What’s even more amazing is there were additional Mindset computers and peripherals found in subsequent months. The owner of Computer Reset said he procured these from a computer graphics artist in the 1980s. This is the ONLY video about this computer on RU-vid!
Thanks for letting Dave do a video on this. I have never heard of the computer before so it was really cool to watch. It would be even more cool if you did a follow up video (hint hint).
@@Kat21 What are the specifications for MindOS 10? In my timeline Mindset failed so I wanted to know if my system would support it (assuming I could ever get a copy). Main Stuff ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Motherboard: Cyrix ProG with 2x Firewire 1600, 4x Firewire 800, 2x Infiniband HDR+, and Proxim Wireless Built-in CPU: Cyrix Cx4800 GPU: Matrox Mystique-9 5Gb with 3x Displayport and 1x DMS-59 Sound: Aureal Vortex 3 Pro (A3D 5.0 compatible) RAM: 32GB Nanya DDR4-2666 (8x4GB in quad-channel configuration) OS: IBM OS2 Warp 7 Storage: 512GB PrairieTek Solid State Drive (boot drive) 4x 1TB Iomega 10k HDD (for game storage) Extras ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1x HD-DVD Drive 1x SuperFloppy Drive (for backwards compatibility)
@John Wagner It does indeed. However, it still is early on in its development. It also has support for the BeOS kernal through running a virtualized version of Haiku (so while it's just a virtual machine, it's at least an officially supported one)
MindOS 11 is in beta. It’s going to be awesome! Sent From My MindOS 11 Beta Computer Also kinda odd how ♉︎♋︎♎︎♍︎♌︎♎︎♎︎♉︎ released it so early. I’ve been ♎︎♊︎♎︎♉︎♊︎♎︎♍︎ a lot of corrupti♋︎♏︎. any idea why?
What a fantastically unique machine, thanks to you and Rob for sharing this! Those graphics seriously blow my mind, I can only wonder what else could be done with this hardware.
That face... It's so familiar, but not exactly in a positive way.... I feel as though someone or something is scolding me for a wrong doing. What game is this face icon from again?
@David - the reason Planet X3 fails, is because while the Mindset does implement the BIOS calls for CGA video (INT 10H), it does NOT implement the CGA hardware registers (nor the hardware registers for the PC speaker) AT ALL. The mindset framebuffer can be located anywhere in memory, and can be changed to anywhere in memory, as well as being able to have its bit blitter move graphics data _very_ quickly through the system memory. (In this way, it's very much like a proto-Amiga, sans hardware sprites). The nice thing is, that while the IBM PC BIOS functions were horrible piles of crap, the ROM BIOS functions on the mindset (INT traps 0xEE and 0xEF) are very flexible and reasonably fast, especially since a lot of them cause graphics coprocessor commands to be emitted over DMA, and so you could probably port Planet X3 with little effort to use the advanced graphics features of the mindset. :)
Would it be possible/sensible to set up a TSR to transparently remap the CGA registers to memory for seamless compatibility, or do you lose too much speed in the process?
10:45 this is collision detection, and can be remarkably complex as in its most basic form the computer has to compare the position of every object against every other object. While i can't say for sure, the fact that they built a demo around it says to me that they probably had a function specifically for it that could be used by program designers. Thus the demo was probably to show off its features and act as a template for developers.
Oh my God, I've seen that before, including Vyper. The more you talked, the more familiar it all sounded. Then you played the game and I remembered it. I used to work for Synapse Software, and Synapse developed Vyper. Yep, we had that computer at the back of the office! The actual look of the system isn't familiar, I think we had pre-production hardware.
I was an Atari 800 guy, so Synapse was a big name for me then and I recognized Kelly Day's name on the game. I was very interested in the Mindset because I first about it as having the involvement of some former Atari chip designers, much like the Amiga. The Amiga was still a mysterious product that had yet to ship anything but game controllers, so the Mindset, with a lengthy story in Byte on the technology, was a fascination of mine for that year. archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-04/page/n269
That's awesome! Had the Atari 800 (GTIA chipset) and Synapse Software was a true powerhouse in those days! So many great and memorable titles by some damn amazing programmers! Thanks for being a part of that wonderful time in my life, you guys at Synapse were a major inspiration!
