A look at some Acorn peripherals I designed in the late 80s/early 90s
Пікірлер: 161
@davidf22812 жыл бұрын
Fantastic to hear this from the actual designer of the upgrades I pored over in the pages of _Acorn User_ as a teenager. Would love to hear more about designing four-layer boards on your own software in the late eighties, and the process of pitching designs and manufacturability back then. Just getting hold of a datasheet in those days was an achievement for me.
@videolabguy2 жыл бұрын
Great memories. No pun intended. We were contemporaries in the industry. I designed vision boards at Applied Scanning Technology in the late 80s and then video processor boards for Prime Image in the early 90s. I used a lot of PALS and GALS, hid boot code in the EPROM on the Oak VGA boards, and suffered memory starvation because management refused to purchase the six memory ZIPs that I requested and forced me to fit my video in four (.5Megabyte). This forced my component NTSC to be 512x488 and totally incapable of supporting PAL. Who remembers Brooktree? Ah, good times. Thanks for the nostalgia!
@stuartmcconnachie2 жыл бұрын
Love the fact that all the socket adapters look like they’re made of wood.
@MrMaxeemum2 жыл бұрын
I would like to think we are of similar age (50 ish) and at the time time you were doing this work me and my mates were learning electronics going down to the local Maplin store and building various circuits outlined in their catalogues, self teaching etc. Although I understand most of what you are talking about now, back then it would have been impossible and am amazed you were doing this work when I was still building flashing LED circuits (not quite that simple but not much more) It has taken me 30 years to get to where you were 40 years ago. Love your videos and the way you explain your thoughts. keep up the good work.
@maxusboostus2 жыл бұрын
I had the exact same thought.
@daic72742 жыл бұрын
Same here.
@peterholst88752 жыл бұрын
I love the videos where you show off your different projects, and especially when you talk about genius tricks in the projects. Please make more videos! 🙂
@Mat-Ellis2 жыл бұрын
I was writing video games in those days, and digitizing was very early. It made a huge difference in how we built the graphics: our artists began using lego figures and models to digitize, and then “tidy up” after. So cool to understand how the early units worked.
@HwAoRrDk2 жыл бұрын
My father worked for a PC manufacturer in the late 80s and 90s, and designed a Winchester drive podule for the Archimedes that they sold. I don't know whether it was an original design or a clone, but he at least did the PCB layout. We rediscovered the original CAD files (Cadstar!) on an old floppy, and I managed to convert them to gerbers that were readable in modern software. 😀
@cambridgemart20752 жыл бұрын
I worked at WE when these were first appearing; amazing how much stuff was crammed into that tiny shop in Cardiff Road!
@TheEmbeddedHobbyist2 жыл бұрын
Still brings back memories as I used to buy all my components from Watford Electronics and knew the owner quite well in the end, as I’d be sitting in his living room most Saturdays while he got the bits I wanted. My “first clock I built” video was built from parts from a visit to that living room in 1975. My dad would drive me over as I was 15 at the time.
@iandavidson992 жыл бұрын
I used to work for Castle Technology. We manufactured the Acorn range after Acorn went kaput. We also did our own SCSI card, the "Storm DMA32" SCSI card :-)
@factorylad50712 жыл бұрын
The main board being manufactured by Fujitsu ?
@randomthings87872 жыл бұрын
Best start of the week ever.... Thanks Mike!
@ytsm Жыл бұрын
Having worked in post production from the early 90's, getting all of this processing working on such a small form-factor is incredibly impressive.
@petewild59602 жыл бұрын
Hi Mike, Loved the video, a real blast from the past. LM1881, now that really was a legendary IC! Those were the days....Best regards Pete (Wild Vision)
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
Hi Pete - I hunted around but couldn't find a picture of your colour converter board!
@bluelightningnz2 жыл бұрын
Absolutely fascinating, and impressive how much detail you can recall! I was one of those kids exposed to these machines back in the early 90s at school, though it was here in NZ and most of the machines were fairly standard, one machine per class with no networking or fancy expansions such as these. Great machines for the time to which I probably owe my career in computing. Thanks for bringing up some fond memories :)
@simonstergaard2 жыл бұрын
Love it when you pull out your old projects. Its a great learning experience and history lesson in one. Top notch watch!
