The Mac Plus had modern multi monitor support in 1986 and I got it working!

in this day and age we're all used to using computers that have multi-monitor support that's where you can hook up two or more monitors to one computer and be able to move your windows and programs between the various monitors and even overlap one program between two monitors it's a boon to productivity and it just generally makes working with computers that much easier when I try to think back onto what exactly originated the idea of multi-monitor support in the sense that we use it today the Macintosh 2 line was introduced by Apple computer around 1987 and it brought to the table multi-monitor support by using multiple video cards inside the computer and it works exactly the same way we'd expect it to work today there were earlier examples of multi-monitor support like on the IBM PC but it didn't really work that way because it was usually using one color graphical screen in combination with a text screen so while it is multi-monitor support it's just not multi-monitor in the conventional sense as we know it today well in this video we're going to take a look at a Macintosh that was released before the Macintosh 2 live line that has multi-modern support as we know it today so welcome to Adrian's digital basement and without further Ado let's get right to it foreign [Music] we're going to be talking about this is a Macintosh Plus from 1986 and while this seems like a pretty normal Macintosh plus there's actually something kind of special about this machine it was recently shown on my second Channel I had a video where I service this chassis and tested out a few different motherboards and one of the things we noticed is that the motherboard that's inside this computer has an extra card made by the company radius attached to the CPU socket and that said card has some ROMs on it that results in the menus looking much larger than they normally do in fact take a look at the file menu it actually Scrolls here which is unusual we're just running regular system 6.07 so that's absolutely not normal so let me turn this computer off and let's take a look at this board that's inside the machine there we go and see what's going on exactly with the back cover removed normally you can just pull the motherboard out you slide it out of the the chassis that direction the thing is this actually has that extra board attached to the CPU socket and that doesn't allow you to just slide this out basically it stops about there so it's a little bit of a brutal process to actually remove the motherboard from this system you need to slide it up just a little bit so it clears the bottom edge here and then you have to use a screwdriver here and wedging the motherboard out just like that and there it is now it's free and here we have it there's the Mac plus motherboard and that is the radius full page display card that's attached to the CPU socket I talked a little bit about what I could see going on with this card in the last video where I worked on this motherboard but on the side here it says radius full page display copyright radius Incorporated 1986 and the ROMs that are on here also have 1986 date codes when this card was installed someone removed the CPU installed a socket plug this card into the socket and then there's another socket where the CPU goes into we additionally have some Ram here so this is most likely for the frame buffer I don't think this thing spans the memory on the computer in any way and then you have a connector right here now originally on this machine and I recommend you might want to go watch that video this cable was installed in there so obviously this one connects right here and then this connector here which you can see there has a row of pins was actually shoved through the security connector on the back of the case when I first saw this car there was nothing really surprising to me about the fact that it existed because I knew that full page display and two page display cards existed for the otherwise non-expandable Macintosh Plus in fact I have a Mac 512 which I've shown on the channel before that has an internal hard drive expansion that's put into that thing so not only does it have an internal hard drive which is not normally inside a Mac 512 but it has a similar board to this that is the hard drive interface so people have been expanding the non-expandable macintoshes for a while and I think it was stuff like this that prompted Apple to add a processor direct slot on the Mac SE which essentially allows a card like this to just plug into a connector versus needing to connect on top of the CPU an interesting connection to these types of expansion interfaces was that around 1986 or 87 my father had a Macintosh Plus he used for his publishing business and he actually had an accelerator put onto the machine and it was a similar board to this one where it clipped on top of the CPU it was a 68020 and it also had a display interface for a 21 inch external monitor monochrome of course but with that particular setup when the external monitor is in use the internal monitor is disabled so it really is only a single monitor solution and it just takes over from the internal monitor giving you a much higher resolution it was my initial assumption that this car this full page display card was going to work exactly the same as the one that my father had back when I was young but I started doing a little bit of reading about this card and turns out that's not the case after doing a quick at Google for the radius full page display I came across this website called 32x32 which has a little bit of an article and some pictures about this