@@heyidiot This is true, they just had a rubber coating to make them more sticky. Now I have the disturbing thought that the computer system named "girlfriend" (Amiga) also had balls of steel... BTW, the Amiga also had a 16 color RGBI output (via a round DIN socket). I suppose the hardware somehow mapped the 4096 possible colors into their RGBI counterparts (but I guess no one ever did). Not sure how the Mindset worked this; it had a palette of 512 colors ("9 bit RGB") of which it could display 16 colors simultaneously.
I imagine some executive laying awake in bed late at night thinking back to when he told the team "it's compatible enough, we're good" and how that ruined his company
Being this was released in 1984 and as I write this, that’s 38 years later, and most CEOs aren’t exactly young to become a CEO, I suspect without looking, the Mindset CEO has died of old age by now. Such is life.
The designer listed on the MoMA page is Robert Brunner - he went on to lead the Apple Industrial design team, and was responsible for a lot of their mid 90s design direction. He is also the guy who hired Jony Ive
The AT program is showing the coprocessor interaction between the bit blitter _AND_ the hardware collision detection registers, which were nicely exposed in the BASIC.
Yep. It looks like sample code to show people how to make a video game. It looks like it's made to be as simple as possible so that people can understand that code. It's impressive considering it's being run from BASIC
This sounds like one of things average people say to make fun of intelligent people. "Ah yes, its quite clear that the dynamic iso-actuator is running into micro oscillations cause the kinetic propagation field was misaligned from an improper initiation. Someone forgot to quantify its parameterized state without juxtapositioning it against a known metric such as the hyperbolic descriptor known as word soup. Duhhh... Must've been one of the interns. 😁
:D I wanted to write the same comment but then i saw yours but that is true XD And i am not the one of "r/Whoosh"ers who doesnt know the joke don't worry
@@tschak909 ... OK, I'm sort of familiar with how that works at a software level, but what's the difference when we're talking about hardware? Is it just a technical difference owing to what chips are involved and how, or does it affect performance and programming technique as well?
@@markpenrice6253 There is a pair of graphics and display coprocessors involved that DMAs their instructions and data out of main memory. As such, writing to the hardware directly isn't as straightforward as on standard PCs. This is why Mindset spent so much time and energy making an excellent BIOS interface that can not only handle all of the various operations that the GCP/DP and audio processors can handle, but be able to schedule many of the same type very quickly with a single call, so the BIOS interface is actually pretty fast, unlike every other MS-DOS machine of the time. You can see some demos here: i.imgur.com/sR5U6jJ.gif the colorbars draws in less time than one frame. Boxes spits out a queue of 128 operations to the GCP (it can do more), and the pause is because it's randomizing 128 more before sending them out... Polyline also sends 128 seperate polylines per color before changing color. Polygons is slowest, filling one 8-sided random polygon per call.
@@joeg4707 for the new demos? I'm using WATCOM C (OpenWatcom) . The compiler intended on the original ISV disks was Microsoft C, Pascal, or Assembler. (At that time, Microsoft C was a rebadged version of Lattice C 2.0 for 8086..WATCOM has an infinitely better optimizer.)
It's slowly becoming more clear to the public at large that Computer Reset is a serious treasure trove of computer history. That place NEEDS to be preserved!
Sadly, its shut down. Richard had some health issues and did a big sellout around 2 or 3 weeks ago, and hes ending the buisness. He's been a family friend for decades, and sadly ive only known him for half of one. Good man though, an honor to have helped him with his buisness
And I could be mistaken, but he called me to notify me of his sellout a few weeks ago, and I sadly didn't go because I was on vacation. However, if he ever decides to lemme drive that firebird, I'd be down in a jiffy 😉
Makes you wonder what Windows on a Mindset would've felt/looked like... It's amazing how many old "failures" were actually just way too ahead of their times in concepts. (PS - glad to see some proper video capture of the system - slightly curious how the various video outs compare)
Microsoft was all talk back then, they couldnt even be bothered to properly support TIGA chipsets (full graphical processor running at 40-50MHz) in Windows 3.0 despite talking the talk.