@RetroMarkyRM2 жыл бұрын
me too :)
@xl0xl0xl02 жыл бұрын
I often watch YT on 2x speed. For Mike it's 1.25x tops.
@DextersTechLab2 жыл бұрын
Fascinating video Mike, thank you for sharing your old designs!
@davidareader2 жыл бұрын
Wow.. I had no idea you'd done these. We had one of the video digitisers at school, and that got me a bit obsessed with how that worked at the time. I recall Maplin also made a kit which could be used with the Amstrad CPC (which is what I had). Great to see all this. The Archimedes was fantastic for anyone interested in how computers worked and could be used - and the Acorn !Draw software has had a lasting impact on me. I designed PCBs by hand with that - and the trick was to use a laser printer then drench the printout in WD40 to make it transparent enough to expose the board in the lightbox...
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
You never discovered tracing paper then..!
@m4d3ng2 жыл бұрын
It was on an Archimedes that I first saw computer based video capture being done. My school had a video camera plugged into the back of one. I remember being blown away wondering how on earth it worked
@nickk61092 жыл бұрын
Anyone remember the jump vectors that RiscOS used everywhere (both low memory addresses for the ARM and the "modules" that would be embedded in the podules)? I ended up using that idea for a fast SMS router for fast/flexible decoding that back in the 2000s - all the Teen Idol voting traffic in the US went through those tables :D (and most of the SMS traffic world wide). I learn that on the Acorn Archimedes!
@AureliusR2 жыл бұрын
Argh, I really wish I had been an adult during this time. I was a kid, and we didn't get our first computer until 1998 or so, if I remember correctly? So I was born like a decade too late to really enjoy all this stuff. Mike, your bona fides are simply off the chart. The breadth and quality of the stuff you've done over your lifetime is seriously astounding. I genuinely hope you write a memoir at some point, even if it's fairly brief. I do writing professionally and would be happy to help out with editing, proofreading, etc. for free.
@Zadster2 жыл бұрын
I must have seen you at some of the exhibitions I went to around this time, PCW, Breadboard etc. No educational / Acorn ones though. After School, uni for me was mostly Sun machines and sometimes PCs. I'm so glad the ARM found the success that it has, such an elegant well engineered thing. I find it frustrating that the computer world has moved on so much that we can't make stuff like this any more. I mean, we can in theory, whacking on a Rasp Pi Zero and designing a whizbang-doodah-whatever with amazing PCB from JLC or whoever, but chances are that it already exists on Aliexpress and costs 75p including shipping!
@Palmit_2 жыл бұрын
Mike. Really interesting stuff. Youv'e nade Super rare video. That era's electronics not only physically present and in existence, but full description and history by the designer themselves. Thanks for creating and sharing this. I shall do what i can to try to locate the missing 'podule'. cheers man. keep safe and healthy. Rob
@arladds2 жыл бұрын
I had one of your teletext cards! Sadly it was given to me after analogue TV was switched off so I was never able to use it properly, but from memory I got some corrupted data from old VHS tapes. I gave it to a chap setting up a computing history museum in the end.
@vincei42522 жыл бұрын
I used to drool over the Archimedes but I already had an Amiga. One of the highlights way back then was going to Watford by train and buying chips and parts. Years later and thousands of miles away I still have many of the chips I bought back then, 68008, Eproms, TTL chips, Pals, etc. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
@rayroulstone35652 жыл бұрын
Another great video Mike. Nice to hear from the original desiger of this stuff and on you own time also. I still have most of my Acorn machines includeing my A440 with the 20MB St506 HDD. The first time I knew you were involved in Watford Electronics was the print buffer video for the BBC. We used one of these in school and it was such a time saver.
@proudsnowtiger2 жыл бұрын
God! Sendz! Haven't thought of them in so many decades. Good place for cheap, obscure, 'oooh I bet I could do something with that' purchases.
