Tech archeology: Exploring mysterious computer parts

Please see pinned comment for updates! Who doesn't love a good rummage through a box of random PC parts? In today's video I do just that -- I dig into this filled box of computer parts looking for interesting and unknown cards. Part 2 will be next week when I dig seeing if I can get any of the cards working.
Part 1: This part!
Part 2: Coming soon
-- Info
Creative Labs CT2770 Sound Blaster 16 Value
(With CT1471 chip there does have real OPL3 sound, allegedly)
Creative Labs CT4500 Sound Blaster AWE64 Value PNP
Creative Labs CT3620 Sound Blaster 32
Creative Labs CT4520 Sound Blaster AWE64 Value PNP
Creative Labs CT2940 Sound Blaster 16 PNP
MQX-16 Music Quest Inc.
Scan Cap by Conversion Technology Copyright 1991
BlackFoot by Arroyo Technologies for the Macintosh II NuBus
Eclipse II Portacom Technologies VGA card with P86C911 Chip
-- Links
Freetech/Flexus 486F55 Motherboard
theretroweb.com/motherboards/...
Keithley DDA-08/16
download.tek.com/manual/78340...
Dumped ROMs for TMS Vectrix EX1280 video card:
archive.org/details/vectrix-e...
Dump ROM from BlackFoot card:
archive.org/details/27-c-256-...
S100 bus RAM card TDL Z16:
www.s100computers.com/Hardware...
Heath EGA 150-307-3 Rev 1.33 and P/N 150-307-2 Rev 1.32
www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?...
Apple Talk TOPS card:
archive.retro.co.za/mirrors/68...
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Adrian's Digital Basement ][ (Second Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement2
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Links
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
Commodore Computer Club / Vancouver, WA - Portland, OR - PDX Commodore Users Group
www.commodorecomputerclub.com/
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Patrons are already digging up cool info about some of this stuff! I'll pin this comment: Patron stynx found this about that TMS video card: bitsavers.org/pdf/vectrix/isa/ex1280/ But then I did some more Googling and it turned out I already have one of these cards!! Check out SMMC episode #7: kzbin.info/www/bejne/m33bl2itgN93gK8 Nick Griebel found that a Computer chronicles episode makes a reference to TOP technology, and kind of describes how you can transfer IBM files to an Apple via Appletalk and TOPS. kzbin.info/www/bejne/oqqrnmurlKaFaZI Patron stynx found this about the Orchid Turbo Graphics card: "Orchid Technology. The Turbo Graphics Controller (TGC), which is functionally compatible with the IBM Professional Graphics Controller, runs 4 to 25 times faster than IBM’s product. The TGC offers 640-by-480 pixel display resolution and can run on a less expensive display than IBM’s. It writes directly to screen memory (bit-map), and has RAM designed specially for video applications. Approximately $2,000." Fond in PC_Tech_Journal_vol03_n08 page 30 Also from Patron stynx: Arroyo Technologies "Blackfoot JPEG": Macworld May 1992 page 211. Claims to allow >1MB/s JPEG (de-)compression.

[@Troppa17]

😅 I could've sworn I've seen that Vectrix EX1280 before. Funny i couldn't remember it was on your second channel as well... Still not sure what happend to rest of Vectrix. It seems Vectrix became part of Everex around 1991. At least they took over the patent for the Vectrix name in April of 1991. Everex itself was purchased by Formosa Plastics Group after filling for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January of 1993. Vectrix filled for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December of 1993. So the rest of Vectrix might be swallowed up by Formosa as well but I couldn't find any evidence for that.

[@scottgfx]

I watched this video awhile back, It's a background on all of the Vectrix products. kzbin.info/www/bejne/jGimmKpobdGUa9k At around 8:15 is an introduction of their new PC hardware called "PEPE". You may have one!

[@gregmarshall8523]

A large number of the boards in your collection came from me. I donated them to "Free Geek" in Portland in late 2022. Some are simply products I used, but others are ones I designed for other companies, or manufactured and sold myself. Most are rather special purpose, such as "Scan Cap", which was used to capture video from a variety of medical imaging systems. "BlackFoot" is an early JPEG processor. It quickly became obsolete as processors became fast enough to process JPEG-compressed video in real time (they couldn't when this was developed). They were sold primarily in Japan. I did a lot of video processors and video capture boards for various companies.

[@jonathan_herr]

Pin this comment @adrian

[@landonbrown5295]

Between the VGA, name, and ADC on board, I'd already pinned the Scan Cap as a VGA capture card. Good to know I was on the right track!

[@ArturHeise]

Logitech "Juliette 2" card is an interface for handheld scanner - ScanMan to be precise.

[@freeculture]

Ugh i remember that one... no wonder that looked familiar...

[@root42]

Yup, immediately I thought "handheld scanner" when I saw the card.

[@paincreatesfame]

Man these “random crap in a box haul” videos are so good, they’re the perfect background for when I’m working on my frustrating discrete structures homework. Much love from a local!

[@jpvlsmv2023]

I suspect someone was acting as a contract assembler in the early 90s. Back before pick & place was common, companies could find hobbyists who could wield a soldering iron.

