What do you mean sorry? Try to be more careful 😝

It's okay and all but I love the backdrop for this and what sounds like in the peanuts cartoons about whenever adults would be talking that sort of effect it brings back memories yearly peanuts specials! Also most people may not be aware but there are many other specials that we never saw in the United States at least originally since they were all over the world apparently so there some that most people have never seen and at least they used to be here on KZfaq so if you're a fan of Charlie Brown it's worth looking around on KZfaq for this! I found a couple of specials that I had recorded on VHS originally don't worry this would be for my own use only but I would digitize this for the future for the holidays primarily. Also has anyone ever seen the Blondie special that one was just over the edge for any one that's a real geek trust me worth looking at if you haven't seen it! Thinking of this mind set computer got me thinking about the old bee box! What everyone said that if you wanted to hook the coffee maker up to the computer this is the computer you would use essentially! It did have the ultimate user port including power out and yes fused! Analog Da and AD converters!. Digital inputs and outputs. AKA gpio! This even happened in the option for up to four IBM compatible type joysticks. And built-in midi interface. This is all Native. Not to mention the joystick ports were not just a quad 555 timer! But an actual analog to digital converter! This is probably the first real computer that was all set to do any home automation DYI project I'd say. Unfortunately almost everything I believe was proprietary in terms of operating system and so on not sure if there was ever a Linux derivative for this machine! I think we should bring back the user port Commodore Business Systems had this for the longest! Even having some sort of USB interface that will open up this possibility and easily be able to access it through any operating system or even a dedicated Linux device yes I know Raspberry Pi can do this. But something that we allow you to just basically plug in a large connector and be able to do whatever you want with the capabilities are there! Not to mention having a Serial ports and parallel ports available! These are not dead ports by any means. This would need to be running Linux since support has really been dropped for direct access at least into the parallel port via Microsoft Windows! I don't know if running the Linux side of things in Windows could be workaround either! Parallel port is actually desirable sometimes since it's so easy to interface with and it's not just eight bits of data out! You could use all control lines and all pins further versatility! Which sometimes there's more available there and then some dedicated interfaces just a bit of isolation and Signal conditioning and possibly inverting a few lines you got yourself a general purpose interface. And just bit banging the parallel port can be more useful than most things that are out there. There were so many things back in the day that use the parallel port for control even robotics kid accessories just literally plug straight into the parallel port essentially. And depending on what Hardware support you can get a lot more than a single port by just losing one data bit! Not to mention two-way communication and much more! And orange 232 is very much alive but not as much general purpose anymore but more niche! Nowadays you could even use it in entertainment center such as to control the television if it's equipped. There are even some CD/DVD and so on players that are full on media players that can even be fully controlled as well as receive data from on rs232. Interior even if you wanted to have now playing sorry to display you could extract the data from the player and also run the unit from there even can tell all status and do much more than even the remote can! Some cases all you need is three wires for basic cereal Port even if you only need one way data in some cases it's still pertinent! There were even more modern machines that actually had still at least one rs232 serial Port even if there was not a actual Port it was on the motherboard. There was even certain machines that actually did include this even externally for Niche applications. There is Hardware still available that even something like an adult pair of Lego that's also interested in computers could easily use parallel ports and serial ports and even USB at the same time and do some pretty spectacular stuff. Courtesy of the original we do robotics kit USB interfaces. Lego interface a which was parallel port even though only using six data lines up to six outputs non-versible and up to three reversible or any combination thereof. This was for the 4.5 volt system! And also the interface B which is rs232 serial! This was up to eight inputs and eight outputs! For the 9 volt system! This was even before LEGO Mindstorms this was with the Lego education even back in the Apple 2 era! By the way the interface a was originally designed for operation from the parallel printer port! The only logic was the actual switching essentially it's a dumb interface and all it was was literally an interface between the parallel port and the outputs. Literally using to control lines as inputs six data lines as outputs. Even the IBM pcxt had a dedicated IO card for this! Don't know why they did not just use a parallel port cable on this one! Unless of course figured the parallel port might already been in use? On the Commodore 64 it connected to the user port! There was dedicated system cables available along with the software used a ribbon cable oftentimes the same cable for each system other than specific ones that would need a different type of connection. There is a DYI parallel port cable schematic available!

More than worth the wait. These videos are so cool.

well, relatively speaking Amiga was much more "successful" - one thing it had going was that it was an excellent 2D gaming system - hah, and it could run MacOS better than Mac hardware

One thing Mindset did have going for them was the suite of graphics tools available on day one. I imagine the Amiga would be an easier sell if they had done that!