@Graham_Wideman2 жыл бұрын
Quite apart from the clever innovations and novel products, I'm amazed at Mike's output during that time period. Part way through the video I was already thinking OK, nice, Mike must have been working with someone else doing the 4-layer board design with professional PCB software (which I remember was $$$$$ at the time), when Mike casually drops in that he did the board design oh by the way with the software he wrote. !!!!! All on the side while having a full-time job! Is "Mike" actually an amalgam of several clones?
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
Luckily, at my full-time job, nobody noticed I was doing this stuff half the time at work..!
@Tinker0012 жыл бұрын
I've always thought Mike tended to sound tired in his videos. Now I know it's because he's basically worn out. :P
@TheStevenWhiting2 жыл бұрын
Multiplicity
@fredfred23632 жыл бұрын
Mike, you were also working for a marconi division??? Lots of time for outside projects and with the very best test gear...
@unlokia2 жыл бұрын
The sheer genius. Wow you’re a dark horse.
@hoofie20022 жыл бұрын
Top marks for the Rowan Atkinson translator joke!
@xjet2 жыл бұрын
Ah, happy days. I was doing some very similar stuff back in the late 1970s. It was so much easier to knock up hardware and software back then but the market was pretty small.
@SeanBZA2 жыл бұрын
I also bought from Sendz, using a bank cheque that was posted to them. Issuing bank for London was actually Barclays Bank London, even though I was using my local bank, which had an account with them for this. First few cheques were hand written, stamped by the issuing bank for validity, but the last few were machine printed, and actually a really nice looking bearer instrument, more because they normally were used for massive money transfers. I was getting ones for a few pounds only.
@TheElz82 жыл бұрын
Mike, thanks for sharing you experience and knowledge!
@Richardincancale2 жыл бұрын
27:30 - I do recall that. In the pre-standard packet switched network that linked Strathclyde, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities some student in Edinburgh put up a Teletext server you could call up from your async terminal. It mapped the graphics characters as best as it could so you could vaguely see the block graphics as well as the text on your terminal! Thanks Mike!
@ThePlodger2 жыл бұрын
Back in those days I was also around the edges of this world. Some of my friends designed most of the Archimedes addons that were sold through HCCS. I have good memories from those years. I remember helping debug an archie SCSI interface that had some issues with its PAL… :)
@90SecondsofAviation2 жыл бұрын
Mike... please man ! make more videos !!
@cowasakiElectronics2 жыл бұрын
This video really took me back.....I was the technical services manager of Orion Computers and a component level Archimedes service engineer. I designed a multi podule interface and memory expansions for the A3000 but mainly dealt with repairs and complicated customers. I must have sold a good few of your boards :-). We did an IDE podule but it was VERY dependant on drives and worked with some and not with others. We also had a TV output convertor which was used with the A3000 to hook it up to TV sets that didn't have scart or video in. Out of absolutely everything the only one thing I still have is one of the Orion IDE boards and I didn't even design that. It was designed by a lad called Dave who did quite a bit of Acorn design work although I can't remember his surname.
@jtveg2 жыл бұрын
Quite fascinating work and design. Thanks for sharing.
@jimsmind38942 жыл бұрын
Brings back so many memories for me, had a BBC Micro with a teletext adapter at home and Archimedes with EchoNet in school. (Early 90's 😊)
@koenlefever2 жыл бұрын
9:35 The A305 came with 512k RAM soldered on the board, and empty sockets for another 512k. In practice, the machine was not usable with only half a meg, so after a couple of weeks I filled up the empty sockets, but even with 1024k memory remained tight. Later, I had the onboard RAM and the original sockets removed and replaced by new sockets with 4 megs on the main board, which was plenty at the time.
@shanesrandoms2 жыл бұрын
Awesome. Thanks for sharing your knowledge on the development of these. Never owned an acorn computer back then but always find the old hardware interesting 😀👍
@avacreativemedia2 жыл бұрын
21:17 "i don't know the exact details...." wow there's enough detail in this video to blow the pants off most today. You Know your stuff, and still do. Way above most pal, excellent work to be proud of. :-)
@faumnamara51812 жыл бұрын
I had that digitiser will check the loft
@cmjones012 жыл бұрын
Regarding the teletext board, the original Acorn "cheese wedge" teletext adapter takes a similar approach to yours: it just does the data slicing and has some minimal discrete logic to capture the packets, which the Beeb then reads immediately down the 1MHz bus. It can't store more than one line of data, so the Beeb has to be running in real-time. The later Morley and Acorn Advanced Teletext systems use the SAA5243 chip which downloads whole pages in to its own RAM, which is then read at leisure by the Beeb over the I2C bus.
@whippoorwill1124 Жыл бұрын
Harwin pins in that first prototype from the look of it. I spent too much of the mid-'80s working for a couple of cheapskates, who paid me a pittance to solder hundreds of them into production boards because they were too miserly to pay for through-hole-plated vias.
@stuart.swales2 жыл бұрын
Solid designs from Mike!
@GeorgeStyles2 жыл бұрын
Love this video. Brings back all kinds of good Archie memories
@groovejet332 жыл бұрын
havnt seen mike for ages, good to catch up. 1 clever man. Mind you, i never understood a bloody thing, but hey, i still can appreciate it
@MrRussor4 ай бұрын
I believe we had one of your video digitisers on our A440/1 back in the early nineties! My dad used to take it to school fetes with his massive 80s camcorder. For 10p he'd take your picture and print out a western-style "wanted: dead or alive" poster on our Epson dot matrix printer. This is long before the days of consumer digital cameras, obviously, so it proved quite popular. Thought you might like to hear a story of how it was used by the home consumer. If you're still after one then I can dig around my parents' loft next time I'm back, assuming my brother hasn't nicked it.
@MrRussor4 ай бұрын
Actually it was probably the late eighties. Say 89-92 or so. Either way it got a lot of attention at the time.
@MrRussor4 ай бұрын
Also, I've been subbed to you for years and only just discovered we probably had a fair bit of stuff you personally designed on our Arc. We might have had your SCSI card too. Small world!
@stevec00ps2 жыл бұрын
Ah Sendz was great - if you ever needed a replacement remote control for anything, they would have it!
@jhallenworld2 жыл бұрын
I also made video capture cards, and I remember using a 74S124 to generate the recovered pixel clock just as you say- feed the sync into the enable pin. It worked great. I got that trick from a company that made character generators for the broadcast industry, they used it for generating video genlocked to some other source.
@CTCTraining12 жыл бұрын
Fascinating history lesson... the Archimedes was one machine to which had little exposure. I remember it appearing in the news occasionally but by the time it was current ai would have been using the equipment which work supplied (Fujitsu C/CPM luggables I suspect). Fingers crossed someone unearths a board or two to let you restock 😀👍
@eliotmansfield2 жыл бұрын
Love these ‘from the archives’ videos
@GadgetUK1642 жыл бұрын
Awesome! =D Had no idea you did so much cool stuff with Acorns!
@sammy611872 жыл бұрын
Awesome to hear from the creator of them very nice video
@SionynJones2 жыл бұрын
Great video mike very interesting history lesson.
@ligius32 жыл бұрын
Just one word: awesome!
@mfx12 жыл бұрын
I remember designing PCB's using XCad on the Amiga, would have been around the same time, I had a plotter I got cheap from a kitchen design place that closed down and spent a fortune on specialist latex ink plotter drafting pens and polyester film, I made my own prototypes and for high res stuff used a local printer to do reductions onto film, bizarrely a local small hardware/garden shop also had a full PCD production line in the basement, I got friendly with them and he'd run my boards through cheap with other larger orders.
