0083 PicoGUS emulating a Sound Blaster, DRAM testers and a clip on Mac accelerator

Well, hello and welcome back to Adrian's digital basement 2. This is a super mini mail call episode and let's get into it. This package comes from Ian and Ian is the one who created the Pico calling card that I've talked about a lot. many times in the canal and here I already know what this is, there is no knife, there is no knife there, I can't, I can't open it. I really need to order some new blades for these, uh, these boxes. cutters, yes, as I was saying, Ian is the one who created the Pico Gus card, the Pico Gus card is a software defined search card, well let's open this package and then I can show this, yes, this is version two of the card , so let's see what's here we have a note here that says Hi Adrien, here's the latest Pico Gus 2.0 board.

Thank you for presenting the first version on your channel and all your comments. The response has been incredible, so Pico Gus, yes, here it is. right, just for a refresher in case you're not familiar with what the Pico burst is and damn, the oven just turned on. I'll turn it off. There's a button on my little controller there, so this is the final production version of the Pico Gus card, I don't want to say that the first, uh, the first version, which is this one right here, wasn't being produced. I stuck that sticker on there by the way, the difference obviously you can see that this one has all the components that this thing has on these little integrated boards, so if we look at the first one here, essentially what we have is we have a Raspberry Pi Pico rp250 board and we have level shifters here that connect it to the 5vt ISA. bus and then what you have here is the digital to audio converter, it's a DAC and this is a small unit available on the market that takes the digital output of this, which of course emulates different

sound

cards and then converts it to a High quality 3.5mm audio output jack.

This one here is for midi mpu 401 emulation and you use something like this which is a little dongle that plugs into that TRS jack here and then outputs a standard midi signal so you can use your Rolland M mt32 and other midi devices, so this board is awesome but obviously the build required is soldering a bunch of headers and this and that and the new version here just takes all those components like the rp250 and integrates them directly onto the board on top of that. After designing this board, Ian created firmware that allowed him to use a USB controller as a joystick on a PC.

Of course, the USB port here requires a USB adapter on the go and is a bit fiddly to use. So in the new version it just has a very standard USB connector so you can plug your Xbox 360 controller directly here and use it in DOS games. I also noticed that instead of a 3D printed slot holder, this one has a real stamped steel one. which is pretty surprising because it fits perfectly, so I'm guessing this one was designed specifically for this board. The first one actually, as you can see, has a 3D printed one that works absolutely fine, but this new board is pretty incredible.

I also noticed that it has an EG Coding here for the connector for the ISA bus, which is much more robust and reliable than the previous version here, which has this one here, whose name I forgot, it's like a layer of solder, apparently, these can come off material and leave it inside your Isa slot so it's not really ideal, it's a lot more expensive to make these types of boards because it has this gold plating so you still have a normal USB or micro USB connector here and that's for upgrading the firmware here if If you brick your card you may need to update the firmware using a computer and you simply plug it in here which powers up the rp240 and then you can load the firmware onto it by simply dragging and dropping it but while this is installed on your PC, you can just plug your joysticks right there and you won't have to worry about this port and of course it's face down which is a great design decision so you can't plug it into an Isa slot and power up the Raspberry Pi Multi U peak. multiprocessor microcontroller, so yeah, I love this and there's the Dack, it's basically built right into the board.

I think it's the exact same design as this one, although yeah, I guess it looks like it has the same chips and everything, and maybe. it also has these larger caps for better audio quality and you may also notice there's a wavetable header so I'm really excited about this project, it's one of my favorites of 2023 and 2024. I guess I should make a copy security a bit because I've been gushing about the updates to this board 2.0, what is this board? Well obviously it's an Isa

sound

card and the name puss gives you the idea of ​​what it does or what it was originally designed for.

It was replacing the need to have one of these Gravis ultrasound cards, these extremely expensive cards that are in high demand for PCs. I don't know how much these things cost nowadays, but it's absolutely ridiculous. There are 90 sound cards that had wavetable synthesis. So you had a dam that's on the card, the previous ones actually use SIM slots and what this can do is load samples into the RAM there and then it does hardware wavetable synthesis, so it's basically a synthesizer who uses samples, uh, I don't. I don't remember how many channels, 32 channels, maybe 64 channels and stereo audio, not to mention it has the midi port for joystick and this one has sound input and so on because it's a later version, these cards basically provide the capabilities of the Amiga, but a lot further because you can use 16-bit stereo audio samples and of course many more channels than the Amiga has and all that heavy lifting of synthesis is handled on the card itself, so in the 46 era, where the people were trying to make amazing demos and games, you could trust them. on a card like this, to do that sound mixing in hardware, it took the load off your CPU, if you tried to do 32 channel digital audio playback on a 486, a lot of the CPU power would go into making Sound. playback if you were just using a standard two channel stereo sound card this card takes the burden off you so yeah a lot of games well not a lot but there are a good number of games that use this a lot of demos use ultrasound gravis and they didn't do it.