card specifically the first picture shows that monitor hooked up to a Macintosh Plus and I was flabbergasted to see that there's actually two screens working at the same time multi-monitor support in 1986. I don't know for sure if the copy that's on this website came from the promo material from radius but I love how it says two screens are better than one well definitely indeed if you're going to be working on a small compact MacIntosh and you can add an entire extra screen and still have the use of your internal one well that I find pretty darn amazing and this might be as far as I'm aware the first implementation of multi-monitors in the conventional sense as we know it today on a personal home computer maybe with like some crazy workstations and stuff this was possible but for something you could just go buy at a store I'm pretty impressed I'm pretty impressed I'd love to hear comments on anyone else who knows about any other personal computers as in home computers and not some really esoteric workstation that had the capability of a graphical multi-screen system where you could just drag Windows between two monitors and in fact it's this article that goes on to talk about this exact fact saying that we often remember that March 87 was the start of an era of external displays for Macintosh with the Macintosh 2 line but it was in October 86 that Mac World magazine heralded the two-headed Macintosh in a story about this full-page display setup for the Macintosh Plus that allowed multi-monitor support the article highlighted the ability to move Windows freely between two screens with a new kind of virtual two-dimensional space like revolutionary honestly not to mention you had additional software capabilities like detachable tear off menus that could be repositioned and a larger font size for the menus also a screen dimmer and control over the size of the cursor to reduce the possibility of losing the mouse on such a large field of vision enabling this took a new Motorola 68000 processor perhaps running at a higher clock frequency with a question mark that's a bit odd that completely replaced the max original CPU and the requirement of a new Macintosh ROM meant that the product was restricted to the Mac plus and the 512 ke models incidentally the 512 ke is just a Macintosh 512 that's been enhanced to be more like a Macintosh Plus with only 512k of ram so I think it has Mac plus ROMs and it has a double-sided disc controller or maybe a circuitry mod to facilitate that it seems that at the time this was released the price was two thousand dollars that would have included the board that's on the motherboard here and the Monitor and here is another picture of a Mac plus running a big spreadsheet with a graph across both monitors that's so freaking cool now this website goes on to say that permanent changes to the mother board were made these presumably included the radius ROM which obviated the need for a special boot disk a requirement for other vendor Solutions the integration between the radius ROM and the Apple motherboard were evidently pretty deep as an example the larger P RAM and the Mac plus allowed for precise vertical alignment between the top and the internal external screens to be memorized but the 512 ke had to be set every time at boot now having looked over this motherboard I'm actually skeptical that any changes were made to it and I can look down on the original ROM sockets that are underneath the card and it definitely looks like those are the original ROMs so I don't think anything has been changed and I think the two ROM chips that are on this board right here are overlaid on top of the original ROMs or the CPU is redirected to these ROMs versus the ones on the motherboard and that's how the larger menu font is activated continuing on in this article it talks about the fact that other vendors solutions for an external monitor on a Mac plus did shut down down the internal screen exactly as I mentioned my the website goes on to indicate that some applications have trouble with this multi-screen approach and of course that goes without saying because this was all before official support was launched by Apple and you do kind of have to wonder how much of what this card was doing did Apple borrow when they came out with their own multi-monitor support after reading what this website had to say about this card I suddenly had a really strong urge to try to get this card working I wanted to see multi-modern support actually running on 1986 Hardware so the first thing I started to do is I started Googling looking for documentation or and or the drivers for this card well unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any documentation period for this card I couldn't find anything anywhere I found a few posts of people talking about the fact that they had this card and they were looking for the drivers and documentation and really nothing ever really turned up there apparently was this old website that had some old Macintosh drivers for radius products and it's seems that that website is gone now now archive.org did archive everything from that website and I was able to get those files but unfortunately when I looked inside that 7-Zip file it didn't have the particular radius where software drivers for this card I did keep looking around and I did eventually find a package that looked like it was for this old car that has the old I think 2.3 ROMs on here and it only had a single like 2K or 4K init file that you put in your system folder and really no information about how to use the card it just said with the readme file put this in your system folder and it should help with compatibility a