[@rallyscoot]

For the periscope card, maybe you can just unleash the top part of the blue connector.. Shorten the ribbon cable, and than attach it back on the connector.. Then the cut is gone.

[@KallePihlajasaari]

Great idea, or get a new connector or solder header.

[@iandobson8846]

I said that same thing out loud when I was watching.

[@microknigh7]

@1:01:04 looks like the bent up pins are on a sacrificial socket. So you might be able to just remove the bent up socket and replace it. If you wanted too. We used all sorts of In Circuit Emulation tools back in the day. Those very heavy and stiff screened ribbons were the bane of my life LOL.

[@bruwin]

The bottom of that Periscope card had two sockets on it. That bent up one was a sacrificial socket to keep the real one from getting its pins bent

[@jayfowler4747]

Was just about to say the exact same thing... but you beat me too it..

[@mrnmrn1]

It probably wasn't intended as a 'sacrificial' socket, it might be needed for some motherboards as a spacer, so the card can avoid hitting taller components on the motherboard. I wonder if you can buc sockets like this today, but definitely nice thing to have an unharmed one underneath, so as least it doesn't need to be desoldered.

[@fishx0ff]

That Keithley card brought back memories. The information you found on it only mentioned Windows drivers for it. Back in 2001/2002, I worked with what must have been a somewhat later Keithley A/D and D/A data acquisition card that also only had official Windows drivers. It could sample analog signals as well as generate them with fairly high resolution on multiple channels. So then for my college computer engineering senior project I requested the detailed hardware register specs for this card from Keithley and created a Linux device driver for it. Then I wrote a very simple oscilloscope/signal generator application to demonstrate my driver worked for my final grade.

[@rawr51919]

does that driver still exist today? that would be cool to see nowadays

[@v12alpine]

That's cool they sent you the info. Companies now adays don't work the same way.

[@schweizerbananen]

@@v12alpine It is only a question how you ask and how you present them your own project. Sometimes the company even wants to be informed after you succeded with your project. (Only an e-mail with gimme the datasheet, that just drops into the trascan)

[@fishx0ff]

Sadly I lost my archive of college stuff in a move a few years ago. :( @@rawr51919

[@fishx0ff]

@@schweizerbananen Yeah I think because it was a school project and I was a student, they were willing to help out. I recall that I still had to sign an NDA to get that register-level document though.

[@____________________________.x]

33:16 Scan-Cap is going to be a scan line capture card, and the TDA8703 is an 8-bit 40Mhz analog-to-digital converter for video applications

[@MajenkoTechnologies]

Oh wow. Turtle beach. I remember those. The soundcards we all lusted after. I only ever installed one in all my time as a systems builder back in the day and that was for some wannabe music producer. Phenomenal cards. I'm jealous.

[@rednight2476]

The weird video card looks like one of those cards to drive high res fixed scan monitors. They where expensive, weird, and small batch produced. They where popular for CAD users, which is about the only thing that every really supported them.

[@blinkinglightsandsmokingcaps]

There were also monochrome high-res adaptors, which were meant for DTP. A former workplace had a few back in the early 1990s.

[@PeterSarazin]

The MQX-16 is a Roland MPU-401 interface compatible card. I have a MQX-16 and an MT-32 with manuals, etc.. I bought it the early 1990's for Sierra Adventure Games. Games like Hero's Quest. Space Quest, and Kings Quest sounded amazing with the MT-32. Also had an early SoundBlaster with the audio from both connected to an external mixer connected to a stereo amplifier driving a pair of Bose 301 speakers.

[@firstsurname9893]

What are the RCA connectors on the card used for?

[@aussieleighsmith]

@@firstsurname9893 If I remember correctly, probably frequency shift keyed (FSK) tape sync analogue signals (in and out) to be used with a multitrack tape machine for syncronizing MIDI sequencers with tape machines. If I remember correctly, the original Roland MPU-401 (which I owned many years ago, c. 1986) had these (but as 1/4" TS jacks, not RCA connectors). The MPU-401 predated the use of SMPTE code within the MIDI standard (MTS), so there was really only a timing clock generated to be written to a tape track, not full timing information in H:M:S:F, so you would need to rewind the tape prior to the beginning of the sync code audio, and then the sequencer would pick up start, clock and stop signals. But you couldn't fast forward through the tape and pick up the SMPTE location to allow the software sequencer to chase the tape. Since the MQX-16 was a modernization of the MPU-401, chances are it did support SMPTE code. The third RCA connector, if it matches the MPU-401, would be a metronome signal, that could be amplified and played to the musicians as they are recording and playing a track. Remember this was before sound cards were in widespread production and use, not even in professional studios, where during the 80's, expensive digital pro-audio devices were still in use, rather than personal computers.

[@firstsurname9893]

@@aussieleighsmith Ah that makes sense. I guessed they were for external sync but couldn't figure out how the signalling would've worked. Thank you for taking the time to provide such a thorough explanation, I really appreciate it.