I sell a lot of them and so they are very expensive today, but the Pico Gus card, the 1.0 card here on the left and of course the new 2.0 card essentially takes all the ultrasound gravis here and reduces it to the code that runs on the Raspberry Pi Pico does all the mixing, all the ISA bus interface, the DMA and all that and then sends it to the Dack or here to the platform and then you get very high quality audio from your computer and unlike of the dacks that were used in these old cards, which are like the amplifiers here.

These cards actually have incredibly good sound quality. I don't remember the exact details of these cards, but they're like 24-bit, 96 kHz, something like that, and extremely low noise. so you won't hear hums or noises coming from the ISA bus like you did on older sound cards, but this is the best thing about these cards besides the ultrasound gravis support that I mentioned and with my testing and other people have been testing . This is pretty cool, I don't think there's really anything that works on a real Gus that doesn't work on these cards and the things that don't work on these cards when you put a real Gus in the computer don't work.

Also the True Gravis ultrasound cards were quite finicky and with certain motherboards and chipsets they had problems occasionally, that's not a problem with these, sorry, if it's a problem on the real burst, it's also a problem on these , that's how good the emulation is. that's the main feature, as you can see, they're open source hardware and that means you can go to GitHub and just download the firmware, you can download the design files, you can make your own cards like Ian Ian, completely, you know. Open the market here for ultrasound gravis by making this product available to anyone who wants to build one themselves and it's very inexpensive if you look at the construction materials here everywhere, it's actually not much and by Of course, Of course, there's all the surface mount assembly and then the manufacturing of this steel seal and the connectors and all that.

I guess I don't remember how much Ian is selling them because he has a Tindy store right now where he sells them and I think. they cost like 70 bucks or something assembled which frankly is a great deal because just go on eBay and try to see how much it costs to buy a real Graphis ultrasound like this, it'll cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars but plus the compatibility with gravis ultrasound which have these cards and USB functionality for external joysticks, which of course is also awesome, Raspberry Pi Pico. What's happening. Here it is: you are creating a software-defined sound card Isa Card specifically correct because it has the DAC and it has the interface to the ISA a bus, which means that with new firmware and the firmware is compatible between these two cards, you can change the functionality of these to be other sound cards and when I first reviewed this card, the firmwares that were available for this could turn this from a gravis alra sound on an adlib card to a Creative Music System card, the CMS card, which it's like a 22 channel square sound card that Creative Labs made before they made the Sound Blasters and I think those were also the, oh no.

You could also do Tandy audio so you can run the patched Tandy software on your PC and get that three channel sound, this can emulate it, but yeah, just run a Dos command and switch to firmware, let's say from Gus mode to adli mode and everything. suddenly you have an adlib card and it works exactly like an adlib opl2 card, it's that easy, it's just command lines and you can change it so you can do a couple of things, you can set up a couple of batch files on your PC with two and when you start your computer you just type whatever you want first like gravis ultrasound or adlib and it will configure this card on the fly for those type of cards and then you just run the game and it works it's that easy it's cool so With this new board design where everything was moved to surface mount packages, like directly on the board, the idea was that one of the manufacturers in China could assemble it much more easily to alleviate the need for a lot of manual soldering. that was necessary for this one, which Ian has to do when he ships them out or of course there is still some manual soldering that needs to be done.

I think this wavetable header, for example, has to be connected and probably the connectors. and those things too. I bet you the PCB comes only with the surface mount components installed, but I think that makes the ordering process a lot easier. Now I know I'm jumping around here because I'm so excited about this project because it's so cool. That's cool, but one of the other things that Ian recently released that we're going to try out in a second is a new firmware for this that turns it into a Sound Blaster 1.0 card. We already had the proper adlib emulation for opl2.

