Some TI notes for you: 1) The TI joysticks won’t move “up” if you have Alpha Lock pressed down. Release it to move up. 2) The beige TI console does not have the door over the expansion port like the black/silver ones do. 3) There was never a beige speech synthesizer made. The box for a beige console shows one, but it was never released. 4) The answer for “where is the database?” in Adventure is CS1 (Cassette Unit 1). A disk would use DSK1.filename
@@kai990 what exactly does that mean no clue heard something about that before but drawing a blank AKA please put in a comment what that means scratch my head it drives me crazy who uo uo it drives me crazy ou ou
Silver Bells played on the c64 Sid chip in the background! Either or the Chipmunks Christmas Song on the same. Or the song Toyland or should I say Candy Land as Ed retro computers LOL Little edit here where it said candy it should have been handy I said Tandy Google! Yep using Google for voice recognition!😳😒💩😣😕😬😲😒😒😳 so no surprise in the outcome! Had worse but not as bad as recently It's seems like Google has gotten Dumber it'll last week weird anyone else seen this? Please comment.
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 uuh cpt schettino was the captain of the cruise ship costa concordia. He ran it aground and then fled the scene and hid in a hotel room as far as i remember. Lots of people died.
@@kai990 okay thanks I thought something sounded familiar there Ravens something I heard on the news or something one time that's probably why it sound familiar I'll check Wikipedia and see if there is some information chances are there will be won't take it as a godsend fact or anyting of course but I'll screenshot dad so I can get the name and Anna get on the gargler as a v e v would say thanks appreciate it
The TI Football and Beginning Grammar cartridges are old enough that they were actually designed for the original TI-99/4, which the 99/4A is backwards compatible with. But that means they do not use any bitmap graphics -- all the graphics you see were drawn using the TI's extended character set (similar to PETSCII).
@@adriansdigitalbasement And a different keyboard, and if I recall correctly didn't support lower case text? And also had a calculator built into ROM on the bootup screen.
@@adriansdigitalbasement The /4 had the original 9918 VDP, the /4A had the 9918A, which supports bitmap mode. That, and the crappy "chiclet" keyboard are the main differences.
@@minivanmegafun I remember a few people that had these computers I don't remember them all numbers by the way the least one person I knew back in the old days had the one with the worst keyboard AKA chiclet keyboard also I did remember that had the calculator if I'm not mistaken but it does make sense there would be a care of you later since after all its Texas Instruments what are they known for so kind of a holdover from their previous endeavors I'd say also I remember they did have a thermal printer I believe it was thermal can't remember but it took the calculator toilet paper as well it looked more like a receipt printer sort of and then anything else I don't remember how it was connected I think it may have connected Vaya the port on the side for the speech synthesis model for example or at least part of it and there was a cable but I don't know because I can't seem to visualize how it was I just remember it said that's the machine but I can't remember if it was bigger or if there's a second device or that was part of the printer that was sitting by the computer and yes some people I knew had the speech synthesis module as well but some would have something that was there war and just like a black box but I didn't know what it did it was the same shape and all his computer but just like blank on top and a bottom it just went between everything else no clue it was he wants in somewhere like that? And I do know that it was not the speech synthesis module because that was also connected as well. Also I remember the power supplies in these had that funky four wire plug on them. Also be careful with the power supply on some of these computers the early ones can be dangerous you will know if you got the revision if there is a short cord with a male on one end and a female on the other and a narrow plastic housing between the male and female this is something trinessa similar to what was it Xbox or whatever situation except not as extreme different circumstances of course but what that is if the power supply does not work that might be the cause of this because what that device is O and by the way if it wasn't an add-on that I think was released for an update to fix the problem? They may have had that and sent you one or whatever if this was the case but cloudy in on ear and unsure are there in all modesty so take it with a grain of salt but what that actually was was was an inline fuse I think it may have been a quarter amp??? Although I may be mistaken on the fuse rating. When I'd seen some of those computers and happiness a power supply cord I'm like What's this and it did have as I said the male and female plug except when the power supply was shipped with this a tear install ready definitely an update for safety because of the issue. That female pug was glued yep that's right glued to the male plug of the power supply that's what's the weirdest things I've seen if something with a device update for safety ever. It's possible that device is created to avoid having power to be returned due to recall or something but pretty clever idea of taking care of the issue. And why I know now what those are later on I believe it may have been American Science & Surplus if you get where I'm going. I got a ton of those things for projects so yeah interesting to say the least. By the way speak your projects I did went up salvaging a lot of those computers back then I didn't repair a lot of stuff like that for one thing wouldn't have any use for it or the means to get parts to it however if there's something like that that might contain something that could be used for another project yeah sandwiches the way to go even if it's now stripping parts to fix another one like this person does here on RU-vid you know what they say repair repurpose reuse erase the rest. At my parents place we had a steadfast rule if it was going to go out for either not working not usually more yada yada if there was even one my new thing that could be useful for salvage or something else it got stripped for parts. 