I think you need to contact some folks who frequent VCF. I'm almost certain they'll be a guy or two there who can help out. There's a discord who's link is floating on the internet (though it took me a lot of googling to find it). On another note, there's a guy in the UK who restored a Quantel Paintbox. I don't know if he'll be much help, but he might be of use when it comes to finding info on fixing the analog video stuff. There WILL be people out there who can fix this. How long or how hard it takes is always up in the air
Could be a good candidate for a collab with the retro tech restoration side of youtube, like Adrian's Digital Basement, BuB etc But that sheer amount of ASICs really makes me hope that the problem is just a cut trace or bad on-board memory somewhere, even a toast (eheh) ROM could prove fatal to such a bespoke machine
Damn that's some obsolete hardware for 2001. They must've been in development hell for *years* First pan across it I just assumed it was centred around one of those pci/Isa industrial backplanes with one of the sbc PC's, but all bespoke batshit 😐
For the era, "homebrew" LSI stuff could often outpace generic CPU and even GPU workloads by about 5/10 years. Yes, that entire box would be obsolete in 2007 by a Core2quad and a couple 8600GT's, but in 2001 they still had enough edge to be worth the bucks
Yeah for video processing, dedicated silicon remained relevant for several more years, in 2001 it was still quite common to buy specialized real-time rendering cards. All the same, while this thing was still being sold in 2001, I'm fairly sure I got the date off and that it originated in like 97 or '98
As someone else here have said. It might be worthwhile to get a full startup log over a serial connection if there's anywhere on the board or its outputs which allows this.
Something like this WILL have a serial output. Probably for factory debugging. @cathode ray dude i'd advise posting a full teardown of this somewhere if you get the time/pluck up the courage
Its common for the SIMM slots on 68k macs of the early 90s to just outright eat it, it might be worth trying to swap the slot assembly out or at least reflow it. If you have an oscope id probe the RAM bus lines and see if any are grounded out or stuck high.
Aaaahhhh! In high school, I operated one of these daily from 2009-2011, it was also a Trinity upgraded to a GlobeCaster. It was incredibly buggy, which was annoying in production, but they did send me a free shirt for reporting a bug with clear repro steps. I'm not sure I can be of any assistance helping here, the only hardware fault I dealt with was a defective Time Machine card which they repaired for us (the situation was as you described, for any problems you had to email/call them up). I have names of some of their support staff that I worked with, I can provide what I have if you'd like but I don't know how much they would be able to help these days.
CRD 5000🎉🎉Thanks man, you’ve been such a great source of healing when I need something to scratch my itchy brain and trying to relax after playing this game of life
I actually tried that first, because initially the whole machine would not talk to the host PC at all. After I removed everything it started responding, then I started putting cards back in and eventually got to this point. So there must have been some crusty connections in there; but in any case, I *have* tried it with as many cards removed as possible.
Veeeeeery stupid question, but judging by years of watching Paintbox-related content (and lots of Adrian's Digital Basement)... Are any of the pins on any cards by chance a serial/JTAG pin header? There has to be some kind of internal serial communication happening to do internal diag, and knowing it's a 68K (they have an internal vector table system for exceptions, like memory or shit like that)... Then it's just going dirty with a multimeter (or even logic analyser) and check the RAM lines to see if some addressing line got stuck/a trace is cut/a cap might be leaking/the usual stuff you'd probably tried. Tbh though, I'm gonna bet that there's an addressing line stuck high/low and past that point it cannot look any further, or the chip at that address got bad. It's a pain in the ass. But a diag POST output would def say a lot. Look for a serial header.
Perhaps the RAM configuration was lost due to power loss in a battery-backed memory module? Blind guess, but the machine not running when it expects 0 Mhz ramclock, but has 133 Mhz feels like something odd hardware like this would do
On the last card you showed, the upright chips in the top left look like they are RAM chips. The package is called ZIP (for Zig-zag Inline Package). There seem to be two missing. Maybe someone stole them to upgrade an Amiga? :D
Good call, but I checked the two other cards on ebay and they're also both missing those chips. To my surprise, one of the ebayers accepted an extreme lowball, so this whole video might be unnecessary, replacing the card may fix it.
