Vintage PCs still in use

[Mike Chambers]

You'll have to find a multi-sync that is capable of going that low, I'd tell you what model the one I had was, but it's gone now and it was years ago so I don't remember, sorry.

But yes, it will be able to tell if it's interlaced or not and will display perfectly.

Never had much to do with NTSC myself, seeing as here in Australia we use the PAL standard, but I have heard it referred to as Never Twice the Same Colour, and from what you've said, maybe there is or was some truth to that, LOL!

lol. well, the color thing is only noticeable on VHS tapes in my experience. the color looks great on laserdiscs and DVD. VHS is just a low-fidelity format compared to those.

 

[Mike Chambers]

Both NTSC and PAL are interlaced. The digital equivalent of NTSC and PAL is 480i and 576i, respectively -- the "i" indicates interlacing. These both fall under the category of "SDTV" (Standard Definition TV).

wow, you learn something new every day! i really thought PAL had progressive frames. according to wikipedia, you're correct though. i don't have much PAL experience, being in the USA.

i did used to trade bootleg VHS tapes (music stuff) with people all over the world, and i bought a very sweet aiwa multi-format VCR for it about 8 years ago. (was $800, EEK!) model number is MX100

unfortunately, it's been having problems lately. seems the motors are getting extremely worn out. it's making LOUD grinding noises when i try to use tapes in it now. it doesn't eject right either anymore, it comes out half-way and then i have to pull it the rest of the way lol. i guess i shouldn't be surprised, i've gotten so much use out of that thing. not useful for anything other than an incredibly expensive tuner atm.

 

[vwestlife]

lol. well, the color thing is only noticeable on VHS tapes in my experience. the color looks great on laserdiscs and DVD. VHS is just a low-fidelity format compared to those.

The poor resolution is a limitation of the videotape format, not of NTSC.

With digital comb filtering techniques introduced in the late 1980s, NTSC color encoding performs just as well as that of PAL. The only reason why PAL may still look better is because of its extra 100 lines of resolution (although the downside of that is its flickery 50 Hz frame rate). In fact, if you go to Brazil, they use PAL-M, which uses the same resolution and frame rate as NTSC (525 lines, 60 Hz).

To keep this relevant to vintage computing, I wonder if any home computers were designed to output one of the black & white video standards previously used until the mid-1980s: the 405-line system in the UK, Ireland, Gibraltar, and Hong Kong, or the high-definition 819-line system in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, Morocco and former French colonies in Africa. Probably not, though, as the British and French had already been using 625-line broadcasts on UHF for color TV since the late 1960s, and these two remaining non-standard black & white systems were effectively obsolete by the time home computers arrived in the late '70s.

 

[Mike Chambers]

The poor resolution is a limitation of the videotape format, not of NTSC.

With digital comb filtering techniques introduced in the late 1980s, NTSC color encoding performs just as well as that of PAL. The only reason why PAL may still look better is because of its extra 100 lines of resolution (although the downside of that is its flickery 50 Hz frame rate). In fact, if you go to Brazil, they use PAL-M, which uses the same resolution and frame rate as NTSC (525 lines, 60 Hz).

To keep this relevant to vintage computing, I wonder if any home computers were designed to output one of the black & white video standards previously used until the mid-1980s: the 405-line system in the UK, Ireland, Gibraltar, and Hong Kong, or the high-definition 819-line system in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, Morocco and former French colonies in Africa. Probably not, though, as the British and French had already been using 625-line broadcasts on UHF for color TV since the late 1960s, and these two remaining non-standard black & white systems were effectively obsolete by the time home computers arrived in the late '70s.

yeah, that's what i said. because of the relative low-fidelity of VHS compared to laserdisc and DVD. you get an effective resolution of about 250 horizontal "pixels" on normal VHS.

it's not really possible to directly compare the "fidelity" of DVD to VHS actually, seeing as it is digital storage. laserdisc, however, is analog video still. i love LD. if you get a very very well made LD, it's quality can meet and sometimes even exceed the quality of a DVD imo. most of them are NOT made that well, but even those are generally much higher quality than tape.

the best thing about LD is that it does not have any annoying MPEG2 compression artifacts. they are hard to notice without looking for it on a high-bitrate MPEG2 video but it's still there.

i wish LD recorders had a chance to become commonplace. if DVD had not been invented, i think they would have slowly started becoming cheaper and more common.

 

[vwestlife]

i wish LD recorders had a chance to become commonplace. if DVD had not been invented, i think they would have slowly started becoming cheaper and more common.

LaserDisc's biggest problem was the size of the media itself, and the inability to record. VHS didn't truly die until recordable DVDs were introduced.

 

[Mike Chambers]

yup! that's true. i still have my Pioneer LD-V2200 player, and plenty of laserdiscs to watch on it. they are pretty damn big. same diameter as a regular vinyl album, and a bit thicker.

they can take some abuse, though. a while back i bought Scarface on LDs on eBay, and when i opened the package i found that the discs were very scratched up. it put it in and hit play, and lo and behold it starts right up and looks fantastic still!