[@PeterSarazin]

@adriansdigitalbasement, @firstsurname9893, @aussieleighsmith UPDATE: I found my original Music Quest MQX-16 in original packaging with the manual, 5¼ driver diskette, and the breakout dongle for the midi ports. I am super excited as I am working on building a couple of different vintage gaming machines from different era's. I will install this in a 386 or maybe 486 system and pair it with my Roland MT-32 sound module, and my original 8-bit ISA SoundBlaster 1.0 sound card. I would happy to scan in the manual and send any of you the .pdf if that would be helpful, and also could copy the driver disk. Please let me know. @adriansdigitalbasement I love your channel and just got my Adrian's Digital Basement t-shirt in the mail last week. 😄

[@sarcomakaposi2054]

Oh my God, you just unearthed my youth years as a computer ethusiast/nerd. Jesus christ man, i remember working with almost everything you had in that box, i kid you not. i'm glad im not the only one cherishing these "antiques", thanks for refreshing old memories and i mean that metaphorically ok that was super nerd of me to say lol

[@markshade8398]

Pretty much all of the Turtle Beach sound cards were highe end. They certainly were high priced and usually only bought by those who wanted the best available. I was in sales during their time and the Gravis line was the main competition for TB.

[@ricardog2165]

I have the Riviera card, which wasn't expensive.

[@t.w.3]

That TB Tahiti card was used in meeting rooms and small aulas in the mid 90's. Great card, with echo cancelling features (microphones) and good support for remote programming using software on the MIDI-port.

[@martinb5398]

TB were higher-end cards and a favorite for musicians with DAWS b/c high end sound, and later onboard synths.

[@claudiuoctavian1972]

As soon as you mentioned Clint, you started saying "whatnot" a lot. I love it !

[@SimonEllwood]

The first TI based card looks similar to the Hercules Graphics Station Card that has the TI chip as an Autocad 9/10 display list based accelerator. I used one of those in the early 90s to design the mechanical elements for UK electrical accessories. I think some of the products are still on sale today ;)

[@sryx]

I remember going through boxes like this at Weird Stuff Warehouse in San Mateo. It was so much fun but I wonder how many interesting things I skipped over because I didn't recognize it.

[@itwasrightthere]

I miss Weird Stuff.

[@Peter_S_]

I can't tell you how many vintage surplus Items I didn't pick up that haunt my memories now. J&H Outlet off Holly Street in San Carlos was an amazing place; the Eimac tube factory used to be across the street and down the block a little. The '89 earthquake was the end of that store.

[@DevilishDesign]

There is a MacWorld snippet on Google books that hints at the Blackfoot Nubus card being a JPEG accelerator of some kind.

[@gbowne1]

I saw this too. Interesting. Might be worth a build and/or test

[@nickwallette6201]

Whew, that was a product with a limited window of usefulness. Late enough that people had large, true-color images that needed to be opened. Early enough that CPUs took too long to do it.

[@PsRohrbaugh]

The ISA DAC card seems like the type of thing that might sit on ebay for 2 years, only for some factory to buy it off you for $1000 because they need it to get propriety and ancient factory equipment fixed.

[@Skracken]

Had an old copper bus-bar bending machine at work, controlled by a DOS PC. It definetly had some special I/O cards in it. We scrapped that machine a couple of years ago, but I did rescue the computer so I have the cards

[@Mrshoujo]

Proprietary

[@CATech1138]

pc cnc cad solution in one box

[@baronvonlimbourgh1716]

The previous company i worked for had some old machinery that they could only comunicate with trough certain 286 laptops for some reason or another. Probably because of a connection or protocol i imagine. The guy responsible for keeping that stuff running was always hunting for old laptops and bodging things together because that old portable stuff really wasn't very reliable anymore for actual production use. Anyway, they payed good money for it because it was essential to keep things working.

[@iabconsulting]

If you are carefull, you can remove the connector from one end of the broken ribbon cable closets to the break, and reattach it after the break. You will loose about 4 inches of cable but still have a working system. I have done this but with smaller ribbon cable. You have to be carefull of the plastic tabs.

[@Mueller3D]

It may also be easy enough to expose a bit of the conductors, apply some flux, and solder them back together, before taping or gluing over the repair.

[@timballam3675]

I remember the Periscop cards, great times doing bare metal code with one... Also the Turtle Beach card was for quality, built a P90 machine for a friend that composed music back in the day!

[@thesovietunion6374]

We really need Adrian’s analog attic

[@horusfalcon]

Keithly, National Semiconductor, and Omega were prominent brands in the Data Acquisition space way back when. Without software for this board, it will be difficult to get it working. The reason there are so many terminals on the back is that instrument transmitters and transducers typically have two wires for their I/O signal loops. Some of the other five terminals (16-channels = 32 terminals) are for grounding and "loop power", typically somewhere between 12 and 24 vdc.

[@madigorfkgoogle9349]

The Turtle Beach card was not aimed at gamers, it was aimed at audio enthusiast/musician, it was the card that allowed multitrack HDD recording (4 or 8 tracks, dont remember) and real time audio manipulation effects. Basically, you transformed your PC into home recording studio, similar to Atari Falcon 030. It was very expensive for a gamer, the DSP56001 alone was very pricey. I dont know how Atari managed the Falcon price being so low, the basic 1MB version of Falcon 030 was about the same price as Motorola would sell you the 56001 chip alone. If the Tahiti card works, you can consider yourself extremely lucky. Cant wait for the followup video.