1 time. To shop motors out of that and a dummy load resistor big chunky one. Hey Carrie area washing machine and dryer. That thing had already been hacked to replace a very expensive Park oh yeah and Harley analog and just switches the real smarts at all actually wouldn't that be digital since there was no analog circuitry just switches and timers? Anyhow back to that hack mod whatever you want to call it what happened with the dryer is the racial switch was like over $50 just for the stupid switch keep in mind who knows how much that is in today's money? Yeah that mean years ago. The theme the original switch had one switch for three positions air fluff air dry something like that. Low medium and high heat dry. And another momentary toggle switch 4 the start switch. But when I found out how much is going to be I suggested you know I can make a plate that would take a push button switch heavy duty of course and two toggle switches and put a chart on the front of the machine for the position of the two toggle switches the two toggle switches were for both heating elements low and high both switches off air dry both on high the top one on medium bottom one on low there you go Boston half the cost prepare the dryer just a little bit of Ingenuity and a little bit of time. Also by the way that was not the only thing that got done to those things over time once we got the off-peak meter Ford electric there was some other Hardware installed on both and even before that one of my family members was afraid to let the washing machine run when they weren't there because if they need godparents and not shut off the automatic shut off and burn out the motor or do damage so I installed a device that I built from scratch that used a pinball machine tilt switch just shut down there on the washing machine if it went out of balance too much and a blinking red light an optional buzzer to let you know that then thing in tripped And that way you just had to reset it after redistributing the load and there you go. Back to the other mod for when we got the off-peak electric meter essentially it was essentially it was a timer a few switches for bypass another add a few contactors of course the 24-volt transformer if I'm not mistaken the timer may have been 24 volts? Also there was a time delay relay possibly on one of the contractors? Long time ago can't remember. That was used to momentarily close the start switch for the motor on the dryer wash machine was easier 2 set up and also I did incorporate a cycle pause control on the wash machine which also added a soak setting as well. basically all you would do lifting washing machine set the cycle timer push it in set timer bypass honor off hit start. Also the dryer at that time was added a pause as well I just remembered. since both used timers that had the synchronous Motors it meant this was easy. Hey if you got an appointment that's old days of work is out of out of warranty and new situations come along and things aren't exactly the way you'd like pee you know open source it yourself open it up make it your own just one of those things where the maker shines Although I had a policy of never voiding warranty! Ever.
By the way side note with chicklet AKA Chiclets as in the gum I just remembered this LOL. A friend of mine had this gag with Chiclet keyboards One Step no longer worked he'd either say want some Chiclets as in the gum any hand you some chiclet keyboard keys. If I'm not mistaken he also had a gag box of chocolates like that I could be mistaken but it was probable but don't know too long ago memories kind of foggy. I think he also modified so those kids with the drum all to make them fit but don't know? But somebody could definitely do that for modern computer gag that's one reason why I brought it up if anyone knew didn't think about that before I'm sure it's been done at least once at least it our time other than my friends had.
I had a scanner like that on my 286, so I had to move it veeeeeeeeery slowly because the CPU couldn't keep up. But together with an inkjet printer, also a new thing, I could make such cool school essays!
I had a Logitech had scanner for my PC that came with it's own card, as did my brother and a friend of ours. They were a little wider than half a page width to allow to scan a whole page i two passes, but It was a pain to a) scan at a consistent rate and b) scan perfectly parallel to the page borders. That friend bought something that help align the two scan passes and stitched them together for a "perfect" image. It had a jig of sorts with evenly spaced lines that you wold place the page on top of and when you scanned, you would capture a bit of the exposed lines just outside the border of the page. These lines were used by the included software to judge the scan rate and adjust any skewing during the scan. Of course, it wasn't a fast process, but it worked.