Well, what happened? or what the firmware does there is it takes this card and of course continues adlib opl2 support but then it adds Sound Blaster dsb stuff and in my testing I tried an alpha firmware while testing this card because I hadn't opened this yet package, it seemed to work with everything absolutely perfectly, so it just emulates an original Sound Blaster card like that, just with some software commands and you just change it and it's that easy now that the software is released, so it's officially available, so that anyone who already has one of these can run it as a normal Sound Blaster 1.0 card and Ian let me know that they are working on some additions to turn it into, I believe, a Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 which is apparently a super rare card that is like the evolution of the apit Sound Blaster cards that gave you stereo audio output and I think the Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 has two opl2 chips, so that's the Yamaha FM synthesis chip and I think there are some games that actually support that, so I think it's coming.

I don't know the exact timelines, but like I said, Sound Blaster 1.0 is not the professional one, but the 1.0 mono card support is no longer available for this, so you can buy one of these and that's replacing it. your grais ultrasound your adlib card your sound

blaster

1.0 card your creative CMS card and of course it and an mpu 401 card so you can connect your midi things because they are also very expensive and then, then, uh, other things are possible, so one of the things that Ian was working on because I was asking him, like, if this is possible, what about Sid support for the PC, so that Sid like in Sid's commercial sound 64, a card came out official for the PC that supported Sid on the PC, I don't think it ever got traction, meaning well, there's really no software to use with it, but sure enough, Ian got rudimentary support from Sid working on this card, there are enough horsesforce inside the rp240 to emulate the Sid and then, uh. yeah, it was actually working, uh, I don't think it was a finished project because it just had a lot of problems and well, there's really nothing to use it with, so that kind of thing was put on hold for Sound Blaster support, which It's more important to work with this card, so I think let me stop gushing about this card and I'm going to pull out the dyno, we'll plug this in and check out the new support for Sound Blaster 1.0 which I already set up on my 46, like this which here is my test bench right now and as you can see this 46 motherboard actually has a sound

blaster

32 on it so it's like an a32.

I have a compact flash card here to boot the system local bus video card and this little ROM card here is the IDE XC ROM which allows me to boot this without having to worry about BIOS settings on this particular machine, so obviously we don't need this Sound Blaster 32 card anymore because we are going to use the picus, now this of course does things that the picus can't do. What the picus can't do at the moment is that there is no opl3 emulation for this yet and the main reason, from what Ian was telling me, is that the source code for the open source opl3 emulation is not there. optimized enough to run. the rp240 doesn't mean this can't be done, it just means that the code that is available right now needs to be rewritten and optimized to work properly on this particular microcontroller, so of course the Sound Blaster 32 here in addition to have also wavetable synthesis with uh, this 8 Mak of ram here also supports opl3, it's inside one of these Creative Labs chips, some of them may have a physical opl L3 chip here, this one is not emulated here inside, so this makes opl3, this makes a wavetable that The Sound Blaster wavetable is not compatible with Gravis ultrasound.

It's also a Sound Blaster 16, so it's a 16-bit sound card and there are a lot of games that use the Sound Blaster 16 that don't work with the Gravis ultrasound, which means the Pico. Gus, you can't emulate much of the functionality of this card, but this is really good for older cards, like I said saster Pro or saster 1.0 adlib, um, the serious ultrasound stuff like that that came out before this card came out . We see the dates on this card 95, okay, so that's when this came out. Look, it also says 1995 there. I keep this card handy. I don't know how much these cards cost, but I think the Soundbluster 16s are pretty cheap and at least clones. are and if you want opl3 and stuff like that you can buy one of those cloned Sound Blaster cards or of course you can buy a Sound Blaster 16 or I don't know much these cost pick one of these but anyway that's in the side, so what we're going to do is connect this new version of the picus to my board here and yes, it's just an 8-bit Isa slot, which means it works inside of XTS, which is interesting because the original Ultrasound gravis It is a 16 bit card.

I don't think it necessarily works on XTS, but this absolutely works so you can do gravis ultrasound stuff on your . I want to see the LEDs, the Blinky Blinky LEDs that might be on the Gus Peak, so I'm going to put this front and center in this 8-bit Isa slot so we can see it working. Yeah, well, actually, what am I? What I'm talking about? It's a top down camera, you can't see anything working, there we go, I think we are, you can see Gus Peak. I know it's blurry right now, but I've got this all propped up on things. oh, it's going to make my face blurry, well, anyway, I think we're fine, let's turn this on, let's make sure I don't have anything wrongly connected, no, I think we're fine, okay, we're not seeing anything, Oh. um, I'm on the wrong entry, so it should be entry two.

This is the Extron video scaler I'm using. I don't know what model it is. Oh it's a RGB HDMI 300a and of course we would have a better chance of having video, if I actually plug the VGA cable into the video card that would help wouldn't it? Let's see if that did anything. Let's turn the computer off and on. Alright? Yes, we are at the correct entrance, just making sure to press the button. menu button uhoh what's happening what happened oh dear please wait we're having technical difficulties I see the problem the VJ cable fell off the back of the Extron there we go okay maybe yes maybe yes I actually screwed the cable into the back of the converter scan that would work better, so it froze here and that has nothing to do with the Pico Gus which has more to do with it, let's look at this again here which has more to do with the fact that the controller is looking for the sound.

Blaster 32 is like a little Doss controller that I have, it's actually very unhappy if it doesn't find the sound card it expects, so what I need to do is, what I really need to do is create a nice automatic executive menu like one of those Doss menus where I can choose which sound card I want on the fly because right now I just have to edit this and I have a couple of files here, so REM that and we have Pico Gus and we have Pico Gus Sound Blaster. Those are the two I have here. We'll start with the normal Gus Peak mode.

Restart the computer here. Now I have to update the firmware and I haven't done it. In fact, you should probably download the version. firmware that Ian just posted literally last night, but because the firmware I'm running here I assume it's beta firmware, but it was initialized, you can see it there, so USB joystick support enabled wavetable volume set to zero . Burst light card detected at 240 audio buffer size set to four you know blah blah blah you can see that stuff there so if we go to my sound directory if I can type picus correctly the utility is called picus init and uh oh, that just does that, but if we do SL question mark, this allows us to update the firmware and change the mode to slf and then to fw. usf2 is updating the actual firmware so you can do it with the USB cable from your computer as it's like the drag and drop method I mentioned or of course you can use this software here so I have a couple of firmwares here , there is the pust sound blaster. at the bottom, but I also have Tandy mpu 401 mode, Gus mode, adlib mode and CMS mode.

You can see right away that it initialized the card as a fatty assault ultrasound, so it must be the firmware that is currently loaded here, so yeah, to change. card mode you have to update the firmware, but you only do it in Doss. Here it only takes a second and then all you have to do is edit your auto exec and reboot. In fact, I don't think you need to. To do that you can first flash the firmware and then just run the pus AIT utility which actually configures it with the iio address and all that so the card is currently configured as a normal gravis ultrasound so I think if Well let's see if we have a cubic player configured to use a Gravis card.

I should really do something to help me execute this. No, I have this set up to use the Sound Blaster card right now, so we just change this to Gravis ultrasound. I think there we go wavetable oh wait uh wavetable sample device yeah okay I think this is what we need so if we run cubic player here we go found the gravis ultrasound now we can go back to a directory a my mod directory, let's make one that won't get me copyrighted. What about this one? I'm blocking my face to focus on Gus's card there and you see the LED flashing, it's basically telling us that it's actually working, so yeah, and what's really amazing here is that well, I mean it's an ultrasound. gravis, right, that's what's working with the cubic player here, for example, all the heavy lifting of all the mixing of these channels, you can see there's at least 24 channels here happening, it all happens on the card and what it happened on real gravis ultrasound too, that means if I don't think you can run this program on a non 386 cubic player, I think it requires a 386, but if you say Rand is on a really slow 36 SX at 16 MHz , this would have no problem playing this file.

A 36 SX at 16MHz isn't really that much faster than a 2d6 at the same speed or if it really is the same speed or maybe even slower, that means yes, you can absolutely use something really old. 3d6 machines, in fact, I think if you take something like an high. of channel files on an XT or a 5150 aren't completely wild and that's because the heavy lifting is done on the card. I think if you like sound cards on PC, you know pretty well how it works and stuff, I just think it's cool, okay, so we're back in the Pico Gus directory and all we have to do is picus on it slf and then we're going to change this to this the new Sound Blaster mode, so just do this and this is it now in my previous video about this.

I think I might have mentioned that I ran into some issues on certain motherboards when updating the firmware on this, but I have to tell you that Ian has fixed all of those issues, so this card is Rock Solid and works so well that we are now in Sound mode Blaster. The thing is, of course, the system has the ultrasound variable still set and all that, which is not really appropriate, so let's edit my executive self. bat here and we're just going to change this login command from Pico Gus to picus sound blaster and now if we reboot the system, what's going to happen because the firmware is already here for Sound Blaster is it's just going to configure itself. the Blaster variable and initialize the card as a Sound Blaster card.