[@8BitMuseum]

The S-100 memory card is a really nice find. The EMM SEMI 4200 is a 4K x 1 SRAM (can be tested with the RCT using an external definition).

[@Psychlist1972]

I remember going to CompUSA back in the 90s. They had a whole section of just Creative Labs cards. They had WAY too many choices, and it was hard to know which to pick unless you did some research ahead of time. They spread themselves too thin and it's probably part of what led to them tanking later.

[@SenileOtaku]

Well I *did* always refer to them as CompUSEless...

[@Hitek146]

Except Creative Labs is still in business...

[@GGigabiteM]

@@Hitek146 CL still exists, but they're a shell of their former self. They started to lose market share when integrated audio became the norm in the late 90s, and that accelerated when integrated audio got good enough for the average person to question why they need a $100 sound card when their PC already has one. They delisted from NASDAQ in 2007. Then there was a large exodus of loyal customers in 2008 when they alienated the community with crippled Vista drivers and sent a C&D to the one person that was able to fix them. From then until now, they've had a steady downwards market share. I've done PC reapir for decades. I stopped seeing creative sound cards in PCs after the mid 2000s The Audigy 2 was their last popular product. Since then, I rarely see any discrete sound cards in machines. Unless you're an audiophile, or do music production, there's no reason to buy a discrete sound card, and hasn't been a reason to for a very long time. CL knows this too, and they've started to diversify into other fields. They also seem to have resorted to patent trolling and licensing old patents of theirs, or patents they've bought up to generate some revenue. Wouldn't surprise me, they have a history of being bottom feeding scumbags.

[@hernancoronel]

Apple did a similar thing until Jobs came back and simplified the product line dropping lots of SKUs, saving the company according to some opinions.

[@Robert-Wilson]

@@hernancoronelyes and now sadly they doing it again way to many SKU of the iPhone. I’m a big apple fan but Tim Cook needs to go.

[@weapongod30]

That weird, unknown, bodge-filled video card looks like it coild be a Vectrix Pepe card. Or possibly one half of one? Hard to tell. Seems to have been a CAD-focused, stackable, high resolution display card from the 80s

[@cromulence]

AWE64 is basically an AWE32 that came with an additional soft synth to boost available MIDI polyphony to 64 voices. RAM was changed to a proprietary interface but it's still effectively the same type of RAM used so you can get a home-brew board to install standard RAM. As it's basically an AWE32 (same EMU8000 synthesiser), software is 100% compatible. It has 512K of onboard RAM and the same 1MB ROM of the AWE32. Whilst the soft synth sounds boring, it's actually quite interesting, as it uses Seer System's WaveSynth W/G which in addition to adding additional polyphony, also had a very early attempt at physical modelling, which would emulate the sound of various instruments without actually using any audio samples. This technology would be later picked up by Yamaha in the guise of Sondius-XG.

[@OscarSommerbo]

My friend had a periscope card, and we used it to create on-the-fly trainers for games, and "other stuff". The RCA port came with a red push button, to halt execution. It was slightly janky as you had to have a second monitor to be able to use it effectively. The disassembler was primitive but functional for simple tasks, I bet if you had debug symbols it would have been easier. The push button broke/got lost, so he resorted to an audio cable that he shorted. I never knew it was that expensive.

[@craigtiano3455]

I recognized that Vectrix card right away. It was offered pre-EGA and produced VGA resolution images. There was a library for use with a specific C compiler to create your images. My ex had one of these at work. The computer had a regular monochrome display and a huge Techtronix monitor connected to the Vectrix.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Ah interesting! Yeah I assumed it was going to work in a dual monitor setup. I explore it a bit more in part 2 of this video, which will be out next weekend. I guess the dual screen thing was typical and you ran the special software AutoCAD or whatever to run on the large screen with the little MDA monitor for DOS and what not, and then the glorious color one for the special app.

[@craigtiano3455]

And, you're missing the top board of the Vectrix card. There was definitely a piggy back card.

[@jameskrych7767]

From 2000 to 2006, I worked for Keithley Instruments. I remember those boards being made at the Solon plant. I used to be the tech for the 236, 237, and 238 SMU lines.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Oh that's cool. Do you know if they sold well? Or better question -- how many were they manufacturing?

[@jameskrych7767]

@@adriansdigitalbasement Not certain, but I do know that department was always kept busy for some time.

[@piconano]

You could dedicate a wall in your house, and screw all the boards to it like a mural. I don't know of more beautiful art, than computer boards plastered all over the wall. If you take high-res pictures, you can find an IC and go pull the board off the wall, desolder or borrow/steal, then put the board back.

[@BjarneLindqvist]

Ohh, the AWE32... Had one back in the day. Really nice card.

[@The1RandomFool]

I'm curious if those "Blackfoot" cards were some kind of prototype that never went into production and was never sold.