@nickk61092 жыл бұрын
LDMFD R13!,{r0-r12,pc} This brings back memories. at home we had an acorn electron then a A310. I remember updating the memory to 4MB with a plugin board - the MEMC1A needed to transferred into the draught board. Also the ARM2 was upgraded with an ARM3. I wrote an app to poke the MEMC1A to increase the speed of the machine too. One module slot was taken up by a Oak SCSI controller + HD. Later at uni I upgraded to a RISCPC with ARM610, ARM710 and then StrongARM. At that point it had an IDE controller in IIRC. I had the RISCPC 486 daughter card too to run PC based development tools for university. I was looking at Hydra to allow multiple StrongARMs to be run in parallel but moved away from the scene. I shared my university house with "Berty" Tom Cooper and in the time I wrote an ultra fast screen plotter for Wavelength over summer, Tom had written a playable game. In the same house was Rob that wrote a 3D editor for a magazine, I ended up rewriting his BASIC in ARM + FP assembler for 13x speed increase :)
@speedsterh2 жыл бұрын
Great story, thanks ! Bought Wavelength, spend quite a few hours on this great game
@nickk61092 жыл бұрын
@@speedsterh I remember designing that in a Uni lecture, with the lightning etc. IIRC sat with Tom at Moocow's house (I can't remember his real name) and playing the pre-release. Another one of the students did the great music. Tom wrote DarkWood in his final year at uni (well finished it) on his A3020 (I can't remember the precise model), I test it out on the RiscPC.
@speedsterh2 жыл бұрын
@@nickk6109 The music (great, could have fit an amiga game) was from Exel. I don't remember him as a musician for the demo scene, though.
@factorylad50712 жыл бұрын
The Acorns are fairly hopeless on games the BBC micro was better more suited to serious applications imho.
@nickk61092 жыл бұрын
@@factorylad5071 At the time the direct memory access and fast RISC chip wasn't too bad - it could have done with more registers for faster memory transfers but that's the price you get for having 16 registers addressable in each 32bit conditionally executable opcode. The 6502 was more an embedded controller and wasn't developed specifically for PCs. If you look at pole position back in the day, the arcade games had 3 CPUs and custom chips. The BBC and Archimedes suffered that their chipset couldn't move memory in a block or really play sound without help from the CPU.
@IanSlothieRolfe2 жыл бұрын
In the early 2000's I bought a load of Archimedes stuff, there was a lot of it on eBay (Probably because schools were selling it off at that time?) and I was looking for something more interesting than PCs to play with. I got one machine working, the second refused to boot. They came with loads of cards and floppy drives though, and I spent a good while trying them out, seeing which bits fitted. I think some of it was for other machines than the 2 I had. Most of the stuff got sold on eBay a few years later where there seemed to be an enthusiastic market for it. My one working machine worked as a file server for me for quite a while until someone offered me more cash for it than I could resist! They were nice machines, although I never really got deeply into them from a software point of view, you could tell they were much better engineered and more like the minicomputers I used at work than PCs.
@ivandelgadov.68062 жыл бұрын
I am 18 years old and I am studying electronics, I just have one question for you, what do I have to do to be as cool as you?
@rkan22 жыл бұрын
I think Mike has freelanced for most of his career, so just start designing stuff for problems ;) I can give you some ideas to boot if you are interested ;)
@DanielFSmith2 жыл бұрын
I had an early Oak SCSI card, and it worked great with its 45MB Seagate drive. However, when I upgraded to a 200MB Maxtor, it would give me ~1b error every 1MB read. Oak couldn't find a fault with it, so I sold it and splashed out on the Acorn SCSI card, which fixed the problem. But I can't complain, since the investigations I had to do to convince myself there even was a problem set my career in motion! (If you've never suffered occasional data corruption, it's really quite insidious.)
@td4dotnet2 жыл бұрын
I have several Acorn RISC pcs I will see what's inside... Thanks for the video Mike great stuff as usual!
@jamesw55842 жыл бұрын
I remember we had teletext in our school dinner hall and it was powered by the Tele-Card, I thought it was a pretty cool system
@dorsetengineering2 жыл бұрын
Brilliant stuff Mike....
@IanScottJohnston2 жыл бұрын
Back in the day I only added the holes for the 64-way edge connector screws (M2.5) if I remembered also....:) Seriously, great to see a review of these old cards......please keep this sort of stuff coming. PS. I remember Watford Electronics well, two page spread in electronics magazines. My goto place for components back in the day.
