Very Productive Day

Holy cow did I have a good couple of hours in HengeWorld.

When I got home from lunch around 3 my wife handed me the NuIO board we ordered for the NeXT machine. This was a very welcome surprise. I expected just a board and it came in a very nice 3D printed case. I cabled it up and plugged it into the CheckMate IPS monitor I've been doing battle with for a year.

With extremely low expectations, I hit the soft-power button on the keyboard.

Fired right up, straight to a desktop, looked FRIGGIN' gorgeous. Sharp. This machine, while frustrating to assemble due to the "unique" decisions of Team NeXT in 1989, has been remarkably reliable. Once I understood exactly what I needed (non-ADB keyboard / mouse), spent a bunch of money, it all just worked great. Even worked great on my 4:3 Eyoyo monitor though it's understandably not as nice is the 17" CheckMate.

_{I ported GOB's Program to csh}

So this spurred me to try some ST stuff I've had in mind too. I wanted to try and wire straight into a Mono/Color ST switchbox with a sacrificial VGA cable and see if I can just make a color/Mono VGA switcher. I don't know if the switch is going to work but I just soldered straight onto the pins from the inbound ST cable and...

The ST looks great, there's interference like if there's nothing on the screen, but once programs were running I didn't notice it at all. It all feels very much as I remember.

I chalk that noise up to my test setup:

Turns out the $5 or whatever Exxos (* I can't recall if Exxos actually made this or not) ST->VGA dingus I got was the culprit all along for years now. Oh well. Maybe I can rescue one or both of the 13 pin DIN and female VGA connector off of it.

After the OSSC thing didn't work out I started really bumming pretty hard on this whole project. Then Youtube recommended this awesome BackOfficeChannel video from 8 years ago which made it click in my brain that I can just straight up solder a VGA cable to an Atari cable and any SVGA monitor should work with it. And I remembered that Len had this Mono/Color switchbox and I decided I want to try to recreate that workflow and keep this machine as original feeling as I can.

It took me an hour to map out which conductors went to which pin on the ST and VGA cables and how the diagrams I was looking at are oriented. But man that looks nice even on the garbage cable I hacked together.

This was 3 hours well spent.