 

[carlsson]

Interesting, because Wikipedia writes:

Given the analog nature of Laserdiscs, without any forms of checksum or error correction, slight dust and scratches cause various problems that could affect video quality.

The article however also mentions that while a DVD can recover from small errors, big errors used to be fatal for playback until recently DVD players feature a repair+skip algorithm. Still, an analog LD player can recover from read errors faster than a DVD can. It also says that the amount of error depends on what caused it: a scratch, a finger print and so on.

But on the other hand, who gets a multimedia player only in order to play damaged records?

 

[squirrel-steam]

I don't see many old computers still in use, just new dells mostly running a special software that looks like ms-dos green screen software in a XP window. I have seen some old IBM cashier stations at our local felpaush, but they run windows 98, and have amd k5's.

The only place i have seen actual old computers being used is in our machine shop at school, our instructer uses an old ibm 286-30 computer to run the mini cnc lathes and mill. And the 1991 giant cnc lathes we have run a very interesting computer in them. They have 2 486DX's on 2 motherboards, each with 16mb of ram, and they run the special cnc operating system, if you do a warm boot, you can see the bios screen, and freeze it there, (2) 486DX at 33mhz, 32mb ram, 4mb flash rom (where the operating system is,) and whats even more interesting is it says "keyboard OK, Mouse OK" but there dosen't appear to be a mouse. He has one that dosen't work, it boots and everything, but the actual lathe dosen't work. I told him to put a hard drive in it and install windows 3.1 on it. It has 2 ISA slots, and a built in floppy drive/IDE controller it uses if it has the optional hard drive to store programs. Suprisingly it has PS/2 ports on it. That would be cool, it can display colors also, its not just a green screen. It will sometimes display a 3d simulation of what the cutters and work is doing (its color too!) This was a very advanced cnc machine in its day, they were $100,000 brand new, and were donated by stryker. He said he would give me the non-working one, but you litereally need a semi truck to deliever it.

 

[barythrin]

I bought some laser discs a few years ago since I never got to see the quality but I never found a working player for cheap so I still haven't lol. Not vintage computer, but when I was trying to find an RF to RCA converter I realized it was cheaper to go to our local goodwill's and they sell perfectly working VCRs *with* a gaurantee for $9. So I got a nice one and used that to connect older antenna RF systems to RCA (actually to RCA on my Commodore monitor) as well as to watch TV on the Commodore monitor upstairs in my computer room (yes I also have a TV tuner card but it's just nice to have the vcr/remote, etc and an antenna hooked up to look away from the computer once and a while).

The scratches are relative to the compression of the data. Fitting one movie on 6 laser discs a single scratch may not cover that much data or be big enough to corrupt it unlike a scratch on a 9GB dvd which could cover 400MB of data. Sort of a downside to that much data in smaller scratchable areas.

A few (ok, quite a few) years back when one of our local arcades was closing they were selling all their systems. I was in or just out of highschool so didn't have much money but was looking at the ones I could afford just for kicks. The arcade "Dragon's Lair" was actually a (486?) Acer computer with a laserdisc reader inside of it and the game was just a laserdisc. I think they did make some rom versions of it but still that one was just a computer and video player. So.. wrapping our video segment back into vintage computers, a few arcades you may see could be an example of vintage systems in use.

 

[carlsson]

If it was the original Dragon's Lair, it could hardly be a 486 as the arcade game was released in 1983 or perhaps even 1982; I can't be bothered to look it up right now. But as you mention, with all the data and graphics pre-recorded on laser discs, it may not require a monster of a CPU to run it. For example Pioneer had a Palcom LD extention to their MSX (!) computer in the mid-80's, and that was a 3.5 MHz Z80 inside the actual computer. Now, the LD player may overtake the whole system, rendering the MSX computer one big I/O slave device; it is highly possible the arcade games worked in similar fashion.

 

[shawn510]

If it was the original Dragon's Lair, it could hardly be a 486 as the arcade game was released in 1983 or perhaps even 1982; I can't be bothered to look it up right now. But as you mention, with all the data and graphics pre-recorded on laser discs, it may not require a monster of a CPU to run it. For example Pioneer had a Palcom LD extention to their MSX (!) computer in the mid-80's, and that was a 3.5 MHz Z80 inside the actual computer. Now, the LD player may overtake the whole system, rendering the MSX computer one big I/O slave device; it is highly possible the arcade games worked in similar fashion.

I thought it was pretty neat how the "industrial" LD players could be controlled by serial, there was even a Laserdisc driver for win9x. The same setup was used with some PC based educational titles, I saw one win 3.1 system back around '97 that had a touchscreen and a video-in card to pipe the LD video into the PC for interactive training. Was used by the nursing students. LD seems to have been popular in the educational market, I saw a lot of players turn up back when I used to go the the state warehouse sales.

Even more inetresting to me was the Laseractive game system, with the data occupying what would normally be the digital audio track. Thought about trying to get one of those a few years back, but the ebay price was too steep. Not to mention trying to get both modules & the games. I settled on a newer industrial model LD player with the digital audio, no more screeching on the AC3 discs! Doubles as a really big CD player too! :mrgreen: