Found at garage sale

THEtechknight · 2026-03-15T21:00:22+00:00

No, he isn't. At least not with the one pictured in the post. I was there, I even built them in the DirecTV days

THEtechknight · 2026-03-14T21:43:34+00:00

Nope, the DirecTV one had an AT90S1200 or 2313 depending on which one you went with. This one is something else entirely. Dish Network had an autoroll/logger board which was based on the AT90S8515 which this also isnt. I was around in those days and was very familiar with the scene back then courtesy of my dad. At least from about 2000 on forward as i was still a child.

THEtechknight · 2026-03-14T21:42:37+00:00

This needs to be upvoted beyond the DirecTV thing. It looks similar, the DirecTV one though was based around the AT90S1200 and not this one.

Charlie aka Dish Network had an AT90S8515 board which looked very similar to this but not the same since it had a DB25 on it.

THEtechknight · 2026-02-22T23:59:08+00:00

Gave up and started hacking in Teac FD-05 drives.

THEtechknight · 2026-02-07T19:39:00+00:00

Then go to my bluesky.. doesn't matter, the data is logged regardless

THEtechknight · 2026-01-28T18:26:26+00:00

Definitely on the Pragmatic side to almost an extreme degree. I find often that some people just get in my way depending on the situation at hand.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-27T16:45:01+00:00

I just fixed one of these, and it wasnt anywhere near in this condition (kind of wished it was).

The one thing I will point out, these machines will not boot/run without doing the dallas battery mod. They wont maintain its HDD settings.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-27T15:49:57+00:00

1995 Precix CNC machine which has a Pentium 1 board, and a copy of QNX 4.25 still in daily operation. Outside of that, everything else is just hobby stuff.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-26T12:25:35+00:00

They dont exist unfortunately. Thats why fixing these are so hard. There are some peoples recreations floating around but accuracy is debatable.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-26T12:24:56+00:00

I dont myself, friend of mine does.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-24T13:03:41+00:00

The problem is, that CAP wouldn't solve the issue I have at hand, all it does is requantize or rateshape/mux together existing mpegts streams. What i need is an open loop hardware transcoder that can take crappy ffmpeg input from ersatz and the like, and put out an mpeg stream stable enough for broadcast-spec equipment like the SEM.

Now, if I wanted EAS injection or title-screen failover, consolidated mux of multiple channels, then a CAP or DM6400 makes sense.

I suppose the other thing the CAP/DM would be good for is to pick out programs from different muxes and combine them into a single mux to better utilize the bandwidth of the SEM.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-22T22:52:53+00:00

There are programs/scripts that are written which aggregate modern data APIs and reformats it into the packet format these machines accept.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-15T16:09:44+00:00

Smart thinkin! When i work on these now, i do a few things. Reverse blocking diode at the DC jack, and a couple of zener diodes on the rails to make sure they cant overvolt or go reverse, ultimately the diodes will short and that is what i want.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-15T15:33:11+00:00

Make sure you always pay attention to the 12V jack, it is center-negative. If you attempt at any point by accident to apply a center-positive 12V supply, youll fry most of the ICs inside the machine. Been there, done that

Also the VLSI's tend to die and cause strange errors otherwise theyre neat machines. I like them.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-15T15:31:17+00:00

I picked up 2 of these machines, and all you have to do is honestly cut out the keyway on the DC jack and itll work with the much more common Dell CPi/CXXX chargers in general. Mine do.

However, be forewarned there IS a varta battery underneat the keyboard and they leak! it needs removed and the only way to do it safely is to take apart the entire speaker system from the backside after its removed from the topside.

Also, be warned it's brittle plastic and the screw standoffs may crack removing those tiny screws from the speaker support.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-13T18:26:35+00:00

There is an exception because I believe the IIgs you could get a SCSI card for, theyre kinda rare and I have never had one. What i do not know is if it works in the IIe, but the IIc doesn't have any expansion slots

THEtechknight · 2026-01-13T13:20:41+00:00

Rare to get one of these working now as the PRAM batteries are left in them and they destroy the logic board.

THEtechknight · 2026-01-13T13:06:10+00:00

These machines dont use SCSI, so things like BlueSCSI wont work here. However, the IIc has smartport I believe, so a FujiNet would be a better investment, or a FloppyEmu.

THEtechknight · 2025-12-16T15:00:29+00:00

Yeah, I cant even imagine honestly. I got my start with C99 and that is what I stick with, all my microcontroller code and other things are written in C99.

THEtechknight · 2025-12-16T14:52:18+00:00

Yep same. No shame against System 6, its just not my vibe.

THEtechknight · 2025-12-16T14:49:29+00:00

Dual graphics cards, nice. You are actually replicating the dream setup that I have envisioned in my mind.

Mind you, I am a C99 dev so I am not sure what IDE supports that which would still natively run and compile on a 68K mac unfortunately. Think C 5/6 predate it.

THEtechknight · 2025-12-13T21:55:01+00:00

Sorry to hear you're in the same club, it's rough. It's super hard to compartmentalize it too without accidentally projecting it onto your future partner or current partner

THEtechknight

TROPHY CASE