TRS-80 Model 100 from 1983 is one of my favorite machines thanks to its incredible battery life and a perfect keyboard comparable with profesional desktop terminals. The OS in ROM (including BASIC, serial terminal, text editor etc.) was written by Microsoft. The BASIC did not

After half a year being disassembled, my Digital DECpc 325 (a rebranded AST) is recapped and working. This one is worth preserving because how often could you see a 386 laptop with a color screen (albeit crappy one) and an SVGA chip supporting 256 colors in 640x480/800x600?

It was a bit painful process and David fixed it with thin wires. The video below better shows how thin they needed to be 🫢 Next time, I will show you what this card can do and how much it helped with CAD rendering. Stay tuned! 🧵5/5

I got this card from a friend, but sadly, it was damaged and nonworking. It was apparently in a bin with other useless hardware and multiple traces were mechanicaly damaged. Thanks to @david_klusacek and his skills, it is working again.🧵4/5

TIGA cards don't follow IBM video standards. They are not supported in BIOS nor have a text mode, so they cannot be used as a primary/boot adapter. You must load a TIGA driver and then you can use them only in programs supporting TIGA. Often in a dual-screen setup with VGA.🧵3/5

SPEA HiLite 1024 is just an entry-level offering for hi-end CAD work but still - it's a full-size ISA card with 1MB of video RAM and 1MB of program RAM. Yes, this is a fully programable board with a TMS34020 graphics processor. Cards with this processor are called TIGA.🧵2/5

🧵People tell me that nobody is interested in what I share because the HW is too obscure. Let's fix it with a graphics card for your ordinary PCs. Upper card is a good ISA SVGA Tseng ET4000. Bottom card is a SPEA HiLite 1024. Both 1MB cards, but SPEA is a CAD accelerator. ➡️1/5

Visual C++ Cross-Development Edition is a set of cross-compilers for the standard Win32/x86 IDE. They ported a lot of Win32 API, GDI etc. so the programs can be compiled for MacOS. There is a document explaining how to handle memory allocation (due to MacOS crude mem management).

Did you know this thing? 🫢 Visual C++ could compile for PPC and 68k Macs 🤫 I think I need to try it.

I used to think that all these Trident VGAs are equal but that is not true. The 8900D with 1MB is my favorite. It supports true color (640x480) and hi-color (800x600). It can also produce 72Hz in 800x600. Unlike previous models, this one uses 32bit access to its RAM and is fast.

Once installed, it looks like a typical generic UNIX with CDE. GUI configuration is similarly crude (as in HP-UX) with missing applets/commands for screen resolution config. USB stack is there but even keyboard/mouse is not detected by default and needs manual configuration.🧵3/3

On the other hand, Tru64 installer boots immediately into graphics mode (in this case it somehow decided that 1024x768/8bpp/60Hz is the best). It looks like Linux (RedHat, SUSE) installers from that time. It was extremely straightforward and surprisingly quick to install.🧵2/3

💾Installing Tru64 #UNIX on a Compaq AlphaServer DS10. A colleague of mine (former Digital employee) wanted to show me how the Tru64 was more advanced and user friendly than HP-UX. HP-UX (to its last days) was installed in text-mode and setup always looked like from 80s/90s.🧵1/3

That is all for now. The next step is to test it back in the computer it was shipped with. We need to install Windows NT 4.0 there first (and clean it a bit).

This demo does not run very fast, be you can see how the 256 color palettes are handled. If the OpenGL window is not active, the palette is changed so desktop looks ok.

Hardware OpenGL works though. And it is very fast. A simple "tank" game can render 30-60 fps in 800x600. The chip can draw gouraud-shaded polygons in 60+ Mpix/s.

It is also possible that the CPU is too new/incompatible with the card. Maybe the card did not follow the standard properly. There is "ALIAS" jumper that should be enabled on EV5 gen of CPU and disabled on EV4. My Alpha AXP is EV6 gen.

Finding the right driver was surprisingly difficult. I found only the version for Alpha (even tough it seems that x86 exists too). Sadly, there are artifacts. The hardware might be defective.

The CL driver is ported to Alpha CPU architecture and was loaded. However, still no more than 800x600 in 16 colors. The card switched to 72Hz refresh rate though. That was unexpected 😅.Let's try the video driver for the main graphics chip.

The card was detected by firmware and I successfully got into Windows NT4. It runs now with the VGA driver. Thus, it runs using the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5424 chip. 512KB is enough to get 800x600 in 256 colors. Let's try installing CL drivers first.