Compaq made thier ISA/EISA cards extra tall on purpose to prevent them from fitting into a standard case. Standard cards would fit in Compaq cases. But not the other way around. I used to work with the guy that made that decision.
In our household we call towels such as these "Dog Towels". They are relegated to drying off the dog when he comes in from the rain. They come in handy for other things as well, such as you are using yours.
Oh, I love these mini mail call videos, I heard about your channel just a few months ago and I used to skip these videos thinking they were just unboxing of things you get. But the fact that you test and talk about the stuff makes it great. Eventually I'll watch every one of the older ones. :)
@@titactaco Have you seen LGR's review of the IMPACT Indigo2? Also RMC's review of the Octane? I supplied both units. I was planning on sending Adrian an Indigo2, but I guess someone beat me to it. :D
When it asks you, “Where is the database?” You should type “CS1” which means cassette deck 1. It will guide you through the cassette loading process and then type start the game. Some of the first leads for the cassette deck had connections forTwo tape decks so you could try “CS2” . You only need to use the white lead in the earphone socket with volume turned to maximum. The red lead is for saving programs “ SAVE CS1” or “SAVE CS2” (Even though red is usually the right channel use left channel if you have the option. The Black lead is for remote this pauses the tape during the loading process. You don’t need to use this if you don’t have it. I found very little success trying to load programs that I had saved. It usually came up with “Error detected in data” sometimes “Error no data found”. It was so frustrating after typing in programs taking about 2 1/2. Hrs and then making sure I hadn’t mistyped anything to get a very simple crappy boring game and then mot being able to save them successfully. Happy days.
It is an unusual thing to notice that the adventure dames are the only programs that I am aware of that use lower case characters. If you put alpha-lock off(up) on the keyboard it still uses all capital letters but smaller than with alpha lock on
Martin Johnston Remember the mongoose rthat was killed by the snake which was then described as a dead Squirrek. Completed Pirate adventure.and one or two others. Got stuck on savage Island series part 1 and Spider-Man. Very nearly finishedThe Incredible Hulk. (My mare got the solution from a home computing mag. Never looked at all of it but got some tips. i remember listing the games that were in Basic for help and reprogramming it a bit hoping that it would help you overcome a problem but you couldn’t list the games that needed the Adventure cartridge. I even tried to get some help from Scott Adams but I got my letter back returned to sender moved left no forwarding address. Great games. There are some online now.watched someone playing on RU-vid.
I really enjoy the format of your Mail Call videos. It's great to see the immediate cuts to the workbench and functional demonstrations following the unboxing! Automatic thumbs-up.
OH my, that Opti Motherboard with localbus slots. I used to work for a PC clone maker in the late 90s and early 2000's that used that board in their "you can afford a computer" model. They were cheap and worked with just about anything you would expect to be referred to as "super cheap". The bane of any tech in our build and support area was "another Opti machine with a Cyrix!" We got a box of them once that had an interesting flaw. I figured out that if you bent the whole board in an upward arc about 15 degrees, they would boot and be fine, you had to wait for the creek you could hear. It was probably seating a bad solder joint. We really hated the sales dudes that propped their numbers with those boards.
Totally! I did find them rather stable boards for 486 though. I remember going to vendors for these boards and seeing whole shelves of "super cheap" and unofficial clones of hardware being stocked from a large shipping container. DOA rate was like 25%, but as long as you didn't mind going back or or three times during burn in time, it was decent "super cheap" stuff for the time.
