In my intro to the Checkmate monitor video I mentioned how I'd love to have this on a datacenter bench and maybe throw a switch in there as well. Well now I'm going to do that.
Now that I'm starting to use all these computers for more than a couple minutes once every few months it's time to build a proper isolation network. I'm beginning the process or archiving loads of Atari ST and GCR Mac floppies so I definitely want to have somewhere safe to do that work. The little Raspberry Pi 3 in my monitor will serve as the bridge, serving old and insecure protocols to that network so we can have the full '90s experience. So it's listening on Telnet and FTP to host archives of all the NeXT software ever made for instance. I'll be dialing back Samba security to the point that a Windows 3.11 or 95 machine can connect to the fileshare. The Pi will also provide the WiFi network for exciting things coming up like my FujiNet cartridge that I haven't even tried to play with yet. I will very likely move DHCP and DNS resolution from the default gateway to the Pi just so I can pick the whole thing up and take it places. Plug devices in and they'll be able to get an address and browse by hostnames and stuff.
It's so nice to have an all-in-one solution and I'm happy to stick a little PoE powered switch in the Checkmate to provide the networking for all of it. This monitor is now a "pick it up and go" solution to demo a wholly contained network of 1980s and 1990s machines where no one can hurt them. If I went to things like VCF, this is what I'd bring to run my whole table.
That monitor is going to feature in a lot of my stuff in a big way. Every time I do a project I find a new use for it! Running desktop computers through multiple VGA switch-boxes? Still looks great!
Again, sorry for the "beginner" nature of all of this but I'm playing with kdenlive and learning how to speed things up and make short clip montages, so you can watch me suffer as I learn :-) It's basically 1978 PBS, WTF do you want it fits my entire aesthetic. Look where I live.
Stay tuned to see my friction-free and more importantly secure way of interacting with all these backend systems. Coming Soon!
I've got a ton of video, all of it garbage, about making a dumb shelf and backplate for my "retro things Isolation Network" that I'm trying to get down to like 20 minutes.
I think the thing to do is watch it all through, then make notes and then go back and execute the notes rather than try to do it one at a time as individual tweaks.
To manage this I'm gonna try and use my internal Wiki with a link on the homepage to like my Blog Notes category so I can go update stuff as I watch, then check them off as I complete them.
We'll see. I just want to put up the dumb "Switch in a Monitor!" video so I can do the really cool stuff of "How I am securing this since no one else talks about this stuff.
But since I've been working on this in the last two days:
My NeXTStation started hanging at the ROM Monitor check screen. I know this has happened before and I know I changed the iSCSI image but I think the real answer was something stupider than that.
This would be a way cooler demo if I had a second machine, like say a NeXTStation which was just working awesome like 3 days ago. I think I gotta just fire up the 95 PC what am I even thinking here duh.
I just replaced my webserver hardware up to the hard drive. I suspect this thing's problems aren't hardware but you never know and it's easier than moving everything.
I dropped one of the very nice thumbscrews from the monitor while I was wrangling cables. It's in the room somewhere. But if you've ever worked in a datacenter you know that a lot of the stuff you drop is just gone into the rack somewhere and you'll never see it again.
Bonus points for nice and beefy but non-ferrous objects. So if I could hit 'em with a magnet they'd probably be super easy to find.
NeXTStation status updated to Dead. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again
My stupid thumb is still bleeding after cutting it on Friday. I've lived with much worse without going to a doctor don't you worry. It could probably use like a stitch or something. I should figure out how to do that.
I've updated all my tools and unit tests for the video no one ever makes about how they actually do the work of dealing with their Retro networks.
Argh. I've got so much stuff to build and I just want to get at it already instead of wasting time editing nonsense that didn't even really work out!
Today was my last day at work, so of course I'm pulling an all-nighter working on projects and building my workflow. I don't think that will ever stop.
*I just got yelled at at 2:40am for pulling an all-nighter right now today. I'm like dude, it's my vacation, and this is me, relaxing on my goddamn vacation! I can sleep in a few days*
This is the desk I sat at for the last 5 years of my job and for two days a week for a decade before that. To be honest it feels weird for the job to be gone and for me to still be allowed in here. This is likely the last photo that will have my work laptop running Gibson in it. I am currently running through every bin and every parts drawer and converting my entire life over from full time network and server admin to ... someone who just hangs out and does projects and upgrades and documentation for a while.
