I recall when watching the video, I thought, "I used to know what those meant." Even though I'm always playing with old computers I'm also always forgetting specifics like this if I'm not using them regularly.

@@devikwolf Bah I'm so oold I use to know what they meant as tose retro computers were the new-fangled hot items when I used them

Dte and dce, that was something I learned for a test... Never knew I would ever see that I real equipment.

@@MrSpacelyy Heh. It's basically just about the kind of equipment you're hooking up and how you want to use it.

My pride and joy of a DOS rig is a Magitronic system

At first it reminded me of a RIVA TNT 2 which I had way back in 2001 on an HP OEM.

The sad thing is that a few years ago they went for a couple of quid. Now the vintage computing market is stupid money.

@@cromulence Collector Tax will get you every time!

The board says NV886.0 so this is an AGP GeForce 2 Ultra.

VWestlife: finds cool, weird expansion cards at the local thrift LGR: finds an IBM PC-XT at Goodwill My local thrift stores: "Sorry, we only have terrible keyboards, and multifunction printers"

I shop at literally the exact same thrift store he goes to, and let me tell you, that is NOT a common find there. They do have some real gems every now an then though. I've found some really interesting vintage electronics including what might be the very first electronic game. It's the type where you put a card with questions and answers over the metal pegs, and you connect wires to try matching the correct answer. The only flaw with it is there's no actual logic in it whatsoever. If you memorize where the wires go you will always get everything right lol.

@@devikwolf I can't even watch thrifting videos. I just start seeing red.

Yep, I think the person who donated those cards probably parted out a Magitronic 8086 or 286 desktop they may have found. (Edit: probably a 286 or 386 judging by the settings on the third-party diskette drive controller card) I'm reminded of 'Datamini' and 'White BOX', both of which were local computer companies where I live that had gone defunct some time in the 2000s.

Man, I haven't seen a Magitronic logo in an age. I had all sorts of things from them.

It's entirely possible that they had unbranded clone cards made, of hardware by other manufacturers, so they could slap their own sticker on them.

It's an artifact of the wave-soldering machines of the time. Pefectly normal.

I have a Commodore 64 where replacing some of the RAM was a massive pain because of the thick solder covering the ground PCB trace. A proper rework desoldering gun probably does a lot better job on those than a desoldering braid does. I get a pit in my stomach now any time I see that on a board.

@@dennisp.2147 Well, it's an artifact of solder mask over tinned copper, which allowed molten solder to wick under the soldermask. This is why we use SMOBC, solder mask over bare copper, which prevents this.

Magitronic used to be an independent company (founded in 1985) before its acquisition by Liuski International in the early 90s. The company went out of business by 2000, but had exited the PC market around 1998-1999. With the resurgence of the retro PC movement, I saw it as a golden opportunity to resurrect the brand. Finding every PC and laptop they built will be difficult but I hope to have a database of drivers for the configurations they offered

The technology didn't change as quickly back then. A system held its value longer.

@@Caseytify Yeah, the humble ol' XT class hung around for quite a while, and people were still using them when I got a 386DX -- which we bought new while it was a contemporary platform, about 5 years after its initial release. Things picked up with the 2nd-gen Pentiums (75MHz, late 94), which doubled in speed a little over a year later (150MHz, beginning of 96), and then again a little over a year after that (300MHz PII, mid 97.)

To be fair, compare it to any other 16-bit computer from the early 1980s with similar capabilities and their circuitry will be equally as large or even larger. For example, the Zenith Z-100 series, NEC APC, Tandy 2000, etc.

@@vwestlife Yep, and that wasn't an accident, either. There was a focus on repairability and experimentation. But the clones focused on price, and consolidation definitely made them smaller and cheaper.

I was just going to say that!

Funny I just saw the computer chronicles shareware episode where they demo hotdir

It's the most reliable hard drive I own. It hasn't been formatted since 1998 and still has zero bad sectors!

I’ve also found a voodoo doll at a thrift store

Magitronic? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. I didn't even recognize it at first. :O I have a Magitronic 486 with a dead CMOS battery buried *somewhere* inside. It's stuck in a BIOS check loop until I can find it.

Look for a Dallas DS1287 chip. Those have a built-in battery that was supposed to last for 10 years. Unfortunately some motherboard came with it soldered on!

@@devikwolf Beware when trying to replace the Dallas chip, that most of the ones on eBay are old stock, and therefore no better than what's on your board. There are aftermarket chips from the vintage community that replace them. They take a standard coin cell, which is far more future-proof than either the original chip or dremeling out the original chip and trying to slap a coin cell holder onto the chip Which is what we had to do in the "olden days" ten years ago.