little bit that was it and even with that init file in the system folder which is actually how it was just now when we had this computer booted it still doesn't actually allow the mouse pointer to move off the screen so that extra monitor is not active at least when the system is booted at least with nothing connected to this cable so I think the first order of business is we need to try to figure out what's going on with the connector that's on this board what kind of signals are coming out of this and if they are compatible with the RGB to HDMI can we use this awesome awesome thing to actually replace the external monitor which I have no hope and Hell of ever finding and if possible maybe we can get this thing working to get started on this discovery process we're going to need to use an oscilloscope that's a given right to look at those signals but also I really want a way to power the motherboard up in a way that's not so sketchy where the motherboard is just hanging out the back of the case which is kind of how I do it most of the time so we need a better solution well luckily a viewer recently came through and sent me something and it's this right here this is the Pico RC and what this is and I've already assembled it because it's a kit this is a Pico ATX to Mac plus power adapter so this is the Pico ATX here you send 12 volts into this and then this connector right here plugs into the motherboard in the normal connector and there's actually a pass-through connector right here that you can plug the cable that goes into the analog board on the Mac and this will actually power that entire system up so even if the power supply portion of that board is not working anymore this this little board will power up the rest of the board and the Monitor and actually send the video signals and the audio and stuff back through to that board now looking at this board you'll notice I have a ribbon cable soldered onto here with a nine pin connector and you might be wondering what that's all about and that is the correct pin out to connect up to the RGB to HDMI directly and that means that with this and this you can actually have the Mac plus sitting on your bench and outputting a video signal to a modern monitor or my capture setup without needing the entire rest of the chassis and using this is as easy as just connecting up to the motherboard like so we do have a little power switch here which turns on the ATX power supply I have the Zip drive I'm going to put the zip disk in there and that's going to spin up it's connected to the scuzzy connector the RGB to HDMI is connected I have the ATX power supply connected it's turned off right now but that little green LED shows up all the time just to tell you there's like a standby power and we're looking at the RGB HDMI output now and I created a profile specifically for the Mac plus which is also the same as the Mac 128 and 512 and I've shared that with Ian the maintainer of the project so future releases should have the Mac Plus profile in there because it is slightly different than the Mac classic one that's in there that I made on a previous video and here we go let's exit the menu and we'll turn this machine on and hopefully it boots so what's kind of funny is we're looking at a Pixel Perfect representation of what's on this Mac plus right now including the large menus but what's funny is notice how it's going off the sides of the screen a little bit that is a problem with my capture setup I have OBS set up here to capture a 4x3 image which is typically what's coming out of uh all our rolled systems but I guess the Macintosh pixel resolution is not exactly 4x3 in the sense of like how other retro computers are so my cropping that goes on here actually crops the sides if we switch to the full picture here you can see there's no cropping going on whatsoever so please just ignore for now that it's cropping off the sides I'm not going to go and adjust my OBS profiles for this computer that I don't really use that much on a capture like this what I wanted to show though is that I do have the full page display system extension in there and it's 3K I thought it was 2K or 4K while it's 3K and this what we're looking at here is the readme that comes with the full page display driver from radius version 2.5 from 1988 and it says simply install this in your system folder and restart the fpd system is in a nit that installs during startup ensuring compatibility yeah there we go with Apple's latest system release all all previous versions of the radius display software including radius update should it's kind of annoying there's no way to zoom on this version of Microsoft Word should be taken out of the system folder also if you have the radius accelerator you should have the radius accelerator dated 88 or later blah blah okay well anyways that's a processor accelerator board with like a 68 or 20 on it I think that is clearly not what's on this system and scrolling down there's really no other useful information on this as the close view utility is not compatible so don't use that I don't even know what that is maybe for like zooming up or something like that and please return your registration card and thank you very much that is literally the entire documentation that I was able to find online for this card full stop alrighty so we have the system working we have the right software installed let's start poking around on the output of this card so I have the system turned off we're going to boot back up and I'm going to get the oscilloscope set up so we can see exactly what we're getting out of those pins when we look at the pins we have four pins a gap and then five pins that's