Getting video off my Atari 1040STf has been a real journey. The general consensus is that high-res mono will work on any monitor, and then for color you'll just make a composite mod cable coming off your standard Atari monitor port. The trouble is that composite video is only on that port if you have an RF modulator, so either STFM or STE so that wasn't really an option. When I got the ST I bought a Truemouse USB dingus and a DIN 13 to VGA, but that thing never worked. It's likely I immediately smoked it, I'm not really sure what the deal is there, but I just figured I needed something Special even for mono. I've seen videos of people using Mono on an LCD but figured they had some scaler going on.
While all this was happening I joined the kickstarter for the Checkmate IPS monitor. This thing is a /monster/ and I love it, but a main factor in my decision was its advertised support for 15khz video produced by the ST's color mode. However it wasn't clear that that support relies on having composite video. The VGA port is unfortunately 35Khz only. Not their fault, it does what it says on the tin. The tin is just ambiguous ;-)
While I was poring over various methods to fix all this I did, after watching Rees' shootout videoactually get an OSSC Pro, which was definitely the right move. However totally unrelated to that searching this video by BackOfficeShow popped up from 8 years ago and sparked what would become the answer. Big shout out. I'm a long time subscriber but never came across this one. Basically you can just passively wire an Atari DIN-13 to a VGA cable directly and it'll just work, at least for mono since again, 15Khz sync for the color mode. But I had the OSSC on the way and his switch seemed like it ought to just work. I just need to order a switch and a 13 pin DIN port or rip the one off my non-functional $9 Atari -> VGA dingus.
While digging around looking for "extra" cables it dawned on me that I thought I had a monitor switchbox, and indeed, here it is with the ST:
This box is a Practical Solutions Monitor Master, is designed to have two monitors plugged in and switch a single inbound signal between them. It's got a single latching switch at the front, and a permanently attached monitor cable to the computer, two monitor-out ports, mono audio out and composite out on the back.
Turns out the switch inside is a 6 way 2 pole switch which is more than enough space to do what I need to switch. What I ended up doing was to pull out the composite connector and use that hole to run my VGA cable out of. The switch very helpfully has pins on the top side for each of the sets of switched connections, so I was able to use the "left" side for the R, G and B/Mono signals and one of the other pairs for the mono detect line, which basically just grounds the mono detect wire when the button is latched. Oh and I had to lift the signal pin for the audio and run that separately. Of everything I feel this connection is the most tenuous. If I do it over again I would leave the audio switch intact and wire that up through the board as normal.
Rather than remove the switch or modify the internals in any way, I just bypassed the on-board connector altogether and only used the board for the ground plane. I just have dupont connectors connecting to the ST-side cable and then soldered to the appropriate switch pins. This means my signals are going all over the place, and probably bad things will happen if you plug a monitor into one of the monitor ports while it's configured this way, but it's also quickly reversible. Just rip out my crappy wiring and plug the cable into the original connector and you're good to go.
Here's kind of a demo:
The man I bought this collection from had color and mono monitors, and obviously bought a monitor switchbox because he always had the good toys. It's kind of important to me to maintain and recreate the original workflow for this machine. A couple of my major goals are to use the original ICD hard disk enclosure (with a BlueSCSI, I'm not a madman) and the Spectre GCR cartridge. I remember this machine in this configuration from the late '80s and early '90s, so I want to get it fully up and running as original as I can.
Far East keyboard vendors "are defining the lower end of the market, and I wish them a lot of luck, but we offer a better membrane keyboard, with better tactile feel, and a lot of service and market support here in the U.S. We offer Cadillacs, and are not the cheapest guys in the world."
- Lexmark's manager of market development Dick McCall regarding falling keyboard prices in 1993, just after spin-off from IBM
I recently bought a new Model F SSK. I've always felt bad for my role in The '90s Purge, wherein if I had a dollar for all the models M and F that ended up in a dumpster...well I could have put a down payment on a mortgage for a new modern Model F :-) I am not, repeat, not knocking the price. It's actually quite a value if you consider that a Model M sold for hundreds of 1989 dollars (MSRP direct from IBM anyway) as the cost-reduced, slightly crappier replacement for the F. It's also a labor of love and I like to support these sorts of projects. It's /incredibly/ well made and is just an absolute monster.
