There's a healthy and well adjusted use of my resources, and then there's whatever I'm doing here.
This video is also a test of a new microphone. It failed. Sorry about the choppiness, I don't really know what's going on there.
Here's the sketch of where things are going to go. There's lots of empty space for pegboard and other accessories over time:
Also I mention the Avocent but never really explain what that is so here's my page on that. It's a serial port concentrator so I can manage a bunch of stuff over serial:
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.
Natalie took this video a few years ago at Funspot in Meredith. I have been obsessed with this cabinet, like probably this exact cabinet, since I was 12 or 13. I remember when they had a whole row of Out Run standup cabinets too back in the day.
I think I did much better on another visit, after the machine was moved somewhere else but I dunno where that video is. I think this one is over by the mini-golf course. Either way, I'm not great at hydraulic Out Run, but that's not really the point is it?
I need to check this off-site so I'm posting it here so I can go click it somewhere else. I can't tell how the fans sound because I am constantly surrounded by it and can't tell if there's "more" noise. If you listen to it and have thoughts, I dunno I guess email me.
I think the microphones here are at least the same volume. I also remember one of the reasons I ordered the Yeti Blue instead of the GX was because the GX cut out everything under 60hz. So now I think I need a low pass filter to do the same thing on the Blue. I'll just make a notch filter that matches the GX capabilities. That should allow me to switch between them with no change to the sound of the GX at all.
* 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!
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.
I'm going to be working on making a few videos about how my office is set up and fix some problems with some of my machines and stuff as I polish this all up.
This was shot as I finished cabling in my in-rack video capture and face-camera. So I'm doing a quick dry-run of a couple of features of the machine I built that lives in that monitor. It's a Raspberry Pi 3 that I have configured with a menu to emulate every other object in this rack as well as manage and maintain my home servers as a KVM for all that stuff. It's connected over serial to an Avocent 16 port serial console. So from my main menu I log into that serial console and then I use that to connect over serial to my main webserver in the rack below.
After logging back out of all that I am launching the Amiga emulator for a quick run of Nebulus.
Here's what that end of the room looks like. My main workstation that's getting all the video is in the bottom of the left hand rack. Then the right rack is all the network hardware, storage, servers and stuff.
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.
This is the correct way (for me) to rip hundreds of DVDs. I still wish there was a global hash table of discs whereby we could automatically name individual files, but this does the job and I'll describe my overall workflow. Ripping TV shows is stupidly time consuming compared to audio CDs and I've done everything I can to reduce the time wastery involved. It's not perfect, but I can just feed disks through my machine all day then take an hour or so a week and rename everything I've done.
It seems like I really don't write very much, but that's kind of a massive misconception. I don't write "much", but I had a bunch of blog entries that were at least 60% written and were missing like, screenshots or links or tags or I need to make new tags for things like XScreensaver and BSDs. Haiku. Shit lots of stuff.