Would have been very interesting to actually see that system alter a video source with overlays in real time. That's what a Mindset was really for, most TV stations here in Germany used these boxes to inject text into the original source, i.e. the score of a soccer game, lottery numbers, and so on. My dad used to work for ZDF and proper use of these machines were the secret for having a lot nicer screen texts than the competing ARD, in the mid 80s at least. I even own a Mindset (S/N 000108) that I found in the attic after my dad passed away. Same config as here but with DOS on a cartridge. Will try to repair (it does not turn on) that gem as soon as possible. This video did a great job motivating me after the machine sat in my attic for yet another decade by now...
Was going to ask how german public tv is competing eachother, as in my youth we could recieve 3 german tv chanels next ARD ZDF WDR to NED 1 and 2. After reading some wiki pages its just as complicated as the Dutch public tv.
The 80186 was in a leadless carrier, and it was installed UPSIDE DOWN in the socket. The metal cap has the part markings and that side is buried in the socket.
@@Xilog It's upside down in the sense that the gold plated lid is facing DOWN. But so are the CONTACTS. The socket was designed to work that way. Usually the part number was also printed on the back side, but now always.
Probably one of my favorite pieces of hardware you've ever featured. It's absolutely beautiful and way ahead of its time. A big "what if" with all the compatibility things for sure. Loved it. Thank you for your video, David.
The sound chip is right next to the graphics processor, it too was a DMA chip (it's an MCU), so sound instructions (and "wavetables") could be sent to the chip and programmed, and the audio chip could run without CPU intervention.
both appear to be custom VLSI chips ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3a_qJFD80_c.htmlm54s VTI is the original VLSI Technology, Inc. it was a contract manufacturer at teh time. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Technology probably THE first ever 'Very Large Scale Integration' company, founded just a year after so called Mead/Conway revolution, that is the publication of a book and first practical MIT course based on it.
@@ChristopherDrum The sound processor is an Intel 8048 microcontroller running a software synthesizer and connected to an 8-bit DAC for output. The stereo module contains an identical 8048.
thanks for a trip down memory lane. i was fortunate enough to work at mindset as did my father and sister. a couple notes: 1. the digital audio controller chip i believe was used to control fading of external video 2. the power switch on the keyboard was hated by employees because at lunch people would push the keyboard away from them and the switch would bump up against the computer and shut down causing many folks to lose their work. similar problem with the reset button. originally you didn’t need to press it in conjunction with the alt key so an accidental hit of it and the computer would restart 3. in the pac-man basic program what you’re seeing is hardware collision detection which was novel at the time 4. the mindset used custom vlsi graphic chips 5. it was originally conceived as a next generation atari home computer but when atari tanked the president of the home computer division left atari and formed mindset. 6. as a last ditch effort to save the computer the mindset was repositioned as a graphic worksatetion for television. a mindset 2000 system was built for this application but the industrial design was just a metal box as the company didn’t have the funds to hire robert bruner to do the industrial design
It doesn't even look like a 90s PC. This thing could slot right into a modern desk, juuuust barely dated. Fonts and styling were about 30 years ahead of its time, maybe?
Wow, this a trip down memory lane. I was amazed to see a video about this obscure computer. I purchased one of these back in 1985 with money I saved after several arduous weeks of mowing neighbors lawns and working a pt job after school. I really wish I had held on to it! Great video!
How to take apart the stereo cartridge: You take the clip off from around the RCA composite connector using some small vice grips to separate the two loops which will allow you to pull the brushed metal retainer off the plastic and it probably clam shells out from the plastic side... Just guessin
Your on the right track but the clip is called a circlip , vice grips wont work, you need a circlip removal tool which pushes the clip apart as you squeeze the handles together.