Aside from some initial glitchiness with a couple of "iffy" flippers and springs, we got it up and running relatively quickly. Definitely get the First Aid Kit, in fact I'll probably get another just to have it. The only modification I made from the default was to remove the fixed USB cable and replace it with a USB-C M -> USB-A F dingus so I could just swap it with my normal keyboard cable.
This steel & aluminum Model F also makes a Model M feel like the toy at the bottom of the Cap'n Crunch box.
Witness:
The model f ssk is pretty pingy but is a total pleasure to type on. My cow-orkers are lucky I didn't haul it down to our 3 day on-site meeing or they'd have tried to murder me in the first 10 minutes. Luckily it doubles as a weapon so I'd have been just fine.
See. The model M sounds like and feels like a children's toy by comparison. IT'S WHISPER QUIET!
Working in the computer store in the '90s I always loved the Model Fs we had around and tried to use them as bench machines, but they were /just/ that little bit too oddly laid out to be useful. So I heaved 'em. Lots of Model Ms too, and 5150s...yeah yeah. Progress. How was I supposed to know I could have made a lucrative career out of making videos about the crap in the basement of a computer store 30 years later?
I like the Model M keyboards I've got, but without fail a couple of weeks into using one my hands start to hurt and I worry about "This is it, after 40 years of this shit I'm finally getting some kind of RSI nonsense". Then I switch to a Keychron and everything is better after a day or two. It's weird because my natural tendency is to kind of hammer on keyboards, or at least I feel like I do, what do I know.
The F feels a lot lighter while typing even if it sounds much more violent. I haven't had any strain yet.
Verdict: Get one! They're Great! - As long as you don't mind maddening frustration when you assemble the whole thing and a single goddamn key won't actuate so you have to take all the caps back off and rip it apart. Not that I had to do that several times. Honestly I wasn't going to get this because I knew from reviews that it shipped without the keycaps and it looked irritating and fiddly to get it going (and I was right!) but Natalie talked me into it. I'm leaving the "locking" tab bent open since like, is it even possible for that backplate to slide? Time will tell!
Again, none of that is a knock on the manufacturing of this thing. It's /great/ and I'm sure it'll last me until I die. I just know my limitations and that I have a very low tolerance for frustration since I've been abused and burned by work for far too long and as such have no patience for friction unless I'm being paid. I don't care how much fucking hacker-chow gets in there, these keycaps aren't coming off to clean or anything unless I absolutely have to.
I was certain that one of Thomas's videos on the modern Model F showed the key assembly process, but I can't find it. Enjoy anyway.
Holy cow did I have a good couple of hours in HengeWorld.
When I got home from lunch around 3 my wife handed me the NuIO board we ordered for the NeXT machine. This was a very welcome surprise. I expected just a board and it came in a very nice 3D printed case. I cabled it up and plugged it into the CheckMate IPS monitor I've been doing battle with for a year.
With extremely low expectations, I hit the soft-power button on the keyboard.
Fired right up, straight to a desktop, looked FRIGGIN' gorgeous. Sharp. This machine, while frustrating to assemble due to the "unique" decisions of Team NeXT in 1989, has been remarkably reliable. Once I understood exactly what I needed (non-ADB keyboard / mouse), spent a bunch of money, it all just worked great. Even worked great on my 4:3 Eyoyo monitor though it's understandably not as nice is the 17" CheckMate.
I ported GOB's Program to csh
So this spurred me to try some ST stuff I've had in mind too. I wanted to try and wire straight into a Mono/Color ST switchbox with a sacrificial VGA cable and see if I can just make a color/Mono VGA switcher. I don't know if the switch is going to work but I just soldered straight onto the pins from the inbound ST cable and...
