NeXT
Veteran Member
About two months ago I was brought to the attention f this computer on ebay. Initially I could find no information about it either other than it was made by Matrox and it was a 286 with a laserdisc player built on top of it. They guy wanted $250 for it but I threw a blink lowball offer at it and he took it to my suprise.
Yesterday I picked it up from my mailbox in Washington state and this morning I got to look it over.
It's pretty beat up on the outside and when powered on it does not POST to VGA or eject the laserdisc tray but it does make quite a bit of racket from the two fans I can hear. All the rear interfaces are also interesting. Three serial ports, game port, parallel, floppy, and SCSI. Then there is the one cardwith two RCA jacks for audio. I'm assuming that because of the size of the case and the fact that everything so far was made in canada, this is going to be one hell ofa system inside.
Nope. It's an 8mhz 286 SBC on a 16-bit dumb backplane with two specialty cards. It's got a SCSI interface though on the SBC though. Nice. I am curious though where the memory is.
The VGA card appears to be specialty to the system and accepts a video signal from the laserdisc unit. I'm assuming it's doing overlay work right on the card.
Then there is this card. It seems to have audio I/O but it also accepts ribbon cables from elsewhere in the unit (all the ribbon cables by the way are labled) and also connects to the VGA card.
I then tackled the laserdisc unit and found out that it's just a regular laserdisc player that's been slightly modified to work in the unit.
I found out that one of the belts had stretched to the point it was useless and another belt instantly liquefied whrn I touched it. I manually gave it a laserdisc and it seemed to play it fine though.
I also found a Connor SCSI hard drive hidden behind the front plastic bezel The rubber seal seems to still be good too. With luck all the necessary software is still on the drive. I don't think I'll ever find the original disks that came with the system.
That's also another thing I found out about the system. It appears as if only one other unit exists and this is it. There is no other information I can find about the unit. Another person seems to have just the laserdisc unit and it was apparently pulled from an arcade cabinet.
What are the chances anyone else here knows more about it? I'll try and figure out why it isn't POSTing when I get back from my parents on monday. I'll dig out my ISA test card while I'm there and see what other goodies I can find to put in the system like a RAMpage card and a 3Com ethernet card and possibly two 1.44mb drives if the controller can support those. I'm also curious if I can upgrade the CPU from 8mhz to something else.
Yesterday I picked it up from my mailbox in Washington state and this morning I got to look it over.
It's pretty beat up on the outside and when powered on it does not POST to VGA or eject the laserdisc tray but it does make quite a bit of racket from the two fans I can hear. All the rear interfaces are also interesting. Three serial ports, game port, parallel, floppy, and SCSI. Then there is the one cardwith two RCA jacks for audio. I'm assuming that because of the size of the case and the fact that everything so far was made in canada, this is going to be one hell ofa system inside.
Nope. It's an 8mhz 286 SBC on a 16-bit dumb backplane with two specialty cards. It's got a SCSI interface though on the SBC though. Nice. I am curious though where the memory is.
The VGA card appears to be specialty to the system and accepts a video signal from the laserdisc unit. I'm assuming it's doing overlay work right on the card.
Then there is this card. It seems to have audio I/O but it also accepts ribbon cables from elsewhere in the unit (all the ribbon cables by the way are labled) and also connects to the VGA card.
I then tackled the laserdisc unit and found out that it's just a regular laserdisc player that's been slightly modified to work in the unit.
I found out that one of the belts had stretched to the point it was useless and another belt instantly liquefied whrn I touched it. I manually gave it a laserdisc and it seemed to play it fine though.
I also found a Connor SCSI hard drive hidden behind the front plastic bezel The rubber seal seems to still be good too. With luck all the necessary software is still on the drive. I don't think I'll ever find the original disks that came with the system.
That's also another thing I found out about the system. It appears as if only one other unit exists and this is it. There is no other information I can find about the unit. Another person seems to have just the laserdisc unit and it was apparently pulled from an arcade cabinet.
What are the chances anyone else here knows more about it? I'll try and figure out why it isn't POSTing when I get back from my parents on monday. I'll dig out my ISA test card while I'm there and see what other goodies I can find to put in the system like a RAMpage card and a 3Com ethernet card and possibly two 1.44mb drives if the controller can support those. I'm also curious if I can upgrade the CPU from 8mhz to something else.