@jaycee19802 жыл бұрын
I've come across a few instances of your work for Watford at The Centre for Computing History already :)
@JonWhitton2 жыл бұрын
Thanks for sharing
@theelmonk2 жыл бұрын
The teletext adapter I had was built for the beeb and used only I2C - it also worked on the Arch, which had I2C on the backplane. Very slow compared with Mike's board.
@AdityaMehendale2 жыл бұрын
Am I the only one drooling over the Ideal-Tek SMD Tweezers? ^^
@markboyle99412 жыл бұрын
Econet was seriously slow. It could take several seconds for me to send a message to my mate across the classroom asking about "Inflatable Ingrid", and for him to call me a smeghead back... Those were the days!
@SproutyPottedPlant2 жыл бұрын
Amazing! All my Acorns had boring network podules 😟
@Darzzr2 жыл бұрын
Nice coincidence, I was just going through some old Acorn Users today! In fact I have January 1988's issue open right now!
@RocketCityTech2 жыл бұрын
Love this video about electric stuff, from mike 👍
@pradolover2 жыл бұрын
I remember Sendz advertising in Television magazine, loved reading all those ads as a kid.
@TheChloeRed2 жыл бұрын
The A540 didn't stop at 8meg, it could have 16 - 4meg + MEMC1A on board, and 3 expansion cards with 4meg + MEMC1a on board.. if you had the money. IIRC, adding the 3 cards to get to the max memory cost almost as much as the base A540!
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
I has a vague recollection that there was more than 1 memory slot but wasn't sure
@stuart.swales2 жыл бұрын
@@mikeselectricstuff Yes, but the A540 was (annoyingly) a long way out... You were a bit bemused as to the early date on the A480 memory card... We'd been asked to help get the M4 prototype board booting (which was to develop into the A680) so put support for a second MEMC into a deviant Arthur build. That worked OK. I think as we got wind that the A680 was going to be produced, we dropped that code back into RISC OS 2, possibly without informing manglement (who wanted a clear distinction between their professional Unix systems and the lower-end products), so that we'd be able to surprise folk by having it running on that too. The A480 card would have taken advantage of that I surmise. We didn't know at the time I left Acorn (Dec 1988) of any plans to do the quad MEMC systems, so if you look at the RISC OS 2.01 memory map from the A540, it has two separate areas for the CAM soft copies, one for each MEMC pair.
@stuart.swales2 жыл бұрын
I should see if my A540 still works. Last powered on about ten years ago. Probably the battery will have killed it.
@theelmonk2 жыл бұрын
The multiple MEMCs had to be speed-selected to match propagation delay : in the 540 it was further adjusted by changing Vcc of a buffer. Did the add-on boards do this too ?
@station2402 жыл бұрын
I've actually got one of the Oak 16 bit Solutions SCSI Interface boards, same issue 2 you have. Never done anything with it, as that requires getting the Archimedes working first (it doesn't like me).
@williefleete2 жыл бұрын
Interesting stuff
@Petertronic2 жыл бұрын
I wonder how much it cost to prototype 4 layer boards back then? Pretty expensive I imagine!
@Fifury1612 жыл бұрын
I guess now is as good a time as any to brag about the hardware interface I created for the Acorn pocket book - it had problems connecting to the serial interface of more modern Macs, so I built a small serial adapter to allow the serial to talk to the Mac. A few schools got the use out of their pocket books and I got a visit from someone from Acorn who offered me a job. I regret to this day that I declined!
@Bianchi772 жыл бұрын
Cool video, keep it up, thanks :)
@electronash2 жыл бұрын
Wow, I remember reading about some of these cards in Acorn User in the early 90s. I got an Archie A3000 around 1992, and it was my main machine for quite a long time. I only have about four disks left now, and donated my A3020 recently. I remember Dad buying me the RiscOS 3.1 ROMs, installing them, and thinking "This is a future!". lol I first saw a digitizer card used on the BBC Master at school in the late 80s. It was very low resolution, ofc, and B&W capture. The guy demonstrating it applied different colour palettes to the captured image. I think the printer was only a 9-pin dot matrix (B&W), but it was still impressive to see video capture back then.
