February 13, 2007

Back in the fall of 1986 I moved from an Apple IIe to an Atari 520ST. I quite enjoyed that ST. One particularly nice and uncommon thing about my ST setup was the system stand I found and ordered out of STart magazine, or some such. It was a Micro Way 520 STation. It was a metal enclosure that housed two 3.5" floppy drives, all system power bricks, and supported a screen. It was raised, so the Atari ST kind of tucked under it, making for a really sharp overall layout. I've not reacquired an ST for my own "Byte Cellar," and swore I never would, unless I could find this excellent and very hard to come by stand.

Well, I found one.

I posted my search for one on Google Answers back in October 2004 and heard nothing - until a couple of weeks ago. Someone came across one of these units and wanted to sell it on eBay, and in doing research on the unit, ran across posts regarding my strong desire for a 520 STation. He e-mailed me with a heads up on the auction and voila! Today, February 13, 2007, I finally got my hands on a STation [pics: 1, 2, 3] (bundled with two Atari SF314 720K floppy drives), having not laid eyes on one in 20 years. Score!

An Atari ST can't be far behind...

UPDATE [3.18.2007]: Indeed, it was not. I've just updated this article to reflect new photos which show the STation filled with a newly acquired Atari 520ST. :-)

February 9, 2007

I've gone through a lot of computers since I got my first for Christmas in 1982 (age 10). A few were PCs. Of the PCs I've owned, one had a particularly interesting feature that I'll wager no one reading this has ever heard about.

I'd been a NeXT fan since the Cube was announced back in '88, and long lusted for their hardware. It wasn't until '94 that I had the opportunity to buy a NEXTSTEP box. After much research, I went with a 66MHz 486-based PC fabricated by a company out of Alaska called eCesys. The system was all black: black mini-tower case, black keyboard, black 17" Altima screen - reminiscent of NeXT's own black hardware. It was a thing of beauty and cost at the time, as I recall, about $4,500. Inside was a JCIS motherboard featuring ISA, VLB, and a third bus that made it rather unique. Next to the VLB slot was a WINGINE local bus slot.

WINGINE was designed by Chips & Technologies to be an extremely high speed framebuffer requiring motherboard support in the form of a chipset and a proprietary local bus WINGINE slot. This made the system one of the preferred graphics configurations for NEXTSTEP, as the operating system did not employ any 2D graphics acceleration - all it wanted was an extremely high bandwidth video subsystem. (Graphically intensive NEXTSTEP was the first OS to feature "solid drags" of windows which, at the time, was a rather heavy lift.)

The following is an excerpt from SmartComputing's Jan. '93 article, "CHIPS And Technologies' WINGINE: Giving Windows Horsepower" (Google cache here, if needed):

A motherboard with the WINGINE chip incorporates the benefits of a local bus with another advantage--video components right on the motherboard. WINGINE Product Manager Carlos Bielicki says, "The main components of a video adapter are the graphics controller and video memory. In the WINGINE system, the 'graphics controller' function is carried out by the CPU and WINGINE." Now the microprocessor has direct access to system memory as well as the video memory--without a trip to the ISA bus.

The WINGINE also utilized expensive, dual-ported VRAM as opposed to cheaper DRAM for optimal speed. I can attest to the performance delivered by the system; that black 486 truly felt like a graphics workstation. An interesting piece of technology history.

February 8, 2007

This may seem like a somewhat obscure and certainly not very exciting post, but I want it to get into the search engines. One of the nicer non-RGB monitors ever made is the Commodore 1702, released in the early 80s. As expected, it accepts composite input, but it goes well beyond by accepting separate modulated chrominance (color) and luminance (brightness) video inputs over two RCA style inputs. These separate signals provide a much higher fidelity image than a single composite signal, so much so that years later this method of input was given a more convenient, single 4-pin mini-DIN connector and christened S-Video. You're probably using it in your entertainment center.