a few more pins that I would have expected there at least needs to be a ground pin horizontal vertical sync so that's three and then we have a video signal so really only four pins and we have a total of nine so I'm clipped onto the first pin and let's power this on and see what we see oh hey we're getting something already so that is a good sign let's zoom in here oh hey okay this is awesome this actually looks like a video signal of some kind so this would be probably blanking and then you have oh it went away you know the system booted up off the zip disk and then it went away let me hit the reset button here look it's back okay you know what maybe that init file actually disables the video card or something like when the system boots and if you look at this uh let me pause the video here single shot so look how that looks different than that and that so they're different and that is a really good indication of a scan line so what I'm going to quickly do is I'm just going to go through the rest of these pins and take a look at what I see on any of them and and write down if I'm seeing like horizontal or vertical sync that looks like a video signal as well and we have a pulse there on this pin if I zoom in on this down at the bottom here actually shows that we are at 68 kilohertz so that's definitely horizontal sync and then we have this pin which has some kind of a signal let me zoom out ah okay this one right here 67 Hertz that is the vertical sink right there so I found the horizontal the vertical and two different video signals one that's inverted from the other okay this is freaking really exciting all right I'm gonna grab the multimeter and I'm gonna try to figure out with the system turn off which of these are grounded because I can uh go to the ground right at the top of this motherboard here and start looking for ground so there's a ground there's a ground and so on I'm going to write down what I find and then we'll uh go from there all right so this is what I found we have TTL video we have ground we have TTL video again but inverted another ground signal then there's the space or the Gap then we have that five volt line and I'm wondering if that's a sense pin and we'll get back to that in a second we have horizontal sync that was 68 kilohertz or so ground vertical sync at 67 Hertz and then ground again now this line here is 5 volts all the time and the reason why I think it might be a sense line is that that 5 volts is actually fed through a resistor I think it was a there's either like a 4.7 k or a 10K resistor which is very typical for a pull-up resistor meaning that probably this signal here would be grounded and then that would allow the car to be able to tell that the monitor is connected but even with that not connected we did see some kind of video signal coming in over these TTL video signals on the scope so it seems that this car does something when you first turn on the computer that once the zip disk booted up it seemed to black out but at least there was something there at first so what I just went ahead and did is I took this pin out here and I made a little cable that goes to a nine pin connector and I wired it up according to this connector so that I should be able to unplug the RGB to HDMI and zoom out a little bit so you can see what I'm doing unplug this from the motherboard here and plug in the radius card into the RGB to HDMI and let's see what that does now when I turn this on keep in mind that what we're looking at here is the profile for the Mac plus so I expect that we're going to see hopefully something but it's not going to be correct because obviously the sync rate and everything is completely different on the radius card than on the Mac plus motherboard so we turn that on oh okay we're getting something the flashing is normal so we're getting a black screen oh you know why because I connected it to one of the TTL video connections and the Mac plus outputs and inverted signals you have to invert it so I think the oh look okay it's flashing but we're absolutely positively getting some kind of Graphics there now as I was saying it's inverted because I think I connected to the pin on here that is not inverted so let me plug into the inverted pin on the header there it is okay so if I bring up the menu it stops the flashing there is something there there is something there let me go and create a profile that matches the timing that I got on the scope and let's see what we see alrighty check this out I haven't reconnected I have the new profile installed I'm going to turn on the motherboard we get this weird screen and keep in mind I have the zip disk out so it's not going to boot anything it's just gonna sit there and whenever that something comes up that we saw on the other profile we're gonna see it there it is radius Inc full page display 1986 version 2.3 would you look at that it's freaking working now I know what you see here it looks a little small and that's an unfortunate side effect because the image of course that we're capturing is this long image because it's a monitor turned sideways and it's not just a monitor turned on its side it's literally outputting scan lines that are less wide than they are tall so it's like 640 pixels across by like 800 and something pixels down so the electronics in the monitor are actually drawing the picture that way it's not just a regular monitor turns sideways now the Mac is waiting for a disc to be inserted so I'm going to turn off the power and I'm going to push the zip disk in here and we'll turn this back on so the system is booting off the zip disk right now and I'm wondering if it will clear this little splash screen as