[@Peter_S_]

I think that card design might have been sold to Radius based on a 30 year old memory of some prototype Radius products with the ADSP chips in the same spots. IIRC it might have been an MPEG encoder/decoder if it became the card I'm thinking of.

[@Miasmark]

the tms34010 was used in TIGA video cards. these were used for CAD workstations as far as I understand. the closest I have been able to find was the Siemens C79040-R430-C35-02-87 which uses the same chip for video. I think I saw TIGA drivers for old Autocad before.

[@MrGiuzzz]

Yes, I can confirm 👍 Some of these cards have a Demo mode built in by the way, enabled by dip sw

[@Peter_S_]

Correct. The TMS34010 was the first programmable GPU. I designed both TMS34010 and TMS34020 boards and AutoCAD was a very typical target application. They were used in both accelerated and mostly non-accelerated roles where some operations needed a boost. There was also a version of the chip with just the video circuits and no acceleration called the TMS34061 which the same team created and which also powered a lot of video cards from then.

[@lsorense]

Yeah I used to use a 34020 based #9 card that was TIGA. But TIGA was a standard from 1989, so a card that says 1987 might not follow the standard or could be a prototype card. I sure don't see any info that vectrix corp ever released a TI based card.

[@lsorense]

Someone mentioned EX1280 and pictures sure seem to match. I found a brief mention in a pdf saying it was a high res video card with built in vga support as well. Strangely there is also code in mame for that card. Was it used in some arcade machine?

[@andrewlittleboy8532]

Over an hour of Adrian for my Saturday night, what could be better!

[@Peter_S_]

That stack of SCAN-CAP cards takes me back a bit. Definitely capture cards. They look like (monochrome?) composite NTSC / VGA video capture cards but the oscillators are odd. The 50.350 is easy at VGA bitclock * 2, but the 53.76 makes me wonder if this card digitized PAL? The earlier shorter version labeled Jovian Logic looks like it might have been an NTSC/CGA/EGA capture card based on where a couple of the traces go.

[@8bitwiz_]

What's interesting is that there are positions for six crystal oscillators on the left, but only two are installed.

[@Breakfast_of_Champions]

Could be medical, maybe tomography?

[@Peter_S_]

@@8bitwiz_ Those were the days before high speed PLL clockgen chips. It looks like it was a very flexible PCB design but they only had it configured for VGA and possibly PAL in this case. Go forward a couple years and you have the same plus much more functionality at much lower cost driven by PLLs and a single 27MHz or 14.318MHz crystal. I had several video cards with multiple oscillators on them from those days, but I think the max I had was four on one card from Wyse.

[@Peter_S_]

@@Breakfast_of_Champions Absolutely! A custom interface to a piece of medical equipment makes perfect sense as the 53.760 doesn't seem to match anything else I can think of.

[@ano_nymouse]

Looking at the analog front-end section, there's an 8 channel video mux max455, video amplifier lm1201 and what looks like 8 input resistors from the visible trace. Also kind of curious that it can have two ADCs installed. Would love to see a higher resolution scan of the blank PCBs and see how the front-end is wired.

[@chadhartsees]

Gotta love that Purple-Gray of ceramic ICs.

[@fattomandeibu]

The retainer clips on the BlackFoot cards remind me of the ULA on the Acorn Electron. The Electron one only had the clip on one side, with like a hinged shutter that goes over the chip with the clip being used to hold the shutter in place over the chip.

[@MarianoLu]

The turtle beach multi sound Tahiti was a monster! Those were very expensive back in the day, you should do a video with them they were popular with musicians and high end audio. I worked at a radio station back in the 90’s and they had these and also Antex cards that we used on the on air computers. These cards were able to do MPEG hardware decoding which enabled you to add multiple in one PC for multi track audio.

[@MarianoLu]

If I remember correctly Turtle Beach had some connection with Ensoniq which was founded by Al Charpentier and the team behind the commodore SID. Later in the 2000 Ensoniq was acquired by Creative Labs

[@julianbarron5293]

This mixed box had a lot more surprises than I expected!

[@meh78336]

15:42 The moment Adrian goes full metal :D

[@gklinger]

So glad you're feeling better. :)

[@RetroGamingWithEdgarRivera]

That's a lot of goodies on that box specially the sound blaster cards. I'm quite intrigued about the obscure cards like the MQX-16, Black foot, Scan Cap or even the Orchid Turbo Graphics. Can't wait to see part 2 of the cards in action.

[@RetroTinkerer]

Music Quest MQX16 is the card Leo and Edro (Orpheus isa cards) used as a base to make an intelligent mode MPU-401 that could talk perfectly with an MT-32.

[@PhilR0gers]

I remember the Turtle Beach Tahiti. At the time it was way out of my price range and something I could only aspire to, and the sound quality was phenomenal. Often used by professional musicians back in the day.