@electronash2 жыл бұрын
And yep, I do recall the BBC Micro digitizer being very slow. You had to sit perfectly still in front of the camera. The Sega Mega Drive / Genesis uses similar DRAMs with the internal shift reg. And I think VDP1 on the Sega Saturn, which have a "SAM" output pin for shifting out 4-bits of pixel data per chip.
@electronash2 жыл бұрын
23:00 - Haven't seen an AUI connector in quite a few years. I forgot they were a thing. By the 90s, I very rarely saw the modules that used to plug into that port, as most stuff had the 10base2 BNC on by then.
@electronash2 жыл бұрын
27:06 - I recall we had a system for the Amstrad CPC with a photosensor that stuck onto the corner of the TV. There were a few broadcasts back then, which sent computer programs via TV, and also a few that were broadcast directly via the radio. I think the TV version must have had it's own "bootstrap" disk or BASIC program to load in first, so it could cope with the blanking periods etc. I'd be interested to track down that system again, as I'm fairly sure I'm not imagining it. lol We had a modem for the CPC 6128, and it was used it to book the flight for my first ever holiday abroad (Mallorca, around 1988). Strange to think how booking stuff online is taken so much for granted now.
@CalculusDogbertus2 жыл бұрын
A bit off topic, but I remember seeing a video for a buffer built for a high-speed camera. The board was missing and had to be designed and built from scratch. The image sensor was monochrome. Was that one of your projects?
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
yes, but not a video : electricstuff.co.uk/ektapro.html
@grahamparks88852 жыл бұрын
Did you ever do a colour capture board? At school we had one of those Canon analog Still Video Cameras which could be "downloaded" by hooking it up to an Archimedes with a video capture card, and it was definitely colour. (Of course no one was ever allowed to use it because it was too precious)
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
No, ISTR there were some colour digitisers that came later from other companies.
@ZaphodHarkonnen2 жыл бұрын
Wait, was that Rowan Atkinson at 1:24 saying podule? 🤣
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
Yes, I don't recall the timing, but it's possible that it was the origin of the name
@cipndale2 жыл бұрын
Nope that is Zak.
@InXLsisDeo Жыл бұрын
The Archimedes was a genius machine. It's a pity it didn't really take off.
@dcallan8122 жыл бұрын
very interesting. 2x👍
@MostlyPennyCat2 жыл бұрын
My A3000 had an expansion card but I don't think it was a podule. It was a midi and audio sampler card and it used the Econet socket for it's I/O.
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
no, the 3000 just had a strip of 0.1" sockets with a subset of the podule connector, only 8 bits wide
@MostlyPennyCat2 жыл бұрын
@@mikeselectricstuff Was that for the mini podule slot? There was a slot on the back for expansion card but I never saw it used. Mine used the Econet socket so I assume it used the Econet upgrade slot. It came with a breakout pigtail for audio in, MIDI in and MIDI out. Sadly it was pre-general midi and the something in the sampler started adding a constant glitchy noise to the recordings.
@SproutyPottedPlant2 жыл бұрын
Is that like the A3020? In that I was thinking a full size podule was in there but opened it up and was wrong! It was a short board with a few pins!
@dglcomputers14982 жыл бұрын
AFAIK A3000 system had a podule connector on the back which was later dropped for the A3010/3020, not quite sure how you would use it as even if there was an external case it would be a bit of a kludge. Naturally I grew up with Archimedes machines and even at secondary school they had only got their first windows machines two years before I was there (2000) and my junior school was the same. Managed to acquire a few A30x0 and A7000 machines but sadly they are now all long gone, even got given a copy of Fastrax PCB software. The later machines (A7000/RISC PC) had a special connector for a network card as well as the podule(s), though one design flaw was that on the A7000 you could not have a podule and an internal CD-ROM as the case is not deep enough!
@richardp31592 жыл бұрын
@@dglcomputers1498 A mate of mine had a video capture card podule that he used with the A3000 - the card was installed in a metal box and then plugged into the back of the machine - I think there was a slot under the back of the machine that a metal tab went into to stop side to side movement.