Whatever this thing is it's absolutely one of the coolest machines I've seen. I have no idea how you would ever get it working, sadly. Good luck getting any service information or anything for it.
I built a computer with an asus motherboard last year, I tried to use Armory Crate, it's trash, can't even uninstall correctly; also one of the first things it did was corrupt windows. Managed to get back from that and just having it installed substantially increased the idle CPU utilization, made sleeping impossible, and reduced performance across the board. When I went through and scrubbed it I found a bunch of secondary and tertiary uninstallers that it hadn't used when I uninstalled the main program; a lot of them were fully in Chinese. The amount of not giving a shit they put into that program is impressive
I worked with a Play Trinity for nearly a decade at a local TV station, which ended up being used primarily as a CG device for overlays, bugs, crawls, titles, etc. mainly due to its downstream key capabilities in conjunction with a switcher. It was in service from 2000 way up to around 2020 if you can believe it! Never knew it got an update/rebrand running on 2000/XP, as ours ran on NT4 SP4 for the duration of its use (all the while on the same PC!) The first thing I wondered is if some of your cards are using outdated firmware for the new software, but that's pure speculation. I'll see if I can locate the original software ours came with as the disc might still be around.
A few translations. 2:43:07 Impressive they implemented a spec checker. The text calls you an idiot for not having enough ram. 2:47:30 "A Game based on an unpublished novel by Mariusz Pawluk" makes you wish more outsider games were more honest about their origins. "one of our artist friends had a really bad idea for a novel/movie, but decided he should make it a game instead" 2:47:40 "Long ago, a world came to be. A good world. But later a man was born, which came to a merciless barbarian killer bringing death to all. Yet there were other people. People who paid for pain with pain." very teenager novel shit. Credits say that Pawluk is responsible for art and animation, so he probably is the "Mario". Also, funnily the musician Mrozek is just one letter away from Sławomir Mrożek, a Polish playwright and novelist. 2:48:20 as we say, Wiedźmin trzy najlepszy 2:48:47 There were *a lot* of Witcher inspired (as in inspired by the original books) works. This one might be also "inspired" by Conan (yes we had Conan in the late 80s, that's why we had Witcher in the early 90s). 2:49:30 Tak/Nie is Yes/No. Wolny as an adjective can both mean slow or free. It's probably the first one in this context. Doubt setting the Scroll to Szybki would actually make it scroll faster. 2:59:12 "When You Cry, He Can See You" might be an anti-piracy measure. 3:00:33 "You've come too close, you scoundrel! These are the lands of our lord Ardan!" "You better eat those words, you dog!" 3:05:30 Was being made 1992-1994 as per the credits. As with everything, developing games sucked ass because by the time your first game that you spent 2 years making came out, it was already outdated. 3:33:28 "All these games" "coming soon" 3:34:02 "Draggy help! Our land Dragoland (real creative guys) has been attacked by the evil and mischievous Dwarf Mot and his evil minions from the Dark Forest!" 3:34:17 "He drove all our fellow villagers out of their homes, wrecking havoc in the process!" 3:34:31 "He dropped letters of spells in different places so that no one can get to him!" 3:34:45 "Croc! (The actual game uses the diminutive of crocodile) Let's show him that noone wins against us!"
"it's just the illusion of Choice.... capitalism does not result in the largest variety of products for the widest variety of people in the widest variety of situations but in fact focuses on just one very tiny slier of people whoever is perceived to be the most profitable with absolute blinders on." The Truth of the world we live in. Thank you for saying this so elegantly.
the problem with finding good games on the amiga is there was an unproportional amount of bad games on the system so you have to wade through soo many bad ones before you find a gem
I love how for every 3 minutes of playing a euro platformer you need to rant about light fixtures or weed garfield for an hour as a palate cleanser. Fun stream.