I QA interned at Mindset. They were an incredible team, deep knowledge of hardware (custom blitter), compilers (side project early use of C in that market), databases, and many many other things. Part of the opportunity was the PC 5150 was a big empty chassis, but then the PC XT and PC AT started using that space for a hard disk.
Reading old ANTIC! magazines, Atari 400s for under $30, Atari 800s for under $60 liquidation of old stock, new in box, that would be worth a good deal more on eBay today !
when you said it was from 1984, i had to stop and rewind to make sure i'd heard you right. with the design, i would have NEVER guessed it was from the 80s!
In 1983/84 or whatever. Jaw dropped. Graphics abstraction was basically unheard of that time. At least while keeping things still fast enough. This system could probably do pretty crazy things if one hardcodes graphics routines!
You know that for a fact? I suppose if they're high-level enough that's not too astounding. The PC's BIOS had a rep for being slow but that's not an intrinsic property of BIOSes, IBM's just sucked. Using the BIOS to set each pixel would've been terrible, but if you could move sprites around the place, including scaling and transforms, then it's no more astounding than a modern GPU using Open GL etc.
I know you've had it for a while now, but I just wanted to say how much I love the current 8-bit guy intro. The older ones were all good, don't get me wrong. But the current one is so fun and familiar and the music is such a bop, it always gets me excited for the video.
10:42 may have been an example of collision detection, taking into account the visible (round) shape of the sprite, and not the actual square that it's bound in. VERY advanced for the time if that's the case, but I'm only guessing. Who knows really.
@surfer300ZX It's not true man. If you want to meet a woman with depth and integrity, you need to do two things: 1) Evaluate and improve your own depth and integrity (everyone can do better here). 2) Abandon environments which punish depth and integrity (i.e., the city). In my 20s I was bitter and jaded about women. I had come to believe they were all manipulative and exploitative narcissists. Then I looked in the mirror and asked what I could do to attract higher quality women, and then I moved away from the big city. I'm now happily married to a wonderful woman.
@surfer300ZX If the only thing worth marrying about you is your money, yeah, that's all anybody's going to marry you for. My wife stuck with me through joblessness, supported us for a few years, Encourages me to follow my interests. Some of any group of people suck, but yeah, mostly women are just like men, except people treat them the way you treat women. NOthing screams "factual errror" than any statement about all of any kind of person.
@tinylilmatt you'll have more success joking about something funny, or different from the last 100 years of shitty abuse chicks have had to put up with
That computer! That STORE! I wish I could go there and rummage around for a few weeks... Unfortunately I'm from Denmark :(. I really hope, that stuff doesn't end up in the landfill.
@@reneastle8447 Well... Custom chips are custom chips. They can be approximated to some degree with circuitry, but it's not the same/the full experience. FPGA and equivalent can help too, but that's an even worse approximation...
It doesn't appear that it will be going into the landfill. Unfortunately, the owner passed away several weeks ago. But a group of local enthusiasts have partnered with the owner's daughter to organize and sell off anything anyone wants to buy. Obviously, the proceeds will go to the family, but the enthusiasts have gotten involved to make sure that none of the history gets destroyed.
I feel like removing the C-clip on the RCA jack would most likely get you into that sound cartridge. But you're probably right, best not to mess too much with such a rare piece of hardware, especially a loaner. :)
You beat me to it, I was just about to write a similar comment. ;-) Thankfully I scrolled through the comments first. But even with that clip off, there is still a chance that the parts of the module's cover are just held together by plastic clips. And those are probably very brittle after all these years.
You might find the book "Marketing High Technology" by Bill Davidow interesting. He was head of marketing at Intel in the early 80s. One of the anecdotes in the book describes how the 80186 was marketed as needing "only" 14 peripheral chips.