Now you don't need to tell the pus and nit utility what firmware is on the card because it just looks at the card and finds out that it is running the Sound Blaster firmware and configures it as a Sound Blaster, but first you need to have your Blaster configured in the Auto Exec to that you know how to configure the card. If we look at the assembly here, you can see that I set up Blaster a220. I5 D1, so interrupt 5 dma Channel 1, the P gust utility will look at the Blaster variable and then configure the card appropriately, it could well be that the cubic player does not support Sound Blaster 1.0 cards, yes, I pressed pause and it says Sound Blaster not found . optimize your cp.

Well, we won't be able to use the cubic player for testing, but I'm pretty sure we can use Freddy's modmaster XT. Let's see here, it's modm. Oh, maybe we need to edit the MXT CFG mod configuration file, um, okay. I'm not going to touch that, I don't know what's going on there, come on we found Sound Blaster 2, oh so it emulates Sound Blaster 2, sorry I said Sound Blaster one before, that was obviously wrong and this is a mod player that can play . mods on N That's all you're going to do. get and this is currently running at 16khz in 8bit mode.

I'm sure you could increase the sample rate because this machine is fast enough for that. Notice that the LED is not flashing and that is because I believe it is not flashing due to DSP activity. which is what's happening here in this core, but for any opl 2 activity, if we run a game that uses opl2, the LED will blink, so keep that in mind if you're worried, you know it doesn't actually work because obviously we have support of Sound Blaster up and running right here, we can run the Doom setup here, so the music card we'll just choose the sound effects card Sound Blaster 220 Sound Blaster 220 irq 5 dma1 remember this is how I set up my blaster variable and the number of channels is a software that mixes what Doom does and let's get started the game takes a little while to load because I have a 16 bit Isa controller here obviously as you can hear it's working perfectly so I played with the firmware, this new firmware on my 1.1. card and it worked absolutely perfectly, so there you heard the sound, it sounds good, honestly, it sounds better than any old Sound Blaster card I've ever heard.

The original Sound Blaster 2.0 card was noisy as was the audio output. You hear everything. this Isa bus activity and stuff like that, that's not the case with the Pico Gus cards, they work really well and offer really nice quiet sound output, so if you're interested in getting a Pico Gus, I think one of the previous problems is that Ian couldn't really keep up, oh it's only $45 that's right he couldn't keep up with the demand and as you can see it's out of stock right now at his Tindy store and I know Ian,I am currently working on a large batch. of them and you can see the stack of cards right here so if you have some that you've already ordered from the Tindy store, Ian lets me know that they're in progress and hopefully you should get your card soon, but to relieve.

Ian has been working with Joe on Joe's computer museum and if you watched my video, I don't know where he is right now on the blue scuzi 2.0, which also uses a Raspberry Pi 2040 chip. Joe will be selling these boards and assembling them, so That means there will be a steady, easy-to-obtain source of those cards here in North America through Joe's Computer Museum. I don't know when everything will be ready and Joe's I will have them for sale on their website, but I hope in the next few weeks they will be, so maybe when this video comes out you will be able to order those cards directly from Joe's website, but I want Say, $45, I was thinking.

It was going to be $75 and to be honest even at that price it's a deal, but the fact is that for $45 you get a grain ultrasound, a Boer 2.0 sound, all these other sound cards and possible future things, it's absolutely mind-blowing . I'm not. I'm sure what they're going to cost on Joe's website, but you know maybe they're priced similarly or something, but even if they're a little bit more like I said, it's worth it. Ian also let me know and let me change the entries. here out there Ian also let me know that he is working with someone in Europe to try to get a distributor there where they will be assembled and distributed there, so hopefully that will happen soon, that way people in the rest of the world will be able to order them a little easier than importing them from America you have to pay taxes and all that kind of stuff, plus needless to say, as I mentioned above this is an open source project so if you want to build one yourself you can , there are a few different versions of the hardware, uh. there is a version for the 386 hand no picture here but what is that little laptop that is from AliExpress or whatever and there is a version of this that plugs into the side and has the expansion header which I think would work on too the 8888 book too, yes, this is here available for you to do, oh look, I'm testing, testing this card, the previous version and also some others.

I think this is Joel here in Portland who tried this one, so yeah. This is what you could probably tell by my enthusiasm. I love this project and this here is community at its best. Open source hardware. Open source software that makes these things easily accessible to everyone, eliminating the fact that you have to be nice. of rich people to have a Graphis ultrasound and now that is no longer the case. I mean, I know you won't get the original card on the actual card, but you will get access to the capabilities of the Gravis ultrasound just with a cheap card like this and it's open source, I mean what else could be better?

