Old Vintage Computing Research

A periodic fascination on this blog is figuring out better ways to get better screenshots of our classic systems, which often hail from the Wild Wild West/East in terms of video standards (read all entries in this series). Naturally the best way is a bitwise direct grab of the framebuffer, but that's only possible if there's sufficient operating system support. This support is obviously absent for things like boot messages (especially important when investigating NetWare on the Power Mac 6100), so we need to figure out a way to capture that information. My capture box of choice is currently an Inogeni VGA2USB3, which is small, self-contained, USB-powered, highly compatible and makes high quality grabs of anything you can wire into composite or a VGA HD-15 connector up to 1080p, but is limited to 60Hz refresh rates. Various solutions like the OSSC exist, but these are more oriented to arcades and consoles rather than (our primary interest) workstations, and the Pro in particular isn't cheap.

While you might be able to trick the hardware into emitting a compatible signal, that's not good enough or even possible with several of my machines. Previously my problem child was astro, my SAIC Galaxy 1100, a modified PA-RISC HP 9000/712 crammed into a MIL-SPEC portable case with a fabulous built-in flat panel. These machines ran HP-UX 10.10 in their original heyday, but this particular system runs NeXTSTEP 3.3 for PA-RISC during the brief period of time NeXT supported the architecture and was a big hit at the Vintage Computer Festival West a few years ago. Its flat panel runs at an odd 62Hz and the external VGA port only generates a 60Hz signal for 640x480 (all other resolutions use different refresh rates), which is hopeless for running NeXTSTEP. However, now I have a new candidate I'd like to get some grabs off: a particularly problematic member of the Atari ST family which has been the subject of a long-running and highly frustrating extended Refurb Weekend. You'll get to meet this bad girl soon enough. The standard ST high resolution mode is 640x400 — at 71.2Hz. I can get a picture from it with my trusty NEC flat panel, but not with the Inogeni.

The usual solution to this is a scan converter, but those can be expensive and inconvenient. Here's one I picked up used on eBay for $2. Yes, really. It cost more to ship it.

This is the Hall Research Technologies SC-VGA-2, sold as a "VGA/HDTV Video Processor." In addition to slicing, dicing and pureeing, apparently, it will take any of a bundle of input formats and both rescale and resample them on the fly into the VGA or HDTV signal you desire, including 60Hz rates. This came from a seller specializing in teleprompter equipment and Hall still sells an HDMI version with additional resolutions ... for around US$500. However, this or the slightly newer SC-VGA-2A and SC-VGA-2B are all relatively common devices and found substantially cheaper used. Let's try it out and show some sample output, including those delicious NeXTSTEP system messages and some ST grabs.

We were a Commodore 64/128 household growing up, and Apple IIe systems at school, but that doesn't mean I was unaware of Atari 8-bits. There was a family at church who had an 800XL and later a 130XE — and a stack of COMPUTE!'s I used to read through for hours — and it was interesting to compare the two worlds, especially the relatively luxurious Atari BASIC and DOS against Commodore's spartan accoutrements. On the other hand, there was a lot more software and peripherals for the C64 by then, and you ended up becoming a lot more proficient with the guts of the hardware because you had to. Plus, Jack Tramiel's Atari was a lot like Jack Tramiel's Commodore and not always in a good way. I have an XEGS (functionally a 65XE when you add the keyboard) and a 1050 disk drive I should set up somewhere and mess around with a little.

But that doesn't mean Atari didn't try. Prior to all that, Atari in the Warner Communications days put forth substantial effort to make it competitive in all kinds of settings, notably education. Ataris had some unique hardware in that niche; an Atari was the first non-Control Data microcomputer to access the PLATO network, for example. And then there was the AtariLab.

With a very simple interface box, your Atari 8-bit could read the temperature and sense brightness. You could run experiments on it at school, including polarized and coloured light, or testing how quickly things cool and heat. You could use it at home with your own programs thanks to its comprehensive documentation.

But the surprising part is that even though these were the only such devices released under the AtariLab name, they weren't the end of the line: besides its stealthy revival for other home computers like the Commodore 128 running it here, its creator also turns up in one of the more interesting scientific data acquisition devices I've run across in its price range. We'll test-drive the software, hack on the platforms a little, and try some even more outlandish sensors. Let's go down the rabbit hole with AtariLab — and its full-fledged descendants.