Heads up ... there's another computer that used an Intel 80186. The Research Machines Nimbus, which was marketed as an educational workstation for schools here in the UK. Early versions used the 186, before the CPU was changed for a 286 (then a 386) in later models. That's another seriously rare machine for you to hunt down.
Glad you said this, I was going to say the same thing. I don't know if they were ubiquitous across education in the UK, but they were certainly common enough that I saw them in our high school computer room, and then again when I went to college. They soon started to gather dust tho' when the the college bought a bunch of 386 IBM clones in another part of the room.
The Swedish school computer, Telenova Compis, also used the Intel 80186 CPU. The machine normally ran CPM-86 as its OS, but could run MS-DOS (version 3.2 I think) - and like the Mindset it was not particularly compatible with IBM PC.
Neat to see "Program Load Priority" in the sys config. Very similar to the "boot priority" we have in BIOS/UEFI nowadays, but it's really cool to see it used even way back then. Also, I can only assume the "at" program was used to demonstrate sprite-on-sprite collision detection, based on the demonstration.
14:40 That is a very noisy fan. Sounded like an auto-whisk on high speed. Ooof...lol After combing my memory, I can confirm that I have used this computer a few times. I cannot say that my experience was remarkable-I was a twat back then and all I cared about was gaming, as well as messing about with graphics programs... I mean, knowing what I know now, it would of been neat to have one of these, even if it was a DoA system...
Ah, the 80186. There was another, mildly famous computer that ran that processor: The Research Machines RM Nimbus PC used in schools and colleges in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s. Wonderful machines. CGA Graphics but with more colours, BBC BASIC on ROM and, most important of all, it was mostly IBM compatible, if you ran the right bit of software that enabled compatibility mode. I had some fun times on those machines.
and yes, sorry, sometimes my mind fails me, the sound processor is an Intel MCU. The stereo add-on adds another of the same MCU on a cartridge, for stereo output.
My gosh... I've been waiting FOREVER for someone to make a video about Mindset. It's really great to see one in action for a change. From a technical standpoint it's not quite as advanced as I had initially heard (being architecturally more similar to the AtariST than the Amiga), but it's still quite interesting.
Just imagine if other DOS computers had these accelerated vector/sprite graphics that the mindset had. They would have been like DOS X68000s and games would have been out of this world.
The Mindset sounds like it was a truly amazing computer for its' day! Actually including a hardware 3D vector processor in the graphics chip was something completely unheard of at that time. In a way it's too bad they were going for some level of PC compatibility because the CGA-like graphics output left the machine fairly crippled for video games. Had they gone another direction it would likely have been a strong competitor to Atari and Commodore. And Mindset may have lived longer than a couple of years, too. Thanks for the look at that machine. An absolute work of art in 1984.
It looks remarkably similar to the Sharp X68000, which came out a few years later, despite the Sharp being upright in a tower configuration. I wonder if the Sharp designers took some inspiration...
The 80186 was also used in the BBC Master 512. It had a 65C02 which would run all of the BBC Computer software and an 80186 which ran DR-DOS and the GEM-PLUS graphical operating system. It was hopelessly incompatible with almost everything from the world of DOS. I think only about 20 software titles worked on it.
If memory serves, the BBC Master 512 did not exactly have DR-DOS yet, but an earlier product, DOS Plus 1.x, which essentially was CP/M-86 with a built-in DOS 2.11 ABI level emulator called PCMODE. This early hybrid could run both CP/M-86 and MS-DOS programs (incl. batch files). In theory, it also could run CP/M-80 programs via emulation (at the rime, CP/M emulators existed for various platforms, including MS-DOS, CP/M-68k and CP/M-86 platforms). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Plus Edit: At some point, the 512 also came with v2.1 apparently. My apologies. I should have had been more thorough in this case. ^^;
Sadly, I've lived in the Dallas/Fort Worth area for over twenty years, and I've never heard of Computer Reset. I _may_ have seen it before a couple of times. But I did not know all of those glorious computer artifacts were there.