@@TheSulross actually Amiga was pretty much a same failure which almost drove Commodore into bankruptcy in summer of 1986. It was later A500 and A2000 models that got kind a successful. But the first Amiga (A1000) was about same failure as the Mindset, and even found its "killer app" at same audience as Mindset, video titling...

@@madigorfkgoogle9349 Yeah, in post-Tramiel Commodore fashion, they didn't know how to market it and get it ready for the market. When they finally got that ability, they fucked up the R&D.

They've *really* shot up lately. Like even until a year ago you could get a complete system for $1000 or so. Now a cpu unit by itself sold for that much. They're finally getting their due I guess!

I did extensive reading of old newspaper articles and it does seem like they really didn't have a strong team to guide retailers. I think they would have been better off to choose one market or the other and throw all their efforts into that. They were spread thin as it was.

They are all about arcade machines now, very talented young people doing FPGA but they are from the nintendo generation and understandably have little interest in machines such as this from a preservation perspective and giving people a chance to experience them. The usual argument is no software for them to make the effort but the Lisa had almost none yet was such an important point in home pc development. It's a shame but understandable.

@@pauledwards2817 it was steve job failing to understand software drive hardware sells and woz understand that very well if you look at his last thing he made with apple with the iigs, apple could have been our PC what IBM did but woz didn't understand this logical thinking.

@@pauledwards2817 I'm not sure it's fair to lump them in to the "Nintendo generation". There are lots of FPGA cores for old platforms. The problem is simply the general obscurity of machines like this. They didn't become mainstream, so most people involved in recreating old hardware have no personal connection to them. Nostalgia is usually what drives these people, or at least curiosity. Hopefully videos like this will grab someone's imagination and inspire them. 🙂

I wonder what the price differential was. I remember hardware being fiendishly expensive back then.

​@@TechTimeTraveller I am not sure of cost, but Byte Magazine in Jan 1984 lists a 68000 for $49, and Z80A for less than $5, both retail costs. I cant see the 286 costing more than $200. Actually if you can believe Wikipedia, it shows in July 1985 a 10 Mhz 286 costing $155 in batches of 100

Yeah. I think the fully kitted out Mindset topped out around $3k, so discounting the cost of the 186 to put in a 286 it doesn't *seem* like a big deal. The 286 would have just been coming out when they were doing the initial design in 82, maybe they were too committed already to redesign it again.

How punny, …. Nerds are losers.. look in the mirror

The Atari VCS console used cartridges several years earlier than the amazing 400/800 computers. I'm not sure who first came up with the cartridge idea, it probably wasn't Atari, but they certainly made it mainstream. I miss the days of lots of competing 8 and 16 bit computer platforms, before the IBM PC became THE standard.

The guy who engineered the Fairchild Channel F gets credit for the carts. They were ROMS running on a system with a CPU and a small amount of RAM.

I sort of had a mental debate about how granular to get with this video. I really wanted to show the Mindset operating in real time so people could get a sense of how long things take and sounds and such. I may do that in the followup. But for this video I needed to edit a bit. I almost didn't include the drive noises at all, but am glad I did.

To me, this computer looks like the Commodore 128D. Please take that as a compliment it's meant to be.

If Commodore had used the original Boing Ball demo with the text, then the ST would've had no chance to copy it. But, alas.

Yep the Amiga was great for color graphics, but its flickering interlaced screen made it unusable for productivity apps. Using it for more than 15 minutes for word processing, DTP, etc gave the average person a headache.

@@Sl1pstreams that's why people used a Scandoubler / Flickerfixer

Amusingly though, the Atari 8bits could do the boing ball quite nicely. (Not the boing ball demo, but it also exists, I just think this one is cooler) m.kzfaq.info/get/bejne/puCodMl4ubWcnnk.html Besides, the Amiga wasn't impressive because of the boing ball... it was impressive because you could pull down the screen and use workbench while it ran in the background. Back when multitasking wasn't really a thing. A whole lot of the awesomeness of the Amiga was in the OS. The STe (if doing gaming) was very much capable of doing the same as the Amiga, Atari just took way too long to release it, and then the short lived Falcon line finally started to be better than the Amiga, and Atari killed it.

are you aware that amiga Boing demo was pure color cycled animation? so simple that even 1MHz C64 could handle it - "Boing Ball on C64". And remember that Atari was faster than Amiga by 11% or more.

