Keatah

There are like only 2 or 3 products, tops, that capture the original spirit and accomplishments of the original VCS. I'll give you hint. It isn't this "new" VCS.

That's a tall order considering how the VCS was a new form of art in the 1970's. Today it can be nothing but regurgitation. I was nonplussed by that. Not interested in cryptocurrencies and online gambling. Should I be impressed that they partnered with the estate of a dead artist? Like booooorrrrinnngg.

I been using this like ancient program from the Windows95 days called D-FileMU for renaming and such..

Hut-2-3-4.. Hut-2-3-4!

What in your opinion were/are the most moodiest, dark & downtempo, play on a cold & raining evening VCS games? I'm starting with StarShip. Mostly because it was slow and the the sounds droning. The random beeps and bloops were spooky. They really created atmosphere and open space.

Looks like those connectors are free floating in the air. Till I noted the scratches on the glass!

BTW IIRC this mobo will support DX4 and AMD586In most 486 systems the cache is direct-mapped. It depends on the chipset, but that was the common configuration. And I checked, it is TAG ram.

In most 486 systems the cache is direct-mapped. It depends on the chipset, but that was the common configuration. This means that the cache size is proportional to the main memory size. A 64K cache would cover up to 16MB RAM. 128K covers 32MB, and 256K covers 64MB. Its size and presence/absence is typically set by jumpers and dip switches. Thing is if they're set to specify X size of external cache and that cache isn't present, most chipsets will report it to the BIOS but actually ignore the missing chips and go straight to main memory. The board will function. I don't recall if the 9th chip in the external cache bank is for TAG or PARITY. Static RAMS used to be quite expensive. And I suspect someone pulled them out of this system at one time to sell or use elsewhere. And that was that. My recommendation is to look at the numbers on the one remaining chip and go buy 8 more of them. All the while making sure the speed grade and manufacturer is the same. If you have to buy 9 because it's a different brand from the one existing-now chip, then do that. I would also recommend getting 256KB, if you upgrade memory later you'll be covered. The chipset will ignore what can't be direct mapped. No gain. No loss. BTW: Most 486 caches are write through unless otherwise specified. This applies to L1 inside the 486, and the L2 on the motherboard. This means the CPU writes through to main memory directly. And the cache is there to buffer reads only. That's why a board can work without L2 cache even though the chipset has the feature turned on. The chipset doesn't buffer write data in the cache. But it will check there for read data, and if not found, it just goes to main memory. Presence or absence of L2 cache, on my DX2/50 ISA-only system, means about 20% speed difference. I'm using chips labeled: AT&T ATT7C199P-15 9208T 04 ..where -xx is the speed (in nanoseconds) and that number should be matched to what you have in that 9th socket. They should all be the same speed. My system came from the factory with 15ns/66MHz cache chips. Commonly available static ram speeds in the early 486 era were: 20ns - 50MHz 15ns - 66MHz 12ns - 83MHz This is the datasheet for what I'm using. AT&T ATT7C199P-15 DSAP0027017.pdf It may or may not apply to you. You'll have to post a photo of the cache area or transcribe the numbers on the 9th chip exactly. IDT and Cypress Semiconductor were also popular manufacturers of these parts. You can learn more about your system by finding the mobo manual or the chipset's datasheets. In lieu of the manual, an option is that the chipset datasheet may indicate what lines are connected to the jumper pins so you can set them for the right cache size. Hope that all makes sense.

A day late, but not a dollar short. Your card is likely a clone of the AD450 2-Serial / 1-Parallel / 1-Game model. Or the AD450 is a clone of your card! https://stason.org/TULARC/pc/io-cards/U-Z/UNIDENTIFIED-Multi-I-O-card-AD450-AT-I-O-CARD.html Easier to read http://kab00m.ru/lib/docs/JumperSet/i/U-Z/50195.htm

When something is listed for like 99.95 BO, I always like to offer 9.95 in hopes the seller will quickly accept it and not notice. Hasn't worked yet.

The 1990's were a breakneck pace indeed. But most PC standards were backward compatible. And processors were forward/backward compatible. Minus any speed issues.