The ST looks great, there's interference like if there's nothing on the screen, but once programs were running I didn't notice it at all. It all feels very much as I remember.
I chalk that noise up to my test setup:
Turns out the $5 or whatever Exxos (* I can't recall if Exxos actually made this or not) ST->VGA dingus I got was the culprit all along for years now. Oh well. Maybe I can rescue one or both of the 13 pin DIN and female VGA connector off of it.
After the OSSC thing didn't work out I started really bumming pretty hard on this whole project. Then Youtube recommended this awesome BackOfficeChannel video from 8 years ago which made it click in my brain that I can just straight up solder a VGA cable to an Atari cable and any SVGA monitor should work with it. And I remembered that Len had this Mono/Color switchbox and I decided I want to try to recreate that workflow and keep this machine as original feeling as I can.
It took me an hour to map out which conductors went to which pin on the ST and VGA cables and how the diagrams I was looking at are oriented. But man that looks nice even on the garbage cable I hacked together.
I'm trying to lay out some projects that I want to do "when I have the time". I'm considering streaming / recording these as I go if anyone wants to see them and/or help live. I'm at least going to document all of this so it's available to anyone who needs it.
I'm going to update this page as more things come up and I start completing tasks.
Pimp my Atari ST
Get video working. I have an SC1224 which isn't /super/ reliable. I have a Checkpoint monitor that I'm trying to get working for color + mono. I need to get that thing figured out and order whatever I need to make it go
Get a BlueSCSI working as a novelty oversized hard drive with tons of partitions and everything on there. This will involve removing the RIFA caps and getting Len's ICD enclosure working and learning how to install drivers and stuff.
Get my ST talking to Linux machines over serial. This could either be the Pi inside the CheckPoint monitor, or ideally hooked up through the Avocent serial console switch so I could address other ports
Use the serial terminal to manage software transfers from my PC to ST eliminating using aging physical floppy disks and drives or new things like GoTek
Use this method to make images of Len's stuff and transfer to the PC. I think that will be the easiest way to archive these disks
Build the AdaFruit project to use the NeXT non-ADB keyboard on a PC with USB
Use that knowledge to gauge how hard it might be to go the other direction? Using USB stuff on NeXT would be way more useful
Try to get the service manual for that printer or an equivalent Canon model
MiSTer Cabinet
Remove that front door. I keep banging my knees on this idiot door
While the cabinet is apart, extend all the ports from the TV inside with like pigtail connectors including power (C14 -> C15), HDMI and anything else like RF and stuff to hook up Ataris
Well look who is making an appearance on my bench, finally.
I was given this monitor and printer (!) last year by a coworker who used to work for NeXT back in the day. "Just get a slab" he said. "It'll be fun" he said.
Like everyone my age I've lusted after these things since 1989, but I'm also not Dr. NeXT, so there were some bumps. I found the Wombat USB -> ADB dingus that proudly Supports NeXT (fine print... very few NeXT machines have support for ADB) and so I bought a 25Mhz 68040 NeXTStation.
Unfortunately this was not one of the vanishingly few machines that supports ADB, so I was out of luck there. I kept trying to mash my Mac keyboard in until I finally actually looked at the connector. Ah well. $300 later and now I have a non-ADB keyboard and mouse. Which of course can't just plug into the NeXTStation itself. They have to go through the monitor. This is also a first-gen monitor of the type that can't be turned off, so they just burned themselves up. I do look forward to building a Non-ADB to USB dingus using the guide I found via forums, which appears to have been taken up by Adafruit.
After getting the keyboard and mouse up and running I took out the blank 200MB drive and replaced it with a BlueSCSI with a NextStep 3.3 image. I am able to get the machine on the network and pinging Internet hosts. However the Terminal.app seems insanely unstable at least on the OS image I am using. And once crashed it just can't be made to come back at all but just goes into a "launching" state in the Processes app. Know what'd be nice? Virtual Consoles. Just saying. I wonder if there's not a better PID based process viewer that can show me stuff outside my user session.