It's just amazing. Many thanks to Ian and everyone who worked on this project. In fact, let's switch to the bank camera here because there's a small list of people. on the back and what's even better is that Ian was really nice to put my name on the back because I only help with some of the testing and stuff, but compared to some of these other people who did a lot more work on this card. I'm just a small potato in that world, but just look at this card, it's freaking awesome and I absolutely love it. I guess you have to put a bridge on it, but by the way, to match your blaster, it's like the Blaster. variable, so I had this on Five and one already, so it just worked.

I assume the ultrasonic gravel also uses, I think an irq and a dma as well, so I have to configure it appropriately, so note that I think the Blaster variable is used. for the base IO, which is software definable, but they aren't anyway, so anyway that's it. I'm going to stop gushing about this. I'm sure people who aren't interested in this are probably sick of me talking about it, but yeah. I can't get enough of how amazing this is, thank you Ian for working on this and everyone who helped with this project and thank you for sending me this card and now I have the other one too and I think the other one is the best.

The third one, I have the original. The cart is inside my lab gaming machine that I have there, so yeah, this is just amazing. This card will live in my card stash there because it is so universally capable that it is very easy to insert this into any system I am testing if I need a sound card instead of trying to play with an original Sound Blaster 2.0 which luckily I have one of those or an ultrasound chart which luckily I also have. I would rather use this, it's much easier and much more capable and amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing, well, on to the next item.

I've got a lot of stuff to cover with a mail call, so I'm just going to grab another package or I'm going to clean this stuff up and grab another package, okay, next package here, well, I can't tell who it's from or where. it's because the post office box label covers the but luckily we have a letter inside and oh. a couple of chocolates too, let's see what the letter says, dear Adrian. I recently purchased an Apple 2E that came with an expansion board with only one megabyte of RAM. I ordered more RAM chips to completely fill the card with a total of eight megabytes.

Unfortunately, this was around 30 ic. I had no way to test them before installing them, so I bought two Dam

testers

, one for myself and one that I sent to you. I don't think you have one of these and since you do a lot of retro computer repairs. That should help speed things up. I bought them on eBay and will include a link in the email. The Rev 6 has six or three zif sockets and the Rev 2 only works with 80 to 20 pins. I have emailed you the PDF files before. you get this package, you should help explain everything, make sure you don't exceed 5 volts, it has all the circuitry on board to make the +12 and minus 5 volts that would be for 4116 chips and yes, the old micro USB connector.

I think he did it intentionally to avoid giving her too much power. Thanks in advance. Mark from Arkansas. Thank you very much Mark. Hello to all my Arkansas viewers. Let's see what we have here. Well, we have some chocolates. Thank you so much for Mark, that's pretty impressive and I think we have the tester here, so Mark was right. I don't have any type of dam tester specifically now that I have the Retro chip tester Pro and that's what I've shown on the channel several times and that can test almost all dams, but it's big and I don't usually have it on hand.

I have to pick it up and set it up and all that to use it, something like this is so small that it can just sit here, right on the bench, so taking these two out of the bag, it looks like we have two different

testers

, let's zoom in a little bit to get maximum magnification, so looking at this one on the left, it looks like I have a stm32 microcontroller, there is the micro USB connector and the zip connector and there is a little marker there to tell you where pin one is for the IC.

I guess we pressed the button to test and I guess it's probably multicolored. LED right there that little white package that will tell you if the chip is good or bad and on the back here it says 4bit Dam tester uh copyright 2002 Simon raybold and it also says made in England it's cool so with the 4 bit tester bits of This way, this is for 4464 D Rams or 446 that are used in Commodore 64 shortboards, for example, and then this one here, let's look at the back, it says 1bit Dam tester Rev 6 also the same person Simon made in England and the one bit chips are the typical 416s 4164 there is also a 1 megabit variation and we can see right there that this is the vers or this is the socket here for the 416 which requires these bias voltages additionals right there and this will have some form of DC, the onboard DC converters here to take that 5 volt USB connection here and give it the correct voltages on that 41 64 chip only need 5 volts and the same with the 1 megabit variants and 256 kilobit which I think probably goes into that socket for the 1meg and the 64 now if you put a 4164 in the danger zone of the wrong socket it would definitely kill that chip immediately and supposedly put the chip that needs these voltages polarization in a socket that theoretically does not have them can damage it.

This is what I heard, I never tried it. I didn't want to potentially ruin one of those chips. It's not like they're very common anymore, so to try, let's take a few things here. I just had this bit of foam on hand on the bench side, these are 4 bit chips, which would mean they would go into this one here and these are 4164, so they'll go into this socket and this one here is a 4116 I think let me put on my magnifying glasses, yeah, 4116. That's when we're going to get into this socket here with those extra voltage rails, so let me grab a power supply so we can turn this on and test it out.

