I have a bunch of completed ones really no information was forthcoming for the scan cap card whatsoever but looking at the components on this this chip here is an analog to digital converter and almost certainly what this card is is some type of a capture card probably can capture ntsc and VGA and or VGA video and it probably is a slow type capture card it does have some memory on here so it has a bit of a frame buffer it's unknown if this can just capture an entire image and then transfer that into your computer but this was probably designed to just grab still images off of a video signal potentially used in magazines you've seen magazine reviews back in the old days where they would show a screen capture that was you know from another PC a lot of times they probably use cards like this and the video output here maybe it would be captured from a camera or a VCR or whatever like that so without again the software or the information about this card we're never going to get this working but yeah it's a little bit interesting of what this might be and that finally brings us to this card here the Blackfoot card now while there's no way for me to actually test this card I mean I have a Mac that I can plug into the drivers and the information on it are not forthcoming they're not available they're lost to time but what my awesome Patron was able to dig up on this is a little tiny snippet in a Mac World Magazine from 1991. and here's what it has to say about this card the Blackfoot is a JPEG compliant image compression accelerator with a throughput of acclaimed one megabyte per second the board's compression and decompression algorithms are implemented in an onboard Digital Signal processor and it comes with a compression application and a Photoshop plug-in 500 Arroyo Technologies and there is a little bit information here just their phone number here that is it no address even so that's pretty cool that we finally know at least what this card does it's just too bad we could never actually get this working now my Macintosh 2ci has an o40 accelerator in it and of course it's probably a similar time frame to when this card was out and when you load and save jpegs in Photoshop or I have a little jpeg image viewer it's slow it's really slow and if you load a high resolution JPEG I mean it takes a long time to display that image or use a jpegs opening essentially instantaneously now even on like things like your phone and stuff like that but back in 1991 jpegs were extremely processor intensive and I guess cards like this which use these dsps here to really accelerate that were well the bees knees so it would be kind of cool to get this thing working if anyone can dig up the software for it it'd be fun to see if any of these cards do work and we could do some well benchmarks and stuff like that and compare it to the software jpeg compression and decompression versus having this 500 card in your Macintosh okay so that's really it for all the cards that were inside that box what I think this video highlights is I didn't have a lot of success getting the unknown things working like the cards like this and the stuff like this and what this really highlights is there were a good number of years when there was lots of stuff out there in the computer Market I'd say from the mid 80s into the early 90s where a lot of the software and information on this stuff is just lost to time these companies like Arroyo Technologies and this scan cap conversion technology and even Orchid I mean that was a big company but these smaller companies they kind of came and went only existed for a few years maybe getting bought up by someone else and then all their products were just discontinued a product like this this jpeg compression decompression card just had a very limited useful lifespan because you know how much longer after this that Macintosh switched to power PCS where there was now enough processing oomph to decompress and compress jpegs really quickly potentially even faster than a card like this so this thing was just of a very limited usefulness and who knows how many they actually sold and therefore the software and the documentation is just lost all the information is lost a time all we're left with is these little Snippets that were in the back pages of the magazines and just talk about the fact that a product existed but that's it no magazine reviews no nothing the vectrix card here is another example of that this company had been around for a number of years but I don't think they survived much longer after this there were bigger companies in the market that had similar cards like this and then of course VGA and super VGA came out and it just rendered all of these cards obsolete basically overnight and it seemed that these were such Niche cards for their use case that the magazines didn't even do reviews of these cards or comparison reviews or at least not this card now this Orchid card is a bit surprising Orchid was a successful company and they made a whole line of VGA and EGA cards that were very popular I have a bunch of other orcid VGA cards and those have information on them not a lot but at least I can find out what like the dip switch settings are and stuff like that and but being VGA cards they're VGA compatible so you don't need special drivers and whatever for them you just really need to know how the dip switches work and luckily that stuff has survived but the special utilities for those cards because some of them had some extra capabilities that's stuff generally didn't survive and but yet with this card there's just the tiniest information and it's not even 100 clear if that little snippet that was found in the magazine is even this card exactly we don't know for sure but without a photograph of the card even how are we to know how we don't know if this is even complete I think what I'm getting to here is I just continue to be amazed at how many cards existed from all these small companies and big companies where all the documentation and all of the information is just lost I'm pretty sure that somewhere in boxes stored away in people's attics or garages or basements or whatever some of the documentation does exist for this stuff but it's very unlikely that stuff is ever going to be uncovered and actually scanned in and most likely it's all just going to get thrown away and then that's that okay I'll get off my soapbox and stop complaining here this video wasn't a total loss I got a working motherboard I have a bunch of sound cards and some video cards that work and that is pretty exciting and you know I exposed the internet to some of these weird cards so maybe someone watching at some point in the future will go hey I have the information about those cards and then we'll get that onto archive.org and then maybe we'll bring a little bit of information back from the unknown into the general public for our future Generations now what I'm going to do with all these cards that I can't get working is I'm going to put them into a box like this which has a bunch of other cards in there that are in a similar boat that don't work or are they don't know how to make them work in fact uh this video card right here was inside this box right here in an anti-static bag with the original letter from the viewer so I will make some space in here and plus I have a couple other boxes with similar cards so I'm going to stick all these uh other weird random cards into here for a future time if we ever do uncover information about these I can go and grab it and then maybe we can try to get it working might make an interesting video or these cards may never see the light of day again if you have suggestions or thoughts on these cards cards or any information you might be able to dig up or find definitely put a comment down below and in fact if you're watching this video at some point in the future I don't always see comments from older videos especially so definitely please email me at my Channel about page there's an email address there and just let me know that maybe you uncovered some interesting information about one of these cards and we can maybe get it working so that's gonna be it for this video thumbs up if you liked it if you didn't you know what to do huge thanks to my patrons they make this literally possible their names are scroll onto the side of the screen and they get early access to videos and behind the scenes stuff and live streams and stuff like that so if you want to become a patron you could do so at the link in the description below and I guess that's gonna be that so stay healthy stay safe I will see you next time bye foreign

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 221,586

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Id: n2Gm6eM4nCc

Length: 76min 2sec (4562 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023