I'm basically just trying to FTP down some software to use and it's not going /super/ smoothly. But it probably is an accurate representation of the experience I'd have had as a user in a lab in 1992 or whenever.
But the party piece is that printer. That's why I'm here. And I'm happy to say it probably is capable of working. The machine sees it no problem but if I try to print I get a "Printer Door Open" error, which is a lie. It looks like there are three possible switches that get activated when the printer lid is closed, and they all seem to be fine, so this might warrant some further investigation. That is unless I just don't have the right cable since I also learned today that the "high speed serial cable" from the 68030 is not compatible with 68040 machines. So that's nice.
I can't even get my head around how rare these printers must be though. It's estimated that NeXT sold something like 50,000 workstations. My guess is most of those went to university labs and scientific installations (CERN, DUH!). Those places would have had print spoolers and maybe like 1 printer per room full of users. I can't imagine they sold more than a couple thousand of these printers and for such a minty fresh example to fall on me was just super lucky.
Whatever, I'm $1000 into this project and there's no stopping me now! Next up is to get a modern "Soundbox" replacement which will give us VGA output and a non-ADB keyboard port so we can retire the actual CRT into "Sit over there and Look Pretty" mode.
Thanks again so much Andrew for the project, and it's definitely gonna continue to be a project! Of course my goal is that this machine should work as a print spooler for my network. At least for a day or two before the power bill drives me into debtors prison.
This is by far the stupidest thing I've ever had to write.
For decades, IT has used pagers, and later SMS, to alert on outages and send notifications to stakeholders. This has been broken for some time by CloudFilter. Most (All?) US providers rate-limit access to SMS via email by filtering inbound mail through CloudFilter. This has resulted in me missing countless outage events. I'm not sure that my sites aren't even permanently blacklisted at this point. As far as I know there is no way to "opt out" of this, except in the case of Enterprise customers. We are not an Enterprise Customer. In fact if I get one pager event every 3 or 4 months that would surprise me. I'm not exactly "high volume". I do have a Business mobile account, but that evidently does not qualify me to opt out.
So...
I now have SMS emails being sent to my personal, non-work, email address. A cron job checks that folder for mail and if any exists, I use KDEConnect to send a "Find My Phone" alert to my phone. This isn't really ideal on any level:
KDEConnect uses an Alarm for the Find My Phone feature. I never realized this because I don't lose my phone. Makes total sense though since this means it doesn't respect Ringer or Alert volumes being muted or your phone being on vibrate.
This solution will only work when I'm on my home network. Not a huge factor since I generally only leave the house for a 30 minute walk around the neighborhood every day. Otherwise I don't go outside unless it's unavoidable doctor/dentist visits
The fact that I have to write goddamn janky-as-fuck scripts to receive rudimentary alerting of potentially mission-critical failures
Earlier this year we were introduced to Gypsy: The Computer Oracle, a Mac game from 1985. This started a whole Thing and I immediately set about making this work in a display that could be exposed to the public with as little friction as possible for people to play with.
This is how that turned out.
For the machine I just used a brand-new Raspberry Pi 3B+ mounted to the back of an Eyoyo 4:3 monitor and added grommets to some Velcro straps for securing the HDMI, power and mouse cables.
This is very much a 1-weekend hack job project and is not anyone's idea of "secure", but it's also not meant to be connected to a network or a keyboard. At some point I might compile out the standard hotkeys for management of Mini vMac, but for now it's fine. If someone yoinks a keyboard out of their pants and inconspicuously plugs it in and starts hammering away, well now they've got access to a single-function Linux machine with no network. Congrats.
I have to admit though, I have been toying with linking multiple web-based Ouija boards together so different locations can send messages back and forth, or to a (non-ai, more Eliza-level) chatbot if there's no one on the other end at the moment.
A couple of months ago the Salem Witchboard Museum got a copy of Gypsy: The Computer Oracle for the Mac from 1985. We got to play with the game on original hardware and took some photos for their site in our livingroom:
I immediately copied the software and started trying to make an image that I could play in emulation. But a 400k GCR Mac floppy, while I could easily copy it with Copy II it turned out to be more difficult to image and there don't seem to be any archived anywhere that I was able to find. An image just fell in my lap today and has now been uploaded to Macintosh Garden for preservation!