And this is a sneak peek at what I mean when I say "I have a lot of projects in mind for this CheckMate monitor". I'm waiting for one sort-of crucial piece to this puzzle, then I'm going to make an in-depth tour of how I run all of this stuff, from media services to radio broadcasts. I'll be upgrading and making a lot of sysadmin improvements now that I have been freed for a bit. Retro computers are a piece, but are not really the "purpose" of this pile of stuff. My talents lie elsewhere. Fun times ahead as I embrace my inner digital hermit! I will explain why that is a good thing.
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy - Television, The Drug of the Nation
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.
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.
I have a lot of floppies that I need to start imaging and archiving and it's going to mean feeding this USB floppy drive constantly. I have an Atari SF314 external floppy drive with (at least) a broken switch, so I decided to gut it and managed to shim my USB drive in nice and snugly. The Atari drive is safely stored with my other projects to get that switch repaired.
This is 73% more enjoyable than getting disks in and out of this flimsy little USB drive that skitters around on the desk!
I did take the Atari drive apart to try and add the floppy bezel and/or parallelogram eject button, but the bezel doesn't fit with the new drive, and the button requires the bezel to stay put. I decided to stop before I break some 40 year old plastic tab.
Well looks like that USB drive won't read double density disks anyway. Whatever, still looks cool I'm not even mad.
I might actually have to use a Packard Bell 486 with Redhat 4 or Windows 95 for this.
Jeanne & The Darlings - How Can You Mistreat The One You Love
I've got a backup management tool set to write. I'll post it when I've got something written and implemented.
I have a small-ish NAS. I currently do nightly Read-Only backups to another NAS stored at a friend's house. Every so often I'll do a "destructive" (Copy & Delete) backup to clean up any files I've deleted or moved since there would be two copies on the target. I only run that when I'm reasonably sure things are "good" on the main device.
My new plan involves a second off-site backup and will give me an effective 2 month backup retention period.
Getting video off my Atari 1040STf has been a real journey. The general consensus is that high-res mono will work on any monitor, and then for color you'll just make a composite mod cable coming off your standard Atari monitor port. The trouble is that composite video is only on that port if you have an RF modulator, so either STFM or STE so that wasn't really an option. When I got the ST I bought a Truemouse USB dingus and a DIN 13 to VGA, but that thing never worked. It's likely I immediately smoked it, I'm not really sure what the deal is there, but I just figured I needed something Special even for mono. I've seen videos of people using Mono on an LCD but figured they had some scaler going on.
While all this was happening I joined the kickstarter for the Checkmate IPS monitor. This thing is a /monster/ and I love it, but a main factor in my decision was its advertised support for 15khz video produced by the ST's color mode. However it wasn't clear that that support relies on having composite video. The VGA port is unfortunately 35Khz only. Not their fault, it does what it says on the tin. The tin is just ambiguous ;-)
While I was poring over various methods to fix all this I did, after watching Rees' shootout videoactually get an OSSC Pro, which was definitely the right move. However totally unrelated to that searching this video by BackOfficeShow popped up from 8 years ago and sparked what would become the answer. Big shout out. I'm a long time subscriber but never came across this one. Basically you can just passively wire an Atari DIN-13 to a VGA cable directly and it'll just work, at least for mono since again, 15Khz sync for the color mode. But I had the OSSC on the way and his switch seemed like it ought to just work. I just need to order a switch and a 13 pin DIN port or rip the one off my non-functional $9 Atari -> VGA dingus.
While digging around looking for "extra" cables it dawned on me that I thought I had a monitor switchbox, and indeed, here it is with the ST:
This box is a Practical Solutions Monitor Master, is designed to have two monitors plugged in and switch a single inbound signal between them. It's got a single latching switch at the front, and a permanently attached monitor cable to the computer, two monitor-out ports, mono audio out and composite out on the back.
Turns out the switch inside is a 6 way 2 pole switch which is more than enough space to do what I need to switch. What I ended up doing was to pull out the composite connector and use that hole to run my VGA cable out of. The switch very helpfully has pins on the top side for each of the sets of switched connections, so I was able to use the "left" side for the R, G and B/Mono signals and one of the other pairs for the mono detect line, which basically just grounds the mono detect wire when the button is latched. Oh and I had to lift the signal pin for the audio and run that separately. Of everything I feel this connection is the most tenuous. If I do it over again I would leave the audio switch intact and wire that up through the board as normal.