I have seen those OPTi motherboards also, I worked for a PC Clone computer company in the Early 1990's. my Boss was from Taiwan and was on the phone all day long ordering parts and bargaining prices, those Taiwaneese people yell at each other A LOT!. Shuttle computer made a bunch of motherboards with Opti chipsets in those early days. We had lots of problems with the VLB ide multi adapter cards, the ones with floppy ide, serial parallel on the same card, they wouldnt line up front to back in the slots and always had problems and messed up. some of those old motherboards are flakey as hell and NOT very reliable, we did a very bad thing when we kept getting the same machine with the same motherboard back, we stripped some stranded wire and ran it to 12volts and shoved the stripped wiring straight into the side of one of those BIG Opti chips, and that would fix it permanently. and then the customer got a brand new motherboard and all the strange lock-ups and crapola went away. We also use to fix Packard Bell 386's that had Keyboard failure BIOS notices on bootup, the little through-hole fuse near the large keyboard connector would blow a lot, even replacement fuses did the same, so we finally just took a staple from a desk stapler and soldered that across the little green fuse, Those NEVER came back. The days when you never heard of computer viruses, I would have never become a PC, and now network admin person knowing what a PITA it is these days
RU-vid > Adrian's Digital Basement Notification > Coffee and Cake > Start Video > Best time of the Day ! The Silver Speechmodule fits perfectly with the Silver TI99 :-O
I had a Logitech ScanMan on my PC as a teenager. They worked well enough when scanning something just the width of the scanner but trying to stitch together multiple scans always required some post processing. There were brightness differences between scans and sometimes one scan would be just a little compressed or stretched compared to the other. Still it was pretty cool to digitize documents, pictures, etc. Also, flatbeds were too expensive to justify for home & personal use until the early 90s.
In the early 2000's I had a HP printer and I got a very cool imaging accessory. It was a normal printer but there was a scanner that was the actual print cartridge. You would pop out the ink and put in the scanner cartridge, and the software took care of the rest. It was very unique...
What I really like about your mail drops is that you actually show them been used I cannot see any other mail shots that do this. Great video kept me entranced to the end.
Hey Adrian, that grey Apple power supply shouldn't be used on the Portable. The amperage rating on those is higher and the Portable logicboard doesn't regulate current that well, you might blow the Hybrid section (on a non-backlit 5120) or a couple of regulators (backlit 5126) if you plug it in. Bench power supplies are safer IMO.
The AID, CLEAR, REDO buttons were actually the numeric keys on the top row with Function key held down (FCTN key, the one missing from bottom right). There should be a card in the groove above the numeric keys with the function listed. Above it was blanks for writing in functions for when the CTRL key was held. The FCTN key functions were as follows 1=DEL, 2=INS, 3=ERASE, 4=CLEAR, 5=BEGIN, 6=PROC'D, 7=AID, 8=REDO, 9=BACK and = =QUIT. I seem to recall there may have been a see-through plastic cover which clipped in to keep the card in place, but I'm not 100% sure as I owned one of these, back in the mid-80's.
Hand scanning was a PITA. When I had the money for my first page scanner, I bought it. The hand scanner made a satisfying thud when dropped into the waste basket!!! That was about two seconds after I first used it.
FYI, normally you can substitute DC power supplies for AC as double rectification won't hurt. And if the device doesn't function I don't think you can damage it.
We had a similar hand scanner in the computer class of my school. Those were pretty awkward to use. A flatbed scanner was a huge step-up from those. It’s incredible that now you can simply scan a document with your mobile phone and it does a perfect job with that.
He must be nutters! The blue backplate should be a dead giveaway! Also, the 486 board's large Socket is NOT for a pentium upgrade. It just has a 387 copro socket inside the 486 socket, because it runs both 386+387 and 486 CPU's...
Just a note on Syquest drives. They were notorious for head crashes. If you inserted a good cartridge after a head crash, it would mess up the good cartridge. If you get the drive repaired, then insert the bad cartridge it would crash the head again and you would back to square one. That is why syquest went out of business because of all the head crashes during the warranty period.
The best use for those handheld scanners that I found was actually to copy documents to play games back in the 80s. They used to red filter the manual so you couldn't photocopy it, but some of those handhelds used a red light, so they cut right through it.
I remember my friend's brother having a TI99. In addition to the base unit, there was an expansion box - TI-99 PEB Peripheral Expansion System PHP1200, that they had, which allowed a lot of additional peripherals, such as printer, modem, disk drive... I was rather impressed, quite jealous, even though I had an Apple //e with room to grow, I felt the TI99 offered a lot of room for the hobbyist and even professional if they wanted to invest that much. It wasn't a toy, but it was a lot of fun.