YES! There is a deep, missing niche for reviews of old art programs and peripherals. When my living situation improves, I'll be the one to do it if no one else does.

What do you mean "C-like"?

I am genuinely excited about you watching my stuff! I will be enjoying the rest of your 4P fix this aft during my workout!

I doubt anyone in 1985 would have imagined you trying to run this machine in 2022. You have to cut those MOS chip developers a little bit more slack, please.

Yeah I'm not sure it was ever released there.. im not sure the power supply was set up for 220v, which leads me to believe it wasn't offered there. I should check that out.

Much obliged!

@@TechTimeTraveller watched the whole video, absolutely worth the wait. this was great, thank you for all your time and effort. looking forward to whatever's next, as always.

I am very much interested in building an EDUC8. There was a fellow who built one recently.. I can't remember if he made his own boards or ordered them from the original supplier. Might be thinking of the DREAM for that one. But he definitely built an EDUC8 and I was pretty intrigued by it. Will def check out your stuff!

Yes I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sound bleedthrough unfortunately. I've caught a couple of them with my earphones on where I accidentally bang the desk where my mic is setup or whatnot. Not too noticeable but present. I had probably about 8 hours of footage that got edited down to that 1 hour. I actually reshot the entire operation of the machine 3 times before I got the look I wanted on camera. I'll have to get into a habit of listening to the raw footage right there and then and reshoot if it pops into an important area. I think the low pass filter did its job this time around.. I didn't hear any degradation from the original. I did try messing with the notch filter but I kept getting this weird 'telephone' effect. I need to study that a bit more. Really appreciate the feedback and glad you enjoyed the end product! Always want to improve and the tips really help.

Sorry on behalf of my generation. We suck.

@@Solaceon I don’t understand this comment in this context. What generation sucks, and how does this relate to these comments?

@@Solaceon I remember my first paid gig sitting among six giant, CAD monitors in an engineering department. I asked the old timers sitting around how they dealt with the constant high-pitched whine of their monitors. In reply, they just looked at me funny and asked "What whine?" 😢

Very likely. Too small of a pool of people with that skillset probably in 1984 to be a coincidence.

I've been surprised by how many machines have them. I keep thinking I've found the last one and a other pops up. Just bought a Slicer which is a 80186 kit computer.

I am sad that computers lost their verve once the PC-compatible situation took over. It's kind of like what happened with cars as safety standards tightened - they all became eggs. I don't know what it is with the Mindset - it just has this retro-futuristic thing going on. Looking at it in 84, you could have believed we'd in flying cars by now.

For those of us condemned to 4 color h--l on a slow IBM 5170 with its beeper sound, the Mindset would have looked like Nirvana. 😀

@@TechTimeTraveller It's just my "Commodore Snobbery" showing up... I would not touch a PC until the 486 became popular. VIC-20 > C64> Amiga 500>Amiga 3000 for me. I still like them better than PC's, even though I sell and service them for a living and have since 1994! Great channel, BTW - looking forward to catching up on your content.

@@10MARC The only Commodore I regretted buying was the Amiga 4000, which really felt buggy, like some R&D prototype. Especially when you compared the A4000 to the A3000, which was a dream machine. Like you, I only deigned to touch an IBM PC roughly around the 486 era. I remember being incredibly underwhelmed by the single-tasking ability of Windows 3.11.

The sound system was an early example of fixed wavetable output. The whole thing is implemented on a 8042 microcontroller, and in its memory is a fixed table of several sine waves, at different phases. The stereo option is literally another 8042 at another I/O port, with the same exact firmware. You could program how these tables were scanned, and while you could get some other waveforms out of them that approximated things like sawtooths, getting square waves, or other complex waveforms was very difficult using the two built in methods (MODE 1 and MODE 2). There's a reason why EVERYTHING sounds like a symphony of sines, because it was way too painful to get anything else. Depending on the audio mode, you can get either 3 or 4 voices out (with different outputs of very badly implemented random noise). I was able to get something approximating a sawtooth wave by quickly scanning the upward slope of sine table 1. You COULD, if you wanted to burn CPU cycles, put the 8042 in direct output mode, and feed it 8-bit data from code, to produce sampled output. Nobody actually did this though.