Rather than remove the switch or modify the internals in any way, I just bypassed the on-board connector altogether and only used the board for the ground plane. I just have dupont connectors connecting to the ST-side cable and then soldered to the appropriate switch pins. This means my signals are going all over the place, and probably bad things will happen if you plug a monitor into one of the monitor ports while it's configured this way, but it's also quickly reversible. Just rip out my crappy wiring and plug the cable into the original connector and you're good to go.
Here's kind of a demo:
The man I bought this collection from had color and mono monitors, and obviously bought a monitor switchbox because he always had the good toys. It's kind of important to me to maintain and recreate the original workflow for this machine. A couple of my major goals are to use the original ICD hard disk enclosure (with a BlueSCSI, I'm not a madman) and the Spectre GCR cartridge. I remember this machine in this configuration from the late '80s and early '90s, so I want to get it fully up and running as original as I can.
Far East keyboard vendors "are defining the lower end of the market, and I wish them a lot of luck, but we offer a better membrane keyboard, with better tactile feel, and a lot of service and market support here in the U.S. We offer Cadillacs, and are not the cheapest guys in the world."
- Lexmark's manager of market development Dick McCall regarding falling keyboard prices in 1993, just after spin-off from IBM
I recently bought a new Model F SSK. I've always felt bad for my role in The '90s Purge, wherein if I had a dollar for all the models M and F that ended up in a dumpster...well I could have put a down payment on a mortgage for a new modern Model F :-) I am not, repeat, not knocking the price. It's actually quite a value if you consider that a Model M sold for hundreds of 1989 dollars (MSRP direct from IBM anyway) as the cost-reduced, slightly crappier replacement for the F. It's also a labor of love and I like to support these sorts of projects. It's /incredibly/ well made and is just an absolute monster.
Aside from some initial glitchiness with a couple of "iffy" flippers and springs, we got it up and running relatively quickly. Definitely get the First Aid Kit, in fact I'll probably get another just to have it. The only modification I made from the default was to remove the fixed USB cable and replace it with a USB-C M -> USB-A F dingus so I could just swap it with my normal keyboard cable.
This steel & aluminum Model F also makes a Model M feel like the toy at the bottom of the Cap'n Crunch box.
Witness:
The model f ssk is pretty pingy but is a total pleasure to type on. My cow-orkers are lucky I didn't haul it down to our 3 day on-site meeing or they'd have tried to murder me in the first 10 minutes. Luckily it doubles as a weapon so I'd have been just fine.
See. The model M sounds like and feels like a children's toy by comparison. IT'S WHISPER QUIET!
Working in the computer store in the '90s I always loved the Model Fs we had around and tried to use them as bench machines, but they were /just/ that little bit too oddly laid out to be useful. So I heaved 'em. Lots of Model Ms too, and 5150s...yeah yeah. Progress. How was I supposed to know I could have made a lucrative career out of making videos about the crap in the basement of a computer store 30 years later?
I like the Model M keyboards I've got, but without fail a couple of weeks into using one my hands start to hurt and I worry about "This is it, after 40 years of this shit I'm finally getting some kind of RSI nonsense". Then I switch to a Keychron and everything is better after a day or two. It's weird because my natural tendency is to kind of hammer on keyboards, or at least I feel like I do, what do I know.
The F feels a lot lighter while typing even if it sounds much more violent. I haven't had any strain yet.
Verdict: Get one! They're Great! - As long as you don't mind maddening frustration when you assemble the whole thing and a single goddamn key won't actuate so you have to take all the caps back off and rip it apart. Not that I had to do that several times. Honestly I wasn't going to get this because I knew from reviews that it shipped without the keycaps and it looked irritating and fiddly to get it going (and I was right!) but Natalie talked me into it. I'm leaving the "locking" tab bent open since like, is it even possible for that backplate to slide? Time will tell!
Again, none of that is a knock on the manufacturing of this thing. It's /great/ and I'm sure it'll last me until I die. I just know my limitations and that I have a very low tolerance for frustration since I've been abused and burned by work for far too long and as such have no patience for friction unless I'm being paid. I don't care how much fucking hacker-chow gets in there, these keycaps aren't coming off to clean or anything unless I absolutely have to.
I was certain that one of Thomas's videos on the modern Model F showed the key assembly process, but I can't find it. Enjoy anyway.