I've quickly bashed up a menu listing in my auto-booting Raspberry Pi emulation machine. Ultimately this will automatically boot to the game and hopefully be used in an interactive display in the museum.
Note: This ugly disjointed ramble has been in my "Notes to myself that I'm never going to post" queue for a couple of weeks. But JWZ has recently tried to finally engage the enemy and released XScreenSaver 6.11.
I've been running Linux with XScreenSaver since the very early days of KDEs usable existence on my daily driver machines as a senior sysadmin, network admin, tools hacker. Overall this has been the correct choice even though for several years there in the 2000s sysadminning my workstation seemed to be like 60% of my job. At the end of the day, I'm just some guy. I'm not a developer, and I'm not part of The Community of circle jerking Thought Leaders and Influencers. Just a worker bee with 30 years of workflow and tools I want to keep working. Most of my personal productivity tooling has survived migration to Wayland, but several things I rely on, such as Synergy (copy buffer sync) are major blockers. XScreenSaver is a pretty major blocker for me too.
However in their utter dismissal of tools like XScreenSaver, Big Desktop (Wayland, KDE, and I assume GNOME) are really pissing me off as a user and pushing me back off the platform. It's just emblematic of how emphasis is moving away from users being able to define their own environment to their needs and toward more control from RH et al.
I don't know why Wayland and/or DE projects don't even entertain the opinions of the developer who's been consistently locking screens on Unix for over 30 years. I don't hear Jamie even really wanting to handle locking the screen necessarily, only that there's no framework to work within the existing locking mechanisms to show hacks at lock time. XScreenSaver works (with hurdles of course since nothing can ever be painless in JWZ-world) just fine on MacOS with Apple handling the locker as far as I can tell.
It baffles me to see responses from leaders of distros that boil down to in a post-CRT world your use case is irrelevant, your machine should be asleep to save power, Consumer. Screensavers are not a RedHat approved use of electricity. So no one should play video games because it's a gluttonous waste of energy. Nevermind the fact that with modern monitors and SSDs a NUC can run for days on screensaver before you approach my power draw for 5 minutes in 2000, with my 3x 21" Trinitrons and spinning drives grinding away. Man, the heat that used to come off of all that shit. The power consumption argument is as dismissive as it gets.
Wayland and DE people talk "security", and I get that things such as KMag can't work because windows shouldn't be able to know what is being displayed by other windows. Get it. But my security profile isn't "I'm on an NSA workstation on an airgapped network". My systems are all inside my house. I habitually lock screens out of A: Good Security Practice and B: keyboard-typo-safety. If I get up to pat my cat or get a snack, I want my machine to be Hacking the Gibson when I get back in 5 minutes. I do not want my machine to sleep since I probably have 30 RDP / SSH sessions open to other hosts. If someone needs to sit at my terminal to get the Secret Missile Codes I've got bigger problems. They've probably already killed me and my cat.
Microsoft and Apple figured out how to securely let a third party display a screensaver while the OS handles locking decades ago.
It should be embarrassing to Big Desktop that XScreenSaver works better on my goddamn phone as a live background than it does on Wayland.
"What never was cannot be broken" / "Works well and as designed" -- Guy Who Isn't The Whole of the Problem.
I guess someone needs to write "Why Cooperation With Wayland is Impossible".
I can't fucking wait until ssh forwarding breaks with applications I care about. I'm sure it'll happen one day and just make my systems that little bit less useful. Remote Display / Tunneling is a Worthless Legacy Feature. You should use RDP now or VNC or whatever...
Because of the same Technology Connections video as everyone else we quickly amassed an army of Sunbeam Toastmasters, hopefully a lifetime supply. The one in this video is the first one we got. It works great but really should be rewired. It's now the backup to our daily driver which has already had its cord replaced.
1:35 to identically toasted toast every single time like clockwork.