I'm five years late to the party, but anyway - the 80186 showed up in the RM Nimbus too, which was also an educational computer, released only in the UK as far as I'm aware. I believe it was called "Nimbus" because it had a distinctive silver lining (RF shield) on the inside of the case - "every cloud has a silver lining".
@@eng3d Ha , I remember in 1987-1988 We got NEC 286 and they key items were , under $4,000 2 x Floppy or 1 x Floppy and one 10/20Meg HDD and must run Lotus 123 and Wordstar With the EGA+ Multisync games we found we could run games of a floppy eg star trek text games, then leisure Suit Larry
Information is sparse on stuff like this, graphics workstations / video painting systems were normally crazy expensive so only sold in small numbers. Try googling for Quantel Paintbox, Ampex Video Art, Dubner 20K, Spaceward Matisse and Xerox SuperPaint. There are others too like VideoToaster too but you probably know that one!
@@DextersTechLab I've heard of the Paintbox, but Im curious about what was used for old home video and television logos and stuff. There's gotta be some computer behind it all, and it would be cool to know what that is.
@@The1Nomad There was lots of options, rostrum based cel animation, genlocked computers, some would have been sent off to a specialist company to be rendered on a computer as CGI or it could have been just regular optical and video effects. The BBC even had a dedicated bit of hardware to generate the BBC world logo (google for 'BBC Computer Originated World') There was no 'one' solution. It could even be a combination of several techniques composited together. This short video might help explain some of it... ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6Xk2ET5xZUM.html
oiSnowy It was also used in the ICL-owned RC Piccoline computers that were common in schools in the 1980s. They had a similar look but the floppy box would be shared between 4 computers to save costs for a classroom setup. These machines ran CCP/M-86 and more closely followed the Intel documentation stating that int 00 to 1F were reserved for future CPU enhancements, 20 to 2F for BIOS etc., rules blatantly violated by the IBM PC and MS-DOS.
Although Mindset got a couple of things wrong they were actually ahead of their time without a modular computer workstation. The design and effort even in the name itself is incredible!
extremely rare computer, I wonder if the touch tablet is there somewhere, one of the hardest accessories to find from any computer; you might have better luck finding an Apple I out in the wild then a mindset touch tablet.
17:50 I think you can take that apart by removing the locking ring then sliding the metal cover out. There's probably gonna be some screws under it, or it might just come apart.
12:00 This is literally the predecessor of Microsoft Paint, because the bought it from ZSoft (which you see here credited). ZSoft is by the way the inventor of the PCX format, which was very common back in the 80s and early 90s. Really interesting computer anyway.
5:10 Miles Dyson demonstrated in Terminator 2 the proper way to shut down a Mindset computer... by holding down on the ENTER key for more than 1 second.
The graphics coprocessor contained a BLITTER, which in addition to doing block transfers for graphic data, kept track of objects by a transaction ID. this could be used for coincidence detection.
Oh yeah, I was at Synapse Software, and there was a guy working on a game for Mindset. It was 3d-ish with flying buildings coming at you, I think. I don't know if we ever got final hardware, or not.
6:48 I think you’re right about 512 colours on the composite output. Page 4-4 of the Software Developer’s Guide describes the layout of the 16-bit colour palette registers (of which there are 16). The top 4 bits define the colour for “an RGB color monitor”, while the bottom 9 bits define the colour “for a color television”. There is also a bit for letting through an external video signal. Where did I get the docs from? They appeared a few months ago at good old Bitsavers: bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/mindset/
The half-arsed IBM compatibility was an big error. But I doubt full compatibility would have saved the system. They should have go with "Look, a totally nee and awesome machine!". The Amiga and the ST showed that there was at least some air for radical new machines left at the time. Still, a some serious marketing budget would have been needed, too.
The appearance of the machine is quite similar to the Atari Mega computers btw. Those could also be fitted with a graphic card that allowed 1280xsomething hi res mono graphics which I believe worked for Cubase and definitely Calamus - I used such a system at one of my first job places, an ad agency in Stockholm. Laser printer and all.