The color palette register on the Mindset was 16 bits wide. This allowed composite and RGBI colors to be specified at the same time. It was split into two sections, the top 4 bits were for the RGBI color space, and the bottom 10 bits were used for the composite color space, with 9 bits for the color, 3 bits per red, green, and blue color element, for 512 possible colors, and the 10th bit being the GENLOCK bit for overlay use. Mindset's ROM BIOS provided full access to the graphics subsystem. It was designed in such a way that given a graphics operation (e.g. filled rectangle), you could provide a linked list of items to render with the given function. This had the effect of completely mitigating the set up and tear down times normally associated with ROM BIOS interrupt calls, and made it possible to write even arcade games entirely with nothing but the BIOS calls, and not needing to handle the hardware directly, at all. The Mindset ISV programming manual (which you can get on Bitsavers) explains all of this in detail. There were BIOS calls for everything from text rendering to complex filled polylines, all accelerated by the GDP. The various filled operations operated at the word level, and you could specify colors for both composite and RGBI (even going so far as to specify two side by side colors for stippling to alleviate the color congestion). To further elaborate on the BIOS, there were two sets of BIOS calls, the compatibility layer, which put calls at the usual locations (INT 10H, 13H, 14H, etc.) to simulate what was needed for the IBM PC, but Mindset also put all the supercharged BIOS calls at traps EEH and EFH. E.g. the enhanced serial port calls provided FIFO buffering, for higher serial port performance, than INT 14H could allow.

Thank you! I didn't mean to bypass you - I forgot you knew all the internal details. Was a bit too focused on what you know about video. But this all useful info I can add as an addendum in my followup video. I really appreciate this! Do you know of any other software that was produced that really took advantage of the sound?

@@TechTimeTraveller There is a music and sound editor that was part of the ISV package (which you can get on bitsavers) which was intended for game developers to write sound and music data.

boing boom tschak!

I'm guessing the 120 foot peoples' clearance requirements made space utterly unaffordable for Mindset. :)

Thank you! It wasn't me that uploaded the images.. but they're up on bitsavers.org

The 186 was used in a small number of PC-like but PC-incompatible systems. Due to the on-chip peripherals mapped to the same I/O ports used by PC parts, it was impossible to produce a PC-compatible system with a genuine 186. The one I remember most was the Tandy 2000 which, unlike the Mindset apparently, could play Flight Simulator. Near as I can tell, Flight Simulator was the only graphical game released for the system.

The '186 was also used on the RM Nimbus which was quite popular in UK schools (after the BBC Micro)

@@andrewgale7731 It was also used in the Swedish school computer "Compis", which mean "friend" in Swedish. They selected CP/M 86 as operating system. MS/DOS ws possible but graphics etc not the same as in the IBM computer.

Well it depends on application. The most commonly recommended was the Taxan RGBVision 420. I don't see anything remarkable about it though. They also suggested the Zenith ZVM-135, for ... I forget how they put it.. I think it was to sync to RGB. Apparently with the Professional Video Graphics model they switched to analog RGB instead of digital. It's a bit over my head to be honest, but those are the two monitors they explicitly recommended.

I have a theory it was put there to allow the massive ram expansion for the upcoming Mindset II. I wish I could find a picture of the innards of that machine, but my guess is they put some stuff on a daughterboard that would have been suspended over the motherboard, and the interface between the two boards would have been that edge connector.

I noticed this after finishing the video myself. I was so focused on the daughterboards for genlocking that I missed it. My best guess is that it was put there for future expansion use. The Mindset II was to have 512k instead of 32, and I figure maybe they put it up on a daughterboard above the motherboard connecting to that new connector on the left. Sadly there are no photos of the inside of the Mindset II case, so I can't confirm. Another possibility is that it saw use in even later machines like the M3000, which did not use the original Mindset case and had various controls added.

You know what, I was reviewing the footage and I saw that too and regretted missing it. I'd never noticed it before and had no idea what it is. Since we know the board is pretty crammed and the Mindset II was going to have a lot more RAM, my best guess is maybe they accomplished the expansion by having a C connector, and maybe the expansion board with the additional RAM floats out over the mainboard. There's no opening in the case to go out. Really wish I had a photo of the Mindset II.

I doubt it. I forget which game David tried in his own video.. I think it was Planet X3, but I'd assume if the engine is similar it probably wouldn't work.

@*UncleJoe* I take this is a joke. a1000 looked great

As far as I've found Vyper was it. And that Chess game which was more of a port than something done from the ground up. It's possible something else is out there but so far Vyper is the only from scratch one.

That was kind of the idea. I like to borrow nostalgic references sometimes for my skits. Unfortunately it has served to remind me of my age.. a fair number of younger viewers apparently have never seen the Charlie Brown cartoons!