[@reidster87]

The MultiSound line of cards from Turtle Beach was well renowned in pro-sumer music, recording, broadcast, and audio engineering circles as an affordable, high quality audio interface with very low noise. There are only a handful of DOS games that natively support them for PCM, and they don't offer SoundBlaster emulation or FM synth. Wavetable-equipped models are General MIDI, however. Yours is missing the "Tahiti" silk screen which would have been where you wrote "Tahiti" on it. This probably means it was sold as the Turtle Beach MultiSound Monterey which included the Rio wavetable daughtercard as a bundle. The Rio utilizes a ICS WaveFront synth chipset, Motorola 68EC000 microprocessor and includes VoiceCrystal soundfonts in its 4MB ROM and SIPP slots for RAM expansion. Turtle Beach also marketed some more consumer/gaming oriented cards like the Tropez and Monte Carlo series. I had a Monte Carlo 929 for years and it had very good SB Pro emulation, even stereo worked flawlessly. It had a real OPL3 IC, and a Windows Sound System codec. It was noticeably quieter than generic Opti 929 based sound cards, not to mention my Sound Blaster 16.

[@DainUnicorn]

The Tahiti card was a prosumer grade audio card. It was built for studio use and not for gaming. They were know fir having a very low internal noise gate, meaning the audio levels could be amplified in excess of what Sound Blasters and such could chandle without squarewaving out.

[@Psychlist1972]

Did you mean a low noise floor? A gate in audio is a circuit that cuts off audio when it is below certain levels. Guitarists use it all the time so you don't end up with a bunch of random string noise and pickup hum on stage when they aren't playing. Where it might work here is in muting the audio in periods of silence so there appeared to be no noise. "Squarewaving out" : I assume you mean full peaking/distortion where the waveform ends up close to a square wave because of how hard it is clipped. A low noise floor (or a noise gate) don't have much to do with that. But with a low noise floor, you can crank the audio up louder and it will be more pleasant, because less noise will come through with it, when compared to other cards.

[@goranekstrom708]

That last card is an In Circuit Debugger, the (very expensive) solution used before serial port, JTAG MCU/CPU built-in debugging became standard.

[@va4cqd]

Regarding Creative labs large variety of of part numbers, sometimes they used a different number to indicate that the card was part of a bundle. Other times different numbers to indicate the difference between retail and oem cards

[@DonThorntonJr]

holy crap - I had to check my stash to see if a box was missing

[@SeishukuS12]

Scan-cap cards are likely a VGA/composite frame grabber

[@StoneBrooks]

getting the periscope working would be AWESOME!

[@asanjuas]

The periscope card is an isa card for debugging software , if you write something for the 386(like operating systems or something like that).

[@richardblair3021]

That current output on the DDA-08 is still quite useful. 4-20 mA is used for industrial and lab control operations in a current loop. Still used today as it’s much more noise tolerant.

[@douro20]

The W83757F (and the related AF version) was used in numerous mainboards all the way up into the Pentium III era. The "Super 8" is the old name for the Zilog Z8.

[@Zhixalom]

@1:01:04 - It looks to me as if there is just an extra "loose" socket on top there, likely to protect the pins of the main one, or maybe as a "riser". So, the pins underneath are probably okay. - As for the ribbon cable: I would shorten the cable a bit, just before that nasty cut and then try to crimp it back onto the connector on the board. It may be just as fiddly a job, but it would definitely be a better outcome in the end, than attempting to patch up the cut.

[@briangleeson1528]

A box full of cards would be like Christmas to me! My Logitech ScanMan 32 came with that same ISA dip-switch card.

[@prozacgodretro]

Almost guaranteed the protoboard with the gal, was decoding IO address, and latching them and then exposing the data on that 25 pin dsub, and it looked like they actually had it wired in through the standard 1-8 data pins for the d-sub printer port... I'm wondering if someone went through the heroic effort to build their own printer port... :P

[@davidknoll]

I also thought that was a parallel port based on how the socket was wired. But with the low chip count, maybe a subset of functionality to just about allow printing but not all the status lines?

[@prozacgodretro]

@@davidknoll from what I know you only really need the data,strobe,gnd pins and you can print, if you don't overrun the buffer on the printer. Without the control lines the printer can't tell you when it's buffer is full. also you may need to hook the select in pin to a pull up, just so the printer is ready to recieve your signals. If the strobe signal was hooked up to the write signal from the isa bus, I bet it COULD work....

[@QuaaludeCharlie]

Liked and Shared Adrian , this is fun . It's what I do on my down Time , Keep up the great content , You are a Curator of Valor , Thank You :) QC

[@JoeTooman]

I would love a tour of how you keep all your hardware organized and see what the rest of the basement looks like. It seems to me that you have purpose driven piles.

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

It's really tough to stay organized, and I really need some help doing so... especially with the small components like chips and little parts. Cards like this I end up having to test and then group them by function, and put them into bags and then bins. I also do periodically try to "thin the herd" by putting cards I'm going to give away to local members of the retro community because I don't need so many of them. Space is finite and I don't need to keep 29 VLB VGA cards, for instance.

[@TimGladding]

@@adriansdigitalbasement It's a bit late for this year, but you need a summer intern who wants to go in to EE. Are winter interns a thing???