Nice! I had one of those hand scanners, tho on a PC, not Mac. Can't remember if it was a serial (I think) interface or maybe parallel port. And yeah, it was a pain. Better than nothing but that's about the best I can say about it. The weirdest thing I had was a this scanner cartridge that was for a Mac that worked in an Imagewriter dot matrix printer. I can't remember the name of. But it had a cartridge that was shaped like the ribbon cartridge. You would load your paper to scan into the printer, and the software would run the image thru, running the head back and forth to scan it. That was around '88 I had that, and I think it was already discontinued when I got it. I used it on a Mac Plus tho it was meant for a slightly later model. Only problem was it required a power connection that the Mac Plus lacked in it's serial port, so I had to make a box to inject power to it. Very oddball thing, and I'm pretty sure it's still hanging around at my mother's house - I'll have to look for it! Edit: Did a quick search - that thing was called a "ThunderScan".
I remember those! So many oddball bits of hardware over the years, people think you're crazy if you remember them but they don't. I'll have to see if I can dig up my old TI SR-50 calculator from 1973. If I can find it I actually have the "cigarette lighter socket" car charger for it, need to find that and rebuild the NiCd battery pack.
The TI has a special place in my heart as it's the first 8 bit computer I really got to use in school - our Jr. High School had a computer lab, pretty rare in the early 80's! I briefly had a computer store in the 90's and a customer gave me a complete TI 99/4a system complete with the gargantuan expansion chassis. Not only does it have a floppy drive, but several expansion cards - labeled even. There is a Triple Tech, RS 232 and Memory/RAM disk. I believe the Triple Tech is a CP/M emulator. On the left side above the power button there are four buttons the previous owner added. From left to right there is a momentary switch labeled L/I and it's normally up. Next is a three position switch (top, middle, center) the top label is copy, the lower is clear. Third from the left is another momentary, normally up switch labeled W/P and finally the last switch is a two position up/down and the top label is - 10000 with the lower label - 1400. If I remember correctly all are wired to the Triple Tech. I should dig it out and see if it even boots. I should figure out a way to safely ship it to you and get it into better hands; I doubt I'll ever do anything significant with it - I have so many other vintage project computers I just don't see me getting back into the 8 bits in a significant way. Oh and last year a friend gave me his TI too - but it just had a few carts and the joysticks/paddles. The one with the expansion chassis is the really interested one. If it's something you'd like to experiment with and provide a better home let me know. Not sure if it would make sense to try to ship it as is, pull the cards and package separately, etc. It's only ever been moved in a car up to this point but I'm in Virginia now; the thought of shipping it across country makes me cringe :)
Well... actually, it's a _16 bit_ computer (NOT 8 bit), running at 3 MHz. However, only the system ROM and 256 bytes of scratchpad RAM are available on the 16-bit bus. All other memory and peripherals are connected to the CPU through a 16-to-8-bit multiplexer, requiring twice the cycles for any access and introducing an additional 4-cycle wait state. (The reason for this is because they originally intended to develop an 8-bit CPU for it, but they still had numerous flaws to work out and due to the time crunch ... trying to beat the C64 to market ... they decided to use the TMS9900, which they already knew worked. However, this meant that they had to add the multiplexer.)
I don't know if it is addressed in a future video. If I remember correctly The Adventure cartridge is just a runtime and wants to load the game from the tape you have in that vide. I think the location for the "database" is "CSK1" for the cassette ("DSK1" was for diskette but I didn't have one). Indeed you need an adapter: What we had as a kid was a DB9 cable with breakout to 3 jack: audio in, audio out and remote (to control start stop the tape) and we used a cassette player from a Sharp PC1500 at the time. As for the speech synthesizer, games I remember that used it are Parsec, Star Trek, M*A*S*H. (for the last too I still remember some of the dialog)
PC Motherboard @32:24 is 386/486 combo. 486DLC is actually installed in the 386 socket, and bigger socket is just for 486 or for 387 while 386 socket is used. Another RCA on CGA card is just a feature connector.
I had a Logitech Greyscale 286 hand scanner back in my first job working in a college admin office in about 1992. We used it to scan in signatures to make automation of mail merge letters in WordPerfect 5.1 a lot quicker and easier than stamping them or waiting for someone to be around to sign them. Also used it to scan in logos so we didn't have to use pre-printed headed paper. They were a revolution...then about 2 years later we got an affordable flatbed scanner
i miss my old TI99. it was my first experience with a computer. its what got me started with computers and its just something that i wish i could get back, or at least another one.
I used to have one of those ScanMan, monochrome!! - awful thing! anything that wasn't a flat sheet or paper on a flat and clean surface would result in warped and glitched output!