So this makes the 1702 a great screen for game systems and other devices that output S-Video, right? You just need a converter cable. Aye, there's the rub. This is not exactly a standard cable. Sadly, most 1702s and the few other oldschool CRTs that have this dual RCA input scheme lie languishing in attics, closets, or worse. Over the years I've fruitlessly searched for such a cable, only to come up empty handed. And while I've some rather minor skill with a soldering iron, I was not looking to make my own.

Well, I'm happy to report, I've finally found a source for such a cable. Cables N Mor, locted in North Carolina, sells a line of S-Video RCA adapters. I've got several on the way, right now. Hopefully anyone out there searching for this elusive cable will find this post.

I will actually be using this cable not with my Commodore 1702, which is dedicated to my C64 setup, but with a Teknika MJ-10 (seen here and here) which features composite as well as chroma, luma inputs and can be read about in this excerpt from the September 1985 issue of Creative Computing magazine. A very nice screen. (I lead off with mention of the 1702 as it is the most well known of the chroma, luma input CRTs.)

February 5, 2007

On September 20, 2006 I submitted the following Mac OS X bug report to Apple via the ADC Bug Reporter. The bug has to do with OS X's subpixel font rendering, which is activated if the font smoothing style (in the Appearance prefs pane) is set to "Medium - best for Flat Panel."

The ATI X1900 XT video card supports screen rotation in the OS X Displays control panel. A Mac Pro was setup with an X1900, a 30" Apple Cinema Display, and a rotated Samsung 1600x1200 DVI display.

See a similar setup:

http://pix.blakespot.com/view/computers/macpro/IMG_8822.JPG.html

'Font smoothing style' in the Appearance prefs pane is set to "Medium - best for Flat Panel." This setting uses subpixeling, providing up to 3x the horizontal resolution of the screen's native pixel width, etc. (More about sub-pixeling here: http://www.grc.com/cleartype.htm )

Sub-pixeling depends upon the orientation of the RGB elements of each sub-pixel cluster that makes up a pixel. When a screen is rotated 90-degrees, the RGB "stripes" run horizontal, not vertical. As can be seen from the below images, where the first image ("broken") shows the rotated Samsung and the second image ("proper") shows the standard orientation Apple Cinema 30", OS X's sub-pixeling does NOT take into account the new orientation of the sub-pixel clusters, resulting in a rather bold and crude rendering of text on the rotated first ("broken") image:

http://pix.blakespot.com/view/computers/screenshots/osx_subpixel_bug/broken.jpg.html
http://pix.blakespot.com/view/computers/screenshots/osx_subpixel_bug/proper.jpg.html

Apple needs to correct this so that people don't have to abandon sub-pixeling and use 'Standard' (greyscale) anti-aliasing. Microsoft takes sub-pixel cluster orientation into account with Windows Mobile (CE) on the Pocket PC's. Surely Apple can get this working with rotated screens under OS X.

Thanks. I've encountered, so far, one other user complaining about this issue.

I just checked the status of the big report (Problem ID 4740732, for any Mac OS X core developers at Apple reading this) and I find it's still "Open," which means it's unlikely to be addressed in Leopard - the initial release, anyway. Even just the option of selecting a different font smoothing method for each screen would be a win, here.

Apple, please address this.

February 3, 2007

So my media PC died. The core of my entertainment center is a Shuttle XPC i8600 (3.2GHz P4 HT) running Meedio under Windows XP. It's great. It's my main DVD player and it lets me sit on the couch with my IR remote and browse ripped DVDs and HD streams and watch them with ease, all amid surround sound goodness. Well, it did, until it died.

It seemed it had to be either the motherboard, the memory, or the CPU. I pulled each of the two DIMMs that make up its 1GB of RAM in turn and the unit still wouldn't work. I gambled that the motheboard was the cause and ordered a replacement from Shuttle ($138 + shipping). Got up at 4:30 this morning and started breaking down the system to do the swap. The end result? Up and running once more. The culprit? Have a look - two bulged capacitors and a smoked IC. A sad way to go....

More pics of the swap process can be found here, for those interested.

As a footnote, sadly Yahoo! bought Meedio and dumbed it down and turned it into Yahoo! Go for TV. Grumble.