it boots up into the OS and maybe that's a factor of that fpd oh there it went yeah so that might be a factor of that little system folder thing that I copied in there that is doing that I mean that's the only other thing I could imagine now the question is is we're obviously not getting any kind of image we're clearly not experiencing two screens you know where we can drag a window over but perhaps it's that sense pin right here the 5 volt line so I have a little jumper link here let's hook up that signal between ground which is just a bunch there's a bunch of ground pins I'm going to connect it here to ground and I'm going to connect it right here and we're going to turn on the system again and let's see if that changes anything what's gonna happen what is going to happen oh okay look at this there's there's a mouse pointer on the screen sweet I can't believe this so we don't have the internal monitor connected right now obviously so there might be something displayed on the internal monitor that we cannot see oh okay look at this I can't believe it RGB to HDMI we're capturing the full page display from this radius card and absolutely that article was right about the ROMs that are in this thing and it facilitates this thing to work without drivers because obviously we were seeing the boot process even before that little file loaded although I think in that file if we look in the system folder oh it feels a little slow doesn't it if we go into the system folder here fpd system has a little space in front of it which means it should load first so it might actually be that that little driver there does turn this on or whatever so that's kind of cool now the question is are we running into monitor mode right now let me see about dragging this window off the screen so far no what about down here no over here no whoa oh boy I just lost the window it is completely off screen so let's see stare there it's like in the middle okay there it is so the mouse pointer is stuck right there on the edge of the screen and now it's gone so I guess if I had the internal Mac monitor connected right now we would be seeing that window partially on the main screen that is so freaking cool I cannot believe this is actually working wow so I'm trying to think how can we show this operation is there a way for me to capture this if I had a second RGB to HDMI with the digital hat on it I could capture it and send it to a separate HDMI input on my computer and use OBS to composite the image together thing is I have other RGB hdmis but I do not have any of the Little digital add-on board that goes with it that allows me to capture from this setup I think with the right solution to do is probably put the motherboard back into the original case hook up the original Monitor and then just run this extra cable here the little nine pin outside the case we could plug in the RGB to HDMI and then see the machine in operation with another monitor sitting next to it kind of like it was supposed to do the only problem is going to be is that there is no way to rotate this image the RGB to HDMI and the Raspberry Pi cannot do that in software at least with the current software that's on there so we're going to have to use a normal Monitor and just have big borders on the side which kind of sucks alright here we go we're in dual monitor mode the system is booted up right now now ignore the banding you see here that's this monitor for whatever reason it's doing that on the VGA input coming from the Raspberry Pi but take a look at this so this window here system six whoop here we are we're over on the Mac now it's just freaking Works look at that totally as we would know it today multi-monitor supports that honestly it's just blowing my mind I can't believe in 1986 a Mac plus with this radius card could do this I don't know I just it just really it really blows my mind now it is really glitchy though we saw a little bit of that when we dragged the window back and forth it seems to be behaving right now but I noticed now it's weird when I press the special menu I can't actually hold the menu down uh these ones are working oh but look some garbage appeared over there on the main screen ah yeah look it's it's really freaking out now you might be wondering how exactly did I get it where the Mac was on this side and the monitor on that side because that didn't seem to be the default configuration well check this out I noticed if we reboot the computer and I got to hit the reset button if I hold the mouse button down while it's booting up and I figured this out because I was trying to eject the zip disk a little control panel appears on the LCD screen sorry for me having to record the LCD screen here it's uh not exactly the best but we have that large cursor thing we were talking about looks like you could set the menu bar to either large or small looks like we have the ability to turn on and off the zoom bar it allows you to pick which position the monitor is on the right or the left and then you can have both monitors working together just the external monitor just the internal Monitor and then there's a couple sliders here I don't know what this one on the left does other than I think it's the brightness control because the article talked about the brightness control it doesn't do anything now and then this one actually adjusts the position where the Mac monitor is compared to each other so as I move this you'll notice that this little window stays fixed on the external screen and it changes on the Mac so if I move over where it says display here now the mouse pointer is down here on the Mac Monitor and if I move this slider up to the top here wow it's