Okay, let's start with this one here so it's connected to my computer. to give it 5 volts, look there's a multi color LED action there, it's a little faded but the colors are very vibrant to my eyes, the camera strangely doesn't show them very well, well we'll start with the 4116 here my guess , uh, interesting is that I don't see the pin one indicator. I guess it'll be up there, let's plug this in and double check before we hit the test button that has a square panel on it, the rest of these. They are round and that indicates that pin one is their top left corner.

I'm just going to take a marker here and we'll put a little dot there on all of these, just to help identify, there we go, okay, let's press the button. I don't see any switches or anything so I guess it's just auto detection. The two PDF files attached seem pretty complete as I can test pretty much all the chips, including the 1024 kilobit ones, which I assume are TMS, what's 411,000 or something? The part number I can never keep track of. part number, but the 41256 are 256 kilobit chips, so eight of those Dam chips gives you 256 kilobytes, one bit each.

I think they are used for example on igga 500 and 200000 motherboards. The older versions that have eight chips have 16 chips for 512k, which is using those 41 256, it seems to do some interesting things and you can also try half of chips like the 4108, which have 16k partially failed parts or also the TMS 432 or the Oki 37 32, which have half as many failures, 64k. used in the ZX Spectrum I'm pretty sure they were essentially sold with half the chip knowing it was bad and basically when the zedex Spectrum uses them they are bad on the top half or the bottom half and the computer can.

I think there is a The only way to select is which half of the chip is used on the motherboard and it was a way for Sinclair to get those chips much cheaper. It also supports the 128 kilobit parts which were two 64 kilobit chips joined together, pretty sure, the IBM 5150. early reviews of the motherboard or sorry 5170, the 2868 motherboard uses them and I have a few in mind and have never been able to To test them, they essentially stack these two chips together, everything is soldered and there are two Ras lines as mentioned on the right. here that goes all the way down to the motherboard and that's how you're able to address them on the 5170 that has these chips, eight chips are 128 kilobits and it has four banks of that for a total of 512k on the motherboard and you can't just replace them with normal chips, you won't be able to get that capability.

I think you would have to stack two 64k chips together, bend a pin, cut a bottom pin and do a little hacking to achieve this. that work when we scroll through the document, we have a little bit on the LED, so that was the PowerUp configuration, those colors and here it says that the tester detects the rows and columns and divides them into two halves, unless you use chips of less than 16 kilobits in the bottom half of the rows. are displayed on the top LEDs and the top half are displayed on the bottom LEDs, the bottom halves of the columns are displayed on the left LEDs and the top half are displayed on the right LEDs, so the chip we just put there is 16 kilobits is a 40116 and therefore uses 4 kilobit blocks and there should be four of them, so we should have four correct blue LEDs for the top and bottom halves.

Undetected blocks do not illuminate LED blocks that pass at high speed but then fail a hold time test, the indicators will flash. that the part may work, but the dam does not meet specifications. Parts with capacity up to 16 kilobits, such as the 4016, should light up like this. Missing blocks do not light the corresponding LED. Parts with capacity more than 16 kilobits, up to 64, will use green, so the normal Dam chip for this cmer 64 4164 should light four green LEDs, which means four blocks of 16 kilobits and then the 256 kilobit chips as on the Amiga, we get four purple blocks or any magenta and then we get cyan for the 1 megabit chips, all good and When we look at this, hopefully it appears with the camera, it has only two LEDs on the side, which tells us that this chip was not testedcorrectly.

Very interestingly, it tells us that it's actually only being tested as an 8 kilobit chip, so it's kind of bad. Let me take it in and out of the socket, put it back in. I'm going to hold, hold it, press the button, it tests pretty quickly, which is cool, yeah, same thing, very interesting. I guess I'll have to get it. the Retro chip tester Pro and we will use it to see if this little chip works well. Well, let's try one of these regular 64 kilobit chips. These are the ones in corner 64, so we press the button on the right plug here that way it doesn't give you the higher voltages that you don't need.

This will take a lot longer to run the test, up to four times longer of course, and we should get what I think, the four green LEDs, so let's leave that at that. sit for a second here oh yeah, it's right here, so yeah, TMS 4164 shows up all green if you're using one of those medium sized ones. Sorry, I just got a message on my phone are you getting one of those half size chips where is it? like the top half, the bottom half, wow, this is a cool way to do testing, it looks like this, very cool, well we have all the green lights, which tells us that this chip is good.