[@aforgottenevent504]

Doing Arduino-like GPIO stuff with the DDA card would be hysterical. Imagine building an internet-controlled smart light switch but instead of a Pro Micro it uses an entire 386 desktop

[@Dukefazon]

31:16 - I don't know what's wrong with me but I love the look of bare unpopulated PCBs and fully populated ones as well. I don't know, it's just the aesthetic is tickling something in my brain but I just turned into a hardware liker around the pandemic. Before that I was more connected to the software side of things. Those Blackfoot cards look especially amazing, both the populated and unpopulated ones! I love the matte coating!

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

Yeah clearly knowing those are some DSPs on there, that was some kind of card to provide extra processing power to a Mac for some kind of calculations or something. Perhaps someone will be able to dig up the info extra info and then at least curiosity can be satisfied.

[@MichaelNelson1965]

Way back in the day when I wrote mortgage banking software, I worked with an OCR solution under DOS to capture form data. The board that drove the flatbed scanner looked suspiciously similar to those mysterious long boards you unpacked (I think they were the ones labeled with Blackfoot, Arroyo, etc). Complete shot in the dark, but I wonder if they are part of some scanner solution.

[@coxyofnewp]

There was some interesting cards etc in that collection.. Makes me think back to how many boards, connections etc were needed back in the day just to make some setup's run right.. I'm glad that things a lot more easier now ;) But I love seeing some of these amazing boards now !

[@Clavichordist]

I had one of those MIDI cards. From what I remember, the cable was a joystick port to MIDI cable which was pretty standard at the time for driving MIDI from sound cards such as the Creative Labs. The MIDI interface is a well-documented standard that is still used today in case you need to build one or maybe even find one. I had an old Turtle Beach sound card. It wasn't that particular model but boy their sound was particularly nice compared to the similar-period Creative Labs cards. I still have a pair of their now unavailable headphones which are really well made and still work today.

[@freeculture]

Joystick to midi was used by creative and several clones, but this is a 9 pin connector. Don't remember well but Creative midi port might have been the "dumb" type so prone for slowdowns. The "smart" MPU-401 (and clones) can keep the timing even when the cpu is busy.

[@Clavichordist]

@@freeculture I don't remember much about the card and the cable and I'm not sure about the pin-outs. Heck, it's now close to 30 years ago now, and you're right about the connector. I can picture it in my mind. From my recollection, the card wasn't exactly fast and I had a very disappointing time with it driving my Kurzeil K1000 digital piano, which I still have tucked in my closet. I'll have to check my basement cabinet. I have a lot of old stuff down there and may even still have the card and cables which might be amazing!

[@jasmijndekkers]

Nice computer parts. Thankx for sharing with us. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

[@soctechtv]

Watching here amazing unboxing tech treasures great vedio thank you for sharing

[@AugurIliKur]

Vectrix card appears to be CAD/CAM video card with vector graphics operations for applications. Internet Archive has manuals for some of those cards but not this specific model it looks like.

[@TheDefpom]

That periscope board CPU pin mess looks like a socket you could remove and replace.

[@PlasmaHH]

That plug in the 3.5mm jack could be for disconnecting certain connections, there are jacks that disconnect something when you plug something in

[@JussiSiponen]

4 to 20 mA current loops were common in pre-digital industrial automation. Current was used (rather than voltage) because any voltage drop over long wires was irrelevant. E.g a temperature sensor could output a current between 4 mA (0C) and 20 mA (100C). If no current was present, that was an error condition.

[@Peter_S_]

They're still in common use today on brand new super expensive equipment. Now there's also a slow bidirectional serial interface which rides on top of the current loop as carefully crafted noise which is called HART (Highway Addressable Remote Transducer).

[@brake_4_cake]

Some of those cards are spotless, like they came straight from the factory

[@AmstradExin]

The 'Busmouse' Card is obviously a Hand Scanner card, converting the Apple Serial Bus to the PC.

[@Peter_S_]

Yes, appears to be a later ScanMan card, but Apple didn't have anything to do with those. It was a simple synchronous serial interface and totally different from anything Apple offered. There was a similar Apple interface for a rebranded ScanMan called the Quickie from Vitesse, Inc.

[@exidy-yt]

i'm gonna guess both the blackfoot and Coversion tech PCBs and few boards are the only ones in existence, each a short run of someone's moon-shot hoping to launch a new business based on these cards but failing to make a sale, so each sank without a trace before the Internet as we know it was even formed and able to hold a record. Even today there are plenty of business startup attempts that leave some detritus but no record of who and what was behind them.

[@aleksandrbmelnikov]

Great. You found a very fancy card to cheat at Data East boot games.🤣 Use pre-tinned wire strands and sewing needle to stitch cable lines. Flux and solder tacks at each end. Cover patched areas with epoxy to prevent shorting cable. Other cards, you could pull many chips, and sell them as new Old-Stock parts.

[@jozsefizsak]

Fun stuff. Since Creative Labs began as a just very astute marketing company, there is a decent chance that the Turtle Beach card has superior sound quality. That would be the area where they could differentiate themselves from Soundblaster.

[@BeaversElectricDam]

About the Vectrix EX1280 video card. It appears to be a "high-res" video card for use in AT/XT Pc's. Mainly for use with CAD software

[@andrewdunbar828]

I saw a "4HD" sticker on it, which made me think it might offer either 4x the total pixels or 4x the resolution in each axis.