@@vwestlife I was hunting for that Dallas chip, I've seen plenty of them in the past but I couldn't find one in this machine. But I also stopped short of a full motherboard removal -- it's probably hidden somewhere extremely inconvenient. The chassis is extremely unfriendly to disassemble, as well. My intent is, if it is a Dallas chip with the internal battery, to replace it with one of the modern coin cell options instead! But first I gotta find it, and that includes figuring out how to open this thing without damaging it, when there's no info online for it!

@@dennisp.2147 That's the plan! It's because of this channel and others like it that I know about these great retro replacements :)

Although they did sell standalone add-on cards, they were more common pre-installed on Magitronic PCs

@@ct1660 correct

Ironically the Magitronic logo is meant to resemble sine waves / square waves.

@@ct1660 the moral of the story is: do not look at that logo when hungry.

@@netoe funny i posted while at Whataburger

Why?

Here you go: www.amstereo.org/files/ts.zip

@@vwestlife Excellent, thank you! I appreciate it!

Unfortunately this product is a good bit before my time working there. I think in my 3 years there I only ever fielded 2 or 3 calls related to the six-pack card, which was very obsolete by that point. And I don't recall ever dealing with this one at all. We did receive some minimal training on the 6-pack cards when I started, just in case anyone called about them, though.

To be fair, Amiga's double-density disk format was 880K, versus 720K for PCs (and Atari STs) and 800K for Macs.

@@vwestlife It's still nearly just half of even a DOS HD floppy disk. An Amiga-formatted HD disk is 1760K.

Amigas used their Paula sound chips for low-level disk I/O (data separation, finding syncwords, DMA'ing raw track data to/from memory). Paula was the only custom chip that never got upgraded in ECS or AGA, likely for cost reasons, hence the data-rate limitation. I can't remember if AA/AAA would have included an upgraded Paula, but Commodore imploded before those chips ever went into production. Paula would dump an entire track at once to memory, as raw MFM bytes, after which the graphics bit-blitter inside Agnus/Agnes would decode them, relieving the 68k of this task, but using the blitter made if flexible enough to handle GCR as well as MFM (so, reading 800k Mac disks was possible, but I think only the outer 300k or so - due to lack of variable-speed spindle motors on Amiga drives, inner tracks would come in at too fast a bit rate for Paula to sync to). I'm not sure quite how much Paula logic was shared between its audio & disk duties. I've seen demos play sound while loading from disk, but is it possible to generate audio while *writing* to a floppy? Clocks were probably derived from the video timing, which would mean the floppy driver having to take note of whether it's running on an NTSC or PAL machine.

@@jordanhazen7761 Seems like it would have included an upgraded Paula, the Wikipedia article talks about a Paula replacement called Mary that would double the amount of audio channels, so it would likely support HD disks as well.

Thanks, but I already have a new ribbon for it. I just haven't installed it yet.

@@vwestlife they dry up weather you use them or not. This protip will help you when that happens. ;)

It's fine. And that's not interference, it's CGA "snow".

@@vwestlife thanks, so whats the diference between interference and CGA snow then?

I didn't write it.

In the early 2000s.the addition of TV Out was to support using PCs as video recorder/streaming devices. At the time, you could buy video capture and TV tuner cards with the supporting software to create the ultimate home media player/recorder with your PC.

@@dougbrowning82 I am aware and actually used the TV Out at the time. Even on nVidia Cards. The Problem with nVidia TV Outs at the time is that you do NOT have any options to set Overscan, so the Picture is only 50-75% of the screen, i you'relucky. Thats why I said its mostly useless. And the necessary "TV Tool" for nVidia Cards is probably no longer obtainable.

@@Stefan_Payne I've discovered if you set the desktop resolution to 720x480 the overscan goes away and you get perfect output, at least on my FX Go 5200.

@@eDoc2020 Well, here is the Problem: the GF4 MX and FX and later had internal TV Encoder. Those were usable and nVidia had IIRC an option in the Drivers. That wasn't the case on the nVidia Chips with External TV Encoders (usually: Brooktree/Conexant or Philips), there you have a Digital Option: On/Off Thats all you can set in the drivers... Some ELSA, later maybe ASUS Driver might also have allowed that, but they were months behind...

@@Stefan_Payne I seem to think I have an NVIDIA card older than the GF2 MX but on further thought I don't. My TNT2 has the footprints for a video connector but it isn't populated.

Do you mean 28.8K? There was no such thing as 48.8. The speeds went from 28.8, to 33.6, to "56" K, even though the FCC limited the actual maximum speed to 53K.

@@vwestlife Yes, I absolutely meant 28.8, my bad!

The name of a former drug store (pharmacy) chain here in NJ.

Send me an e-mail via the link on the About page of my channel.