I believe members of NewTek did something like that, the makers of Digi-View and VideoToaster/Flyer. They formed a company called Play, Inc. and made their Amiga peripherals for the PC. There was a product in the 90's, for the PC, called Snappy. It was like Digi-View for the PC. Used the parallel port and everything. Used the same technique of scanning the signal. Had a really high resolution for its time. I don't think it was too popular because it still required bulky portable videocameras. Even VHS-C was/is considered big by today's standard. Monstrous even. Scanners were just becoming popular at the time and digital cameras were just getting underway. So lots of competition from other emerging technologies. Technologies that eventually won because they were so much easier to use. So much more practical. I also vaguely recall they made a Toaster for the PC, too.

For the software you might want to check here: https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-mouse/9x Start with version 9 or 8. IIRC I have 8.20 on my DX2/50. There is a readme.exe and/or readme.txt on the disk image itself for more information. Version 11 is for Windows 95/98. And in your DOS folder, you should have something called MSD.exe. It's Microsoft Diagnostics that can tell you more information about your machine. I have this in my CONFIG.SYS file.. DEVICEHIGH=C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.SYS or DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\MOUSE.SYS ..depending on where you install the mouse software. The mouse is going to steal power from the rs-232 signal lines. That's why it's got such a low-power consumption 10 or so milliamps.

It's priced that way because some flunk is gonna pay for it.

Insane indeed. It's just a piece of plastic. My Apple II has more provenance than this. To me!

IMHO that's still a lot of dependencies. Or it sounds that way. Despite the PC having had 1000x that much hardware available I don't recall hussing and fussing over upgrades. Most fuss was about price and where to get something the cheapest. I think both my A500 and A1000 machines had sockets for the custom chips and CPU and ROM. But not the RAM. Sockets are a mixed bag. You need to consider cost, convenience, repair, and reliability. The first Apple II units had all sockets for all 100 or so chips. That meant like 1000 contact points. The last Platinum //e had maybe 7 or 8 sockets tops.

Not entirely. While replaceable, it was intended for the machine to go obsolete before the battery leaked. And it's not like they were replacing them every year. It was a one-time deal, installed at the factory. Today with all the hindsight and cheap tools and supplies, it's a no-brainer to replace it. Unless those "collectors" have no brains to begin with. Absolutely. I suppose that's what happens to those basement apartment dwellers. Their brains rot and leak just like the batteries. Might be caused by Radon gas or their screaming parents.. AAHHHHHHhhhhhhh......!! What one can do is carefully desolder the leaking battery. Drill it out and stabilize the canisters/shell so to speak. Keeping its shape and form intact. Keeping the shrink-wapped plastic label intact. Spiff it up and solder it back in, thus preserving the original look. One can use tiny hook clips to get real functionality from a fresh off-board battery if desired.

Small aspirations = small results. Especially with all the cost-cutting in the design of these machines. It was next to impossible to "splice in" new interfaces or technologies. And even if it was done, system-wide bus speeds put the brakes on the whole shebang. All the ranting and raving about how slick the custom chips were, and how many new features they bought to the table. But they never told you they were NOT upgradable. They never told you that you would be locked into that motherboard. The same motherboard that had RAM soldered onto it. And might as well have had the CPU soldered too, for there were no real upgrade paths via chip swapping. With PC you could go through several upgrades of graphics/sound/io chips on one motherboard+processor+memory combo if you needed to. It was even feasible to just upgrade the motherboard to gain some new I/O capability or bus speed increase. And considering that a PC motherboard houses the chipset, you were getting that new custom chip so to speak. So. Yes. You could get a new bus and backplane for about $120. But of course best results were had when everything was matched. Blahh blahh one big melting pot of parts and upgrades! Yes! And sometimes it was even fun selling my old parts on ebay - to someone just coming into the fray. I never got excited about AGA. It meant I would need to buy a whole new machine. I don't think a video upgrade alone would have made any difference. After about 3 or 4 generations of graphics chips, you'd need to start upgrading other parts to get a faster machine to feed that graphics chip.

