Computers

This one might be sort of tricky. Hey Natalie, do you guys sell anything we could like taste test in the store? Maybe I should email the lighting place like what we used to do back in the before times.

I'm building a shelf in this cubby to hold that super un-weildy VGA switcher. It's awesome but I would have paid triple the price for just 5 ports in a row rather than this octopus nonsense. It was $30, what do I want.

I need to mount that radio too, it looks super cool. I'm also going to make that the home for things like the NeXT VGA breakout box and hopefully the first USB keyboard and mouse dingus they sell. And a bin-full of adapters and "general retro-ey converters and plugs"

So I have this vintage brass and painted woodgrain gooseneck lamp which is awesome looking and so perfect for exactly what I need it for. Imagine sticking like a flashlight on its end pointing up vs this thing. But hoo man this thing's going to burn my house down like that bulb gets scalding hot within a minute or two.

These are 12V bulbs so that base has a transformer in it that gets nice and warm but gives switchable low/hi which is nice. It uses GE 1156F bulbs, which are like automotive backup lights or in a garage door opener. So I want like a modern LED equivalent that is going to look warm and nice like this thing but searching I don't think I trust buying anything I don't see with my own eyes first or someone personally vouches for. Whatever it is I'm not buying four of them for $10 without seeing them lit for real with my eyes.

I want the pleasant light qualities of a 60 year old incandescent light bulb made for one of like 2 "warm ambient light" scenarios for this bulb.

I'd pay $20 for a single bulb if I knew it was exactly what I wanted. I'm sensing a theme in this post.

I said I would have paid triple the $30 for a better design, I've got $130 let's do this thing because these are perfect:

For a year now I've had a Checkmate 19" 4:3 aspect ratio monitor, and I want to show how that's getting used. The reason I kind of sat on it for so long is that I got frustrated, then depressed and spiraling, and finally decided to fix things and spend myself out of my problems. For Health! And here we are, fully working solution, I'm super happy.

I've seen these monitors start showing up in videos from folks like Nostalgia Nerd and Modern Vintage Gamer, but I haven't seen them really exploring it so I want to share some of my favorite use cases. And with my upcoming sabbatical I'm planning on doing a lot of projects involving the machines you'll see here so I wanted to kind of intro everything before I get started on those.

So let's go check it out!
_{(Caveats: I am not comfortable making videos, and I'm not good at it. I didn't edit out many of my "behind the scenes" bumbling because if I have to figure it out, you have to watch me figure it out! Hopefully you find my awkward bumbling "charming")}

TL;DW;

The Checkmate is not just a monitor, it's also an integrated electronics project box, 2u mini-rack and hacking platform.

Basically as I said I ran into one or two semi-issues. The 15Khz horizontal scan rate thing on the VGA port was a real bummer and sent me down a hole, but the OSSC Pro worked out great to help solve that, even though I really don't understand that thing at all. It looked like shit for like a month and just through random button-mashing I got it to work great for both mono and color on the ST. Thanks to CTRL-ALT-Rees for the in-depth review of the OSSC vs RetroTink video specific to the Atari ST platform. If I ever get up the courage to do a factory reset on the OSSC I'll try and document exactly what settings need to be twiddled to make this work in my case.

Thanks again also to BackOfficeShow for leading me to the realization that converting ST to VGA was all just a simple passive "hook the wires to the other wires" process which inspired me to do my Monitor Master hack!

Future projects and other use cases

I do want to see if I can hack a GoTek in there to use as a drive on my ST with the rotary encoder in the monitor. That would be about the slickest thing imaginable. I'll probably get a GoTek with an encoder and try to remove that one and use the monitor one instead.

There are 12VDC headers on the backplane board. Can I wangle one to a barrel jack and mount an 8 port switch in here? I have a couple of 12v@1A Netgear GS108T switches and I'd love to see if I can pull that much power and have a little self-contained network. This is pointless. The Pi in there is just on WiFi, but I kinda want to see.

My most recent job ships cases and cases of hardware to healthcare trade shows. Much of the network hardware for the booth and even small PCs for running demos could easily be securely fitted into a Checkmate with the HDMI out going off to a big TV.