[@natenorrish]

I'm always super jealous of all the retro stuff you have or get to play with at least! :)

[@DarrenHughes-Hybrid]

I remember seeing ads for the Orchid Turbo Graphics cards back in the day. They were used in very high end desktop publishing application and were very expensive cards

[@adriansdigitalbasement]

There's a little tidbit on this card I talk about in part 2, and it seems like it was $2000 when it came out

[@freednighthawk]

I think a good number of those Sound Blasters would have been custom cards for SIs like Dell, Hp and Compaq.

[@86smoke]

That Kingston Turbo chip is really a gem, presercve it al all costs

[@williamsquires3070]

Those Scan Cap boards were probably for a project that arrived on the market too late, or was killed because they just couldn’t make it work. These are almost certainly prototype boards, as evidenced by all the different bodges. My guess is the boss told the Engineering team lead to “toss’em in the garbage - project DOA!” - whereupon said person tossed them… in their car, hoping to work on the project in secret, on their own dime, and on their own time. Just my hypothesis. 😊

[@kyjoel69]

Love going through old oddities from computing past. Would love to see a comparison with that turbo chip tho, and finding out about the Blackfoot card would be amazing!

[@YarisTex]

There’s MIDPAK/DIGPAK API drivers for the Tahiti, so all games that use MIDPAK/DIGPAK API for playing sound will support the Turtle Beach Tahiti

[@galier2]

27:00 this is a so called TIGA card. Use a lot with CAD software like AutoCAD. The TI chip was more a RISC chip to handle the display lists (i.e. lists of geometric figures to draw) of the CAD software. These cards were extremely expensive (special CPU, lots of RAM for bitmap and display lists). They had some advantages but were rendered obsolete by Moore's law. These kind of cards took a long time to migrate away for the ISA bus and when PC's arrived at 486/Pentium age with PCI and 64 bits SVGA Cards, these TIGA card could not compete anymore because of the ISA bus slowness even if some had really big and fast TI chips .

[@spewp]

Turtle Beach hardware was the step up from Creative Labs in that time period. It's a very nice soundcard, less general compatibility but if you actually like quality of sound, this is the one.

[@muppetpaster]

Yup....Turtlebeach was the preferred card/brand for homestudios.

[@christopherjackson2157]

These are my favourite episodes ❤

[@arthurswart4436]

The Vectrix card (24:10) reminds me of dedicated Mathematica cards used in the early nineties, when students could/had to book time on the university´s mini to run complicated calculations. These cards were used to ´dry run´ calculations to make sure they could be performed in Mathematica, to avoid wasting expensive processing time. The date doesn´t fit exactly, it might be a prototype or a product aimed at Maple. That would make more sense considering the location of the card. I could also be completely wrong.

[@SuperJ03y]

There is a Raspberry Pi MT-32 based replica complete with LCD screen that would emulate the original MT-32 LCD screen. This is awesome for playing the old Sierra games.

[@8bitwiz_]

I definitely know this feel, I have quite a few boxes full of boards in my garage that I dig through every now and then. Last time I was digging for a couple of LM386 chips, and found them on modem boards (both ISA and standalone). 53:05 that proto board seems to be rigged up as a plain old parallel port 53:40 TOPS was an early file-sharing software for Appletalk. The SCC chip was the serial chip in the Macintosh which had the 1mbit mode that was used for Appletalk, so this was a PC card for TOPS file sharing over Appletalk. (as you discovered) 59:00 that's an In-Circuit Emulator for debugging a 386. Very expensive back in the day, but they had to give up on that type of board as chips got fast enough that the length of the pod cable became too long to work with. Nowadays chips have built-in debug support that doesn't need every signal brought out in a big cable.

[@GilbertoFerreira]

04:49 - wow that's was my first sound card bumble with 4x or 8x cdrom drivers. That's AWEsome!

[@Megatog615]

I'm so jealous of that Kingston Turbochip.

[@jasonbass2973]

I love videos like this! So many interesting cards!

[@billbliss7407]

Is that Vectrix card the same as the one from your other channel about a year ago (just found it -- title is "0007 A very unprofessional 'professional' modification")?

[@____________________________.x]

54:18 The Zilog SCC is communicating via an AM26LS30 Dual Differential (EIA-422-A)/ Quad Single-Ended (EIA-423-A) Line Driver chip, and a AM26LS32 Quadruple Differential Line Receiver

[@____________________________.x]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocalTalk

[@kirkanos3968]

This channel is why YT need a auto thumbs up. Love all you video's

[@jeromethiel4323]

Whomever was running Creative Labs definitely did a good job. The sheer ubiquity of the Sound Blaster name, it was the sound card most people bought. Even though there were better sound cards out there, Creative had the market.

[@oldguy9051]

They had the game compatibility because they worked with the game companies. And they also had some pretty shady business tactics to save money...

[@jwalshmorrissey]

I work at an institution that has an electronics recycling program. Sooooo many boxes of stuff, usually about 10 years old. But I hold out hope that I’ll find treasure one day…