I used to use syquest drives back in high school and I remember the lab manager had a warning label that if you didn't remove the cartridge before it parks the heads (which it appears to let you do) it will damage the heads. At 31:00 I'm pretty sure that is a MCA network card not PCI.
This is soooo cool to see, after very narrowly missing the 386 era and having no evidence of the 486 PCs we had in my family kicking around... I don't even think I have my Pentium machines anymore. So it's very cool to see this old hardware and how zany the market used to be for these things. LOVE the Mac SE!
The first TI 99 model computer was the TI99/4 which debuted in 1979 but was not very successful, with the the TI99/4a replacing it starting in 1981 as an enhanced version of the 4. The 99/4a is what most people think of when they think of a TI’s brief foray into the home computer market. While the 4a did sell much better then the 4, it was discontinued in March 1984 after only a few years on the market due to Commodore pushing them into price war with that TI later decide it couldn’t win. At one point the 99/4a sold for only $100, far below its cost to manufacture and they were not able to make up the difference via sales of peripherals or software sales as they had hoped. This marked the end of TI’s foray into home micro computers though I think they did continue to sell two business IBM-PC Dos computers (desktop and portable) for business introduced in 1983 for some time after their exit from the home computer market. TI99/4 was notable as the first 16 bit home computer. The main difference between the 4 and 4a models was the 4 had a calculator-style/chiclet keyboard vs the 4a’s full-travel keyboard, the 4a had an improved graphics chip with support for bitmap modes, and a better method of adding expansion cards vs the 4. The price of the 4a was also half of the original 4 model. Of course the 99/4a was backwards compatible with the original 99/4 software so that’s why those cartridge games you have that were originally for the 4 work with the 4a just without enhanced graphics. TI’s biggest mistake was being suckered into a price war with Commodore by Jack Tremiel to compete with the Vic20 despite being more expensive to manufacture.
I can't wait for you to show that ScanMan working!! I had one for my 386SX with DOS and it had a propietary ISA card with what looked like a PS/2 port. Definitely, if you moved it too fast, it would squish up the image or text, skipping scan lines. This actually allowed you to make some cool visual effects if you did it just right. Mine was pure monochrome, no grayscale even. Later ones had color, like you said. I had a LOT of fun with it, scanning in line art from some of my pen & paper role-playing game books, and playing with the (very poor) OCR software that came with it.
Oh that going places with grammar brings back memories! We had a TI99 with a couple bits of educational software, never got anything else for it. The computer ended up going bad, it was mid to late 80s, and that was that. But I still had fun with it in general. There was another educational one that had something to do with the Aztecs. Wish I remembered the name.
You need some 3.5" floppy storage units. I used a Logitech (methinks) hand scanner on a friend's Atari 1040ST and my biggest project was scanning Sailor Moon manga Volume 1 and using Touch Up to reletter it in English. He even had a scan tray so I got really good results.
@@briangoldberg4439 one of my friends who was an Atari ST dealer had one of those trays with a motor for hand scanners to make them into pseudo flatbed scanners. That was like back in 1992. He had a MegaFile 44 hooked up to a MegaST4 along with the hand scanner.
@@TheJeremyHolloway Yeah, I remember stuff like that. I worked at a local office store in high school and one of the graphic designers (designed greeting cards for the store) used something like that at home.
No bong, or dong. Oh man... Also, am I the only one who wants a mail call every day? Lots of interesting stuff in one episode (even if of course many of these also deserve a dedicated one) every time!
I remember seeing a lot of hand scanners back in the day. I never actually used one. But they obviously are problematic. I love that the best scanners we have now are our phones. Just take a photo in decent lighting of what you want to scan. I used to do that with my DSLR before cell phones had good cameras.
New to the channel, nice to see a youtuber being grateful of the mail he get's, some just get to big and say I won't be opening mail anymore, not very nice 😏
“I don’t know much about American football.” They had like one album but it was so good, there was no possible way to follow it up. Give it a listen, I’m sure it’s on RU-vid.
I had that exact scanner but for a PC. It had an 8-bit ISA card and I bet that one is the exact same scanner with the only difference being in the SCSI box itself. It actually made pretty decent monochrome scans if you used a square as a guide. I actual made my own bed out of an old countertop. You would lay the page on it, scan down the left side then fold a piece of wood down which would make a straightedge for the next pass. I scanned thousands of documents and photos with that thing.