Choosing to fight against the growing PC standard was of course a company's choice. They didn't have to fight against anything. Just implement whatever standard and be done. Now. Another thing I never heard mentioned is the progression of standards. The juggernaut PC being the technologically inferior slow machine that it was, actually had another advantage in disguise. The huge size of the ecosphere placed a real limit on how fast standards could evolve and change. A limit on how fast they came into being, and how fast they became obsolete. This slower pace allowed for many to be in play at the same time. Let us consider external storage - my self-proclaimed area of expertise. And let us begin with floppy drives a few iterations into the game, 3.5" 1.44MB and 5.25" 1.2MB models. My first PC came with those. A step up from the 360KB and 720KB sizes from just a few months earlier. But they were backward compatible enough to allow users to migrate their software forward from the 8086's, 286's and 386's. Fine. And 3.5" drives were becoming more popular. More and more software was being published on them. (Never mind their touchiness with choice of media manufacturer.) I migrated most of my stuff to 3.5 in good time. When I needed MORE space I found myself getting an Iomega Zip drive. 100 frakking MegaBytes babycakes! In a removable cartridge-like disk. And it interfaced via parallel port. How cool was that? Very! I used it for several years and was pleased with it overall. Sometime later in the late 90's I got into a Pentium II machine. It's motherboard had a parallel port on it. I could use the Zip Drive! Yay! And it also had USB 1.0 ports (what's that?).. And it still supported 5.25" and 3.5" drives. Great. All these options. I used the Zip drive to transfer my 486 stuff to my spiffy Pentium II. And started giving up frapping with floppies. FireWire and USB came next. And I migrated to FireWire, a mistake on my part. But I quickly backtracked and went with USB 2.0. My next motherboard still had all these ports, but would only support one floppy disk. And my next one dropped FireWire and Parallel support. And so on.. Soon enough I got a board that had seemingly thousands of USB 2 and 3 ports. So you see, there was plenty of overlap allowing one to migrate and move up at their own pace. And not having to leave your data trapped in last-year's machine. No esoteric specialty solutions needed. This didn't happen much (if at all) with machines from Atari or Commodore. You couldn't play games from a 1982 C-64 on the Amiga. And you couldn't play Atari 400/800 games on the ST series. But you could use games and productivity software from the first PC's to way past the Pentium II. Thanks to standards that were additive and backwards compatible. Another example is the Riva-128 graphics chip. It did all the early graphics modes while adding Windows Direct3D and DirectDraw. I do have to mention that Apple put some small effort into easing migrating to Macs via the Apple //e card that gave the Mac //e compatibility on a hardware level. While sharing disk drives too. So there's that. I don't recall anything like that for the Amiga or ST though. In a sense Commodore and Atari were fighting themselves on this aspect.

Absolutely. It's situations like that which make emulation the superior choice. But a true hobbyist will likely have both real and emulated hardware at their disposal. Beauty part of emulating is ease and consistency of color adjustments. And the ability to make a desktop icon for a certain setup/calibration.

Warning! Apple II screenshots! I've always looked at artifacting as a way to increase resolution. Not necessarily to obtain extra "not native" colors. But any additional or different colors were of course always welcome. The Apple II didn't have any sort of videochip whatsoever. It just pulsed the signal based on bits the video scanner read from ram. So one could say all of the Apple II's hi-res graphics were artifacted 100% of the time. All of the time. I think there is a demo (8088) that gets 4096 colors from the CGA adapter - which was designed to output only 4. Numbers may be wrong on the numbers but I recall it being quite impressive. We had something like that on the Apple II titled Brian's Theme. Shipped with every DISK II + DOS 3.3 package. I loved experimenting and modding that program to see what other effects I could come up with. Gotta love the detail there. I think we were getting like 560 dots across or something in the color image. Of course you were restricted to what colors could be adjacent to each other. I didn't know there was a difference between the cart and the disk version - in terms of the colors and flipped Artificial Horizon. Since I do most all of my classic computing on emulators I just flicked the artifact slider to what looked good. Now. As an Apple User I thought I'd slip in a few more screenies of artifacting on that system. Though generated with an emulator I compared against various technologies in real hardware. Like a 1084s and NTSC and Composite Color display. The visible differences between the methods are mostly accurate. What I find impressive is just how similar artifacting is on the two architectures. And just how sharp images can be if you match your display and source just right. And though the screenies are emulated. Their differences are clearly visible as on my actual hardware. 1084s, color tv, RGB, Amdek 300. Sadly my shitty samsung t260hd won't display colors from the Apple II.

That the battery in the pic has a date, and is labeled "high energy" and "do not charge" tells me it's a primary cell only. Yes - here - https://batteryguy.com/lintronics+tl5242p-replacement-battery.html I'm not familiar with any 486 mainboards that charge their external batteries. But then again I haven't seen every make and model. The board above looks like it has the diodes and two transistors. But no resistors for charge current limiting.

Your board could still have a battery onboard. Most 486s of the era had an external + onboard battery. double check that.