Portable industrial control and automation platform as a self contained control station again with several SBCs and integrated network switching

I'm a network and datacenter-ops guy who naturally looks at everything through that lens. If I were building a crash cart or repair workbench I'd love these just to fill with low power SBCs (Pi 3 works great) and switching for a portable KVM, isolation network and test suite.

While they're not "cheap" for a consumer product, thinking in terms of even small-scale datacenter hardware they're an absolute /steal/.

Other Quirks

I did run into a race issue with the Raspberry Pi as well. I think it takes a bit for the monitor to be fully up and ready to receive video as it starts up. At first I thought it might have been an inrush current type thing, but I think it's just that the monitor isn't "up" yet when the Pi starts shooting out video.

When I'd boot the monitor cold there would be no video until I unplugged and re-plugged power to the Pi. To fix that I added a 10000ms delay to /boot/config.txt and it works great:

boot_delay_ms=10000

To give you a sense of the depth of my personal psychosis, the other issue I kind of have is a ridiculous future-proofing one that is bonkers to even be worried about. There are 6 HDMI inputs on this monitor, but only the main one is directly addressable through the front-panel buttons. Using the front panel, you can switch between HDMI-1 and one of HDMI-2 through HDMI-6. To select between HDMI-2 -> 6 you must use the remote. You can kind of see me do this in the video.

From what I can figure out this of course makes total sense. The UI firmware of the panel, like the off-the-shelf stuff that is the same as the EYOYO monitors, knows nothing about the riser card with all those extra ports on it right? The firmware knows about two ports. The external HDMI-1, and an Internal HDMI that the mezzanine card plugs into, and can select between them. The remote therefore isn't interacting with that COTS firmware to do this, but instead it's controlling the mezzanine card to switch the input among the other 5 ports, which is a very neat way to work around that. I mean obviously the firmware can select the riser card ports, because that's where the composite inputs live as well. If I had to guess it "only" had code to handle two HDMI inputs, so this workaround was implemented.

That's obviously a totally rational way to do this, and really the only way you probably can. It's awesome. My "planner" brain is just saying well, what about in 30 years when that remote is dead or lost. How do I select those ports?

For all I know I can control that mezzanine card totally in code over GPIO from a Raspberry Pi, or serial, or LIRC (which this probably is). Who knows. That's Future Guy's problem. I haven't even dug into that, but I certainly intend to! I want to see just how far I can push this.

Greetz and Links

Checkmate1500plus.com for making an excellent project out of total engineering passion. Excellent work all around to Steve and Appy and the rest of the team!

BackOfficeShow.com for showing how easy it can be to convert ST to VGA and switch between mono and color.

CTRL-ALT-Rees.com for his in-depth OSSC testing and demonstration.

* Note, the "Static" on the little display I'm using for my OBS monitor I think is due to the DP to HDMI converter dingus going into the 30 foot HDMI cable to that monitor. I don't care it since it's all very temporary.

One more final sanity test and I think I'm good. Just today Natalie grabbed a Logitech Yeti Blue from Staples for $65. I had ordered one a couple of weeks ago and it didn't work, and then they got hard to find and I figured out they look like they're discontinuing them and so the natural scramble is underway.

I wound up caving and just buying the replacement model but even though i'd never heard sound through the "old" one I knew I liked it better. Gain control is a knob, not an infinite scroll wheel. Monitor headphone output, much sturdier.

Money wasn't a concern in my original decision. I looked at the specs for these two side by side and the old model was better on paper and I saw the price dumping so I really just wanted it for its features. I'm glad I wasn't crazy and the first one really wouldn't have worked!

*This was an email that I was writing, and just stopped and basically pasted in here and embedded videos in, so it's not super well formatted or anything.

This was probably the best explanation of core memory that actually made me understand it.

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I made a quick tour video for an audience of about four. Here's a brief look at the basic stuff in my office, much of which I will do better quality videos about soon. Maybe like a monthly VAST/SPACE meeting? I dunno.

Enjoy the 1992 aesthetic. Pretend it's a VHS-C tape or something you found at Goodwill.

Update: I didn't notice the screensaver during the whole desk part until uploading just now and it's my favorite thing ever.