Watching the Syquest bit of your video brought back bitter memories. These devices were a horrible waste of money. I bought one to serve as a backup device, and it never worked reliably.
I agree with your summary of the hand scanners not working that well and the moment I saw it I thought of wonky uneven scans from one I tried to use at school. It was difficult to get the scanner running smoothly over the paper so one side would drag slightly which by the time you reached the bottom meant the resulting scan had a bizarre crooked look plus trying to get the right speed the whole time was maddening. It seemed such a cool idea but that thought didn't last long and after never getting any good results I gave up on it.
Oh God, the horrible memories of that hand scanner... I had that exact model, only for pc. My opinion is exactly as yours: I have been never able to obtain a straight, undeformed scan of a single printer page with that contraption. Plus, I've tried to scan some photos with it, and I might not have the steadiest hand ever, but they all came up mangled in one way or another. To me it's a relic of the "technology was not ready yet" era.
This was fun to see. I repaired a lot of those PowerBooks back in the day. The hinges really is a weak spot in the design. I used to mold together new standoffs using a soldering iron and acetone. Adding just a little more plastic made them hold together much better. I'm not sure this PowerBook necessarily had any kind of accident. This is just how all of them eventually end up with use. As always, thanks for a great video!
That SysQuest drive will have a drive belt in it that will have dried out and disintegrated, which fits with it not changing tracks. Also, pretty sure we used to sell DCA Irma cards and they were for connection to IBM 3270 systems.
Holy crap! I had that hand-scanner. What a piece of work that was. IT worked for what it was, but it wasn't very good at scanning large things. And you had to doubly make sure your positioning was straight, otherwise you ended up with skewed stuff everywhere. Hahaha.
Greetings! Really enjoy some of your repair videos. A lot to learn there! I may take on a couple older (128 and Fat Mac) repairs myself soon. I have to say I LOVED my Scanman! The stitching worked surprisingly well, although the pseudo-OCR was complete garbage. Doing postdoc study, being able to store relevant short scans saved me enough in copy fees that the Scanman paid for itself in a few months! Funny how our memories of those times are all divergent, isn't it? Thanks kindly for the fascinating content!
8:20 "Reversable Keys" is the old fashioned way of mentioning dual use controls for dual use keys. The print above the button is the 'FN' mode use or secondary use, and whats printed on the key is used primarily when not in FN mode. Keyboards today have that mostly on laptops for saving space. I used to always forget how to get into FN and out of FN mode in my old Acer Aspire because its an odd "FN + F10" or something. I always had to google it or I couldn't type in my password.
I remember running the software configuration for some EISA SCSI cards in the mid-to-late 90's. I worked for a small computer shop and we didn't sell any systems that had the software on an EISA config partition.
Interesting stuff :) Pretty amazing that there's been that kind of education programs for home computers already in 1978. Hand scanners were also quite interesting devices, never had one myself but was tempted to buy one for the Amiga 500. Thought it might be fun to scan photos and edit them with DPaint, but from your experience, maybe it was best that I didn't get one after all :D
A friend had a similar hand scanner for his A2000HD which I used to play with often. They were very persnickety to use and you really had to work at keeping your sweep speed uniform. It didn't help when the object being scanned grabbed and shifted mid-scan either. I don't think I ever had a scan without some small amount of distortion somewhere in the image even on my best attempts.
Man, those handheld scanners supplied so much early-90s to early-2000s furry art on sites like Yerf, Vixen Controlled Library and FurNation back in the day.
Adventure Cartridge is an interface for the Pirate Adventure Tape which is a text adventure game. They had a series of them, great and infuriating games. Think SpaceQuest on the PC but without the graphics. Love seeing the 994a up and running. Was my first computer and loved it. Ended up with 4 of them that I picked up at garage sales etc, but gave them away to a vintage computer museum when I moved to Europe.
The "flippy" expansion card around 31:10 is ISA on one side and Microchannel (MCA) on the other, back when there was some reason to believe IBM could close the barn doors with MCA.