@wskinnyodden2 жыл бұрын
I may be wrong, but didn't OAK also made VGA cards for PC's? If it did I installed many of those back in the day when assembling PC's (mostly for business applications) While watching this video I got the impression you could be THE man to help me bring an interesting idea to life based on a Retro architecture. The idea starts by re-implementing that system with new hardware producing a fully compatible system. And I do mean 100% compatible. Though, due to the way I have in mind to achieve this re-implementation the new system will also be able to "morph" into something much much more powerful. If this short description tingles your curiosity please do get in touch!
@oldguy90512 жыл бұрын
The VGA cards you mean were made by "Oak Technology, Inc.", a US company based in the Silicon Valley, whereas this stuff here is from "Oak Solutions" which seems to be a British company.
@John_Ridley2 жыл бұрын
Is...that Rowan Atkinson at 1:23?
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
Yes. Might be the origin of "Podule"
@MarkTillotson2 жыл бұрын
Its almost certainly from a Not the Nine o'Clock News sketch.
@Tadesan2 жыл бұрын
You are so lucky. I wish I were worth something. Hugs
@Fifury1612 жыл бұрын
I still have a factory sealed A3000 and a classroom worth of BBCs!
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
better check the state of the battery in that A3000 - lots of reports of PCB damage caused by leakage
@Fifury1612 жыл бұрын
@@mikeselectricstuff Good call! I must get around to checking all my kit!
@rasz2 жыл бұрын
@23:00 64KB of SRAM on that network card, and the same size on original Acorn Lance Ethernet card :o while PC Ethernet cards in similar timeframe shipped with 8 (3com 509B) to 16KB (NE2000) buffers. Mike why not release same products (video grabber, TV tuner with teletext) for PC platform on ISA bus? Surely the market was at least 10x if not 100x bigger in early nineties.
@SeanBZA2 жыл бұрын
I would guess because Mike is in the UK, and the Acorn and BBC were a massive market at the time, as they sold a lot to the educational market.
@dglcomputers14982 жыл бұрын
@@SeanBZA Plus the ARM processor, at least in the beginning, was a fair bit more powerful that the Intel processors in PC's and as such were more suited to these kinds of applications.
@jchelm19792 жыл бұрын
The company in Southend that sold the end of line surplus components. Sendz components by any chance?
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
yes
@jchelm19792 жыл бұрын
@@mikeselectricstuff I knew it 👍🏼
@DMStern2 жыл бұрын
I'd love to see a video on the design software you wrote, if you have them running on an emulator.
@factorylad50712 жыл бұрын
Why use an emulator when you could run it native on an r-pi ?
@DMStern2 жыл бұрын
@@factorylad5071 Easier video capture, for one.
@CrazyLogic2 жыл бұрын
@@DMStern kzbin.info/www/bejne/opKQpHqmidWerqc has an overview i believe
@DMStern2 жыл бұрын
@@CrazyLogic Thanks!
@Soapy5552 жыл бұрын
You must have been a teenager when you designed these?
@fargogemini6942 жыл бұрын
System delta on a BBC B
@Lion_McLionhead2 жыл бұрын
Boards like those were a fortune, in the day. A network card was $100. How quickly the job of designing boards went to China.
@ToTheGAMES2 жыл бұрын
The designing? Probably not. Construction/manufacturing on the other hand...
@factorylad50712 жыл бұрын
Make your own double sided by creating new layers in RiscOs !Draw files and use photographic high resolution line film costs much less than $100.
@jinxterx2 жыл бұрын
Whatever happened to Watford Electronics?
@TheBananaPlug2 жыл бұрын
Went tits up around 2007
@mikeselectricstuff2 жыл бұрын
They moved to Luton, got more into PC stuff - I lost touch with them after that, but ISTR reading it didn't end well.
@sparqqling2 жыл бұрын
The PC world took over indeed, happy to see that ARM in de end will win this race. Th days for x86 are over, see the M1.
@donpalmera2 жыл бұрын
As soon as Nvidia finish buying arm arm as you know it will be dead. Apple will evolve their arm sub varient with undocumented and incompatible extensions.