obviously going to be off the screen completely when I move display it doesn't even move at all and the Mac monitor is down here at the bottom now it does appear that these settings are stored in the nvram which of course are not available on this computer so if I turn it off and on quickly all works normally but if I leave it off for more than a couple minutes it loses those settings because there is no battery in here currently now when it comes to the buggy nature of this entire system I did find a few more articles about it and it's specifically called out that there were much later versions of the ROMs for this card going up into like the 4.x versions and I have a feeling that those were there to fix some of these issues one thing I've noticed that if you pick the small menu bar option then the menus appear on the main screen here on the internal screen so it's sort of similar on a modern Macintosh when you drag your menu bar between which screen you want it to be as the home screen there still is a menu bar over on that screen but obviously there's nothing visible on here and this one here has got all the menu items so to really demonstrate the true dual monitor nature of this thing I've loaded up true basic which is a basic interpreter for the Macintosh and over here you can see the program listing and over here we have the output so if we run this program we should actually see the output once this starts to run and this computer is there kind of slow there it goes that is the output of the basic program while we have access to the actual basic listing over here on the side now it looks like while this is running I can't scroll through but it's nice to be able to have your output and your program on two different monitors much like we would do today and when we hit stop the output stays there but of course over here on the monitor on the side I can edit the text as is normal imagine in 1986 doing this kind of thing I'm not sure my 11 year old brain 1986 could have even wrapped my head around being able to do stuff like this this is freaking amazing and I can't believe this is running on 1986 Hardware with 1986 software and ROMs truly amazing well I think I'm going to end this video here I I can't believe this works you can see by the smile on my face how amazed I am that I actually got this working especially because it seems impossible to find the documentation for this card but lo and behold all that integration work that radius did with the Mac plus ROMs paid off because it just kind of works I did try running the system without that radius init in the system folder and it didn't actually change any of those slight corruption and other glitches that I had witnessed but I did play around with true basic quite a bit with a keyboard connected and this program seems to work perfectly without any issues whatsoever in this multi-monitor configuration I also tried running some games where they ran on this screen and they all did seem to work although of course we were looking at a small window in the middle because they're all designed to run on this internal screen if you're running period correct games and they don't really know how to handle the the larger resolution of this external monitor as far as the rotation goes on this screen I went ahead and I sent a message to Ian the maintainer of this project I asked if rotation would be possible to be implemented and apparently it's not very easy so that might come in the future which would make a really good solution in this case because we could use a monitor and just turn it sideways and really have the true experience of the full page display paired with this Macintosh with this radius card I'd also like to point out how freaking awesome this little power supply project is it really came in handy on this Macintosh Plus here working on this machine there are also kits available for a whole bunch of other systems like the Apple 2gs the original Apple II the Osborne one there's also one for the Macintosh SE and se30 not to mention some more generic kits that allow you just to wire it in to whatever computer you're working on and it just allows you to bypass those really sketchy old power supplies and then run the entire system whoops off of a regular 12 volt power supply most excellent this is so handy so there we go I'd love to hear your thoughts on this amazing 1986 multi-monitor solution potentially the first ever in a consumer product and the fact that I was able to get it working on the RGB to HDMI speaks volumes about how amazing the RGB to HDMI project is because it is such a versatile Swiss army knife type tool for these retro computers and this is a perfect example right here of that I've already sent this profile over to Ian the maintainer of the project so this profile should actually be included in future releases of the software so if you want to hook your radius full page display up to the rgbt HDMI you can do so as well with that profile and finally I'd just like to thank my patrons their names are scrolling off the side of the screen they literally make my channel possible it means so much to me they are rock stars thank you very much to all of them if you want to become a supporter of the channel you can do so Link in the description below and hit that subscribe button if you haven't already comment down below all the usual YouTube junk you know how it all goes and that's going to be that so stay healthy stay safe and I will see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 153,883

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Id: slY_F1MxGlk

Length: 33min 30sec (2010 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023