Oh, and that CGA card pin headers, at least one of those is for an internal CGA monitor (possibly mono only CGA output) for a computer like the IBM 5155 "luggable" machine. The dual RCA plugs are probably one for color composite and one for mono composite
I totally forgot about those huge vesa local bus type cards till this video... Now I remember back then when i get that upgrade for my pc from a standard isa card (i think...). It was so amazing, like today upgrading from some crappy integrated igpu to a 2080ti :) . I believe that vesa local bus card was a trident 1mb vga
Ah I vaguely remember looking this up when I looked into the TI 99 software library some months ago. Adventure is a game engine cartridge that reads in text adventure game content from an external device, such as the tape drive. Pirate Adventure is one such adventure game, so you actually need to use both together. (And I just looked it up again to confirm that this is the case. These are all apparently the classic Scott Adams text adventures.) Hopper appears to be a Pengo clone? Try pushing the crates into the enemies. (I did not look this up to check.)
I hope at some point you'll happen across Parsec for the TI-99/4a, a great side-scrolling space shooter game. At the end of each level you have to navigate a belt of multi-colored asteroids tumbling through the screen. I always thought that asteroid belt was one of the best looking things I ever saw on any machine of this era.
Regarding the PowerBook 150 -- Brings back memories. Those plastics were common to fail when the hinges got a little sticky due to age or dirt. This would crack even in regular use if you didn't support the hinge by opening it from the sides (compared to the top of the screen) -- although as you said this one likely had more trauma. As for the screen I have seen an issue that when the PRAM battery went low, the display would stop. Once a battery was replaced and you issue an Open Apple + Option + P + R on power on it might fire back up.
Hi Adrian, the PC board is one of the cheap one selling quite good in Hong Kong, actually I even have some experience of this one, when I'm a working in a computer shop, the Weitek math coprocessor for the 386SX, OPTi chipset is not bad. Those fast cache memory did speed up the CPU, this one is a later model which already using a SIMM RAM instead of DIP, we shout out when customer buy 4MB, usually we use 4x256KB and DOS game rarely over 640K.
Just as an oddity/curiosity, I am intimately familiar with those DCA cards. They are 16/4 token ring adapters, and DCA made a bunch of "convertible" cards. Some PCI/ISA and some MCA/ISA. The removable part is the ring interface, and they had several different flavors- some for 16/4 copper, some for fiber. I have a few spares kicking around somewhere from a network I maintained for a number of years before it was ultimately replaced.
The Opti chipset mainboard is a Jetway VL 486/5x86 Opti chipset up to 50Mhz According to it's bios code. The hdd-bios chip is only needed on older systems that don't have a hdd-bios built into the system bios. Many systems of this age have an IDE-bios built-in, some even have a SCSI-bios built-in. The fringing yellow might be due to ntsc artifacting, maybe clean the RCA-jack seems a little oxidized. The tekram contains a scsi-chip that might work on a system with a scsi-bios embedded into the system-bios.
I did some volunteer computer support work for a charity back in the day and one of the tasks they ahd me do was to install the PC version of that hand scanner... I think it came with a custom ISA card interface. It was real pain to use and really wasn't that great, the matching software was poor and it was near impossible to scan sufficiently slow for the 486 DX66 it was installed on to keep up. They wanted to use it to scan and file certain documentation but the files it produced were huge for the time, even being monochrome, and it took ages to scan even small sections of documents so it just wasn't practical.
The brown VLB connector is the same size as the microchannel bus on the 10mbit ISA "not PCI" network card, they used the same connector for VLB because there were enough connectors because MCA was a failure outside of the IBM PS/2 computers
Adrian, you only need Adaptec SCSI -bios if you boot PC from SCSI -disk. If you boot from IDE and load SCSI drivers, the Adaptec cards will work without bios. The machine which had those two Adaptec cards might have had the other SCSI card with bios active as a controller + disk to boot the PC from and drivers for the other card were loaded from the boot drive. Thus the bios of the older card was removed. You could use a separate configuration program to configure the card.
I remember using a hand-scanner at school once, was used for making small image files for a programmable sewing machine (we had to do various home economics stuff, regardless of whether it was interesting!) which scanned into an Acorn laptop, which made no sense as we had to type out our initials, print it out, scan it back in, and then have it turned into that image file, that was then stuck on a 720k floppy and finally fed to the sewing machine, I'm sure there must have been a far easier way to do all that on the computer itself without prints & scans, like, maybe connecting the laptop to the machine or something... :P