I'm going to put a little marker here, um. This is also a Mt Ram chip, and you know how good they are, they are not. I'm kidding, this is a pretty useful tester. I really have to admit, so looking at my little foam pad here, they're all 256 kilobit. The chips here that are on the board are the 4 bit wide version that the other tester needs and then I went and found two more of these 16 kilobit 4116 chips like the one we just tested that didn't work so why No? try this, this already has a check mark, so it seemsI've already tried this and found that it's fine, so we'll try it here to see what happens and see if it replicates what I already found.

No, there must be a fault on this board. I'm sure this chip is Well, I wouldn't put a mark on it if it didn't have a good test on real hardware. My feeling is that there is probably a bad connection on this board or something that is causing it to not be able to test all the pins. Oh, it worked. that time, well that's not re Shing, let's try it again, I just touched the bottom, oh look, and I did it again, why don't I, um, I don't know, I push this down, maybe it's a closure unreliable zipper, come on?

Let's go back to this one we tested first, oh you know, the pins are oh, they don't look that good, so maybe I maybe this isn't the tester's fault, they're just dodgy pins, in other words, I need to clean them up a little . a little bit, use some sandpaper or whatever, okay let's try this one, oh yeah this one has very corroded pins, it has a mark on it, let's try it, it might as well be that these Z plugs if they're not the truth is that they can be a little incomplete, I find it okay, so it's four blue LEDs so one tests well and the other works well, so we have the four blue LEDs there and for the one that is not testing correctly, what I have.

What I'm going to do is put this in a socket here, let's see if I can get this in a socket. This is a very expensive gold plated socket, so we will put this on the zif socket, let's see what happens now. see if this tests good now no, it still tests bad, very interesting, well anyway let's quickly test one of the 64 kilobit chips I had that already has a marking on it, oh no, this one actually doesn't, like this Let's see what happens. and that one turned out fine, we have four green lights so it has a mark on it and this one here I already tried before, but we'll run it again, uhoh, I'm not happy with that one, this is a 5290, this one might actually be a 16 .kilobit chip and you may have put it in the wrong socket okay no output this is a 4116 so it should go in this socket here so I guess we just figured out if you power one with the voltage incorrect 5 volts.

Does that cause harm? Let's see, hopefully not. I mean, I've read that it can, but I don't really think so, to be honest, oh no, that's good, but it's still okay, so we have a good chip, so everything we have is not really like that. The correct test is this one here, which is still in the socket. Here I went and grabbed the Retro chip tester Pro that is here. Is very large. The reason you might want to purchase a tester like this is because I'm sure. which is actually quite a bit cheaper than the Retro chip tester Pro, which is a pretty expensive testing device, although it is extremely capable, but it is expensive, so that's the negative, we can put this chip here.

I'll leave it in the little socket and this is going to do the test now has some really comprehensive RAM tests for things like the random number generation March tests. You can configure the RAM tests that run on it. This is an older firmware. I bet there is a better firmware. Yeah, this chip is working perfectly on the Retro chip tester brother, now it's doing a March test right now, which is uh, there's two different a u and a and yeah, so this chip is fully working on the Retro chip tester Pro and, without However, for some reason. it's not working properly on this tester now, the problem is that none of these are really great for testing TTL devices and the reason is that in the case of the Retro chip tester Pro, let's try this again here, a microprocessor based on atml things is used. or microcontroller and that means the levels you drive the chips to are not super precise, like it's not the same as a TTL stuff, so things may show up as glitchy here, but they actually work on a real TTL machine because the threshold levels are very different. and vice versa, I've had things not work on a real TTL system and this does it well, it's not that there's anything wrong with this or that the algorithms are bad, it's that driving TTL chips with Coss stuff works most of the time. but it doesn't always work in those threshold situations and I'm sure this tester that Mark just sent I have to try to see what kind of chip it is.

I can't make it out. It looks like it's a St. microcontroller part of some kind, but anyway it's probably doing the same thing and will be driving this Ram with camo thresholds and unfortunately there's no way around it and that will mean it will say things are wrong like this chip, but I'm pretty sure this chip is also totally fine in a real TTL based computer because I had it sitting on the side here well stuck in this foam and it worked so know that these type of testers are not like what is the correct word. are not the end all be all beall, the only way you could really know 100% for sure if one of these chips is good or bad, you would need to design a chip tester that used say a 6502 or a z80 and one of the versions nmos of the chip, not later versions of Coss, because they will have similar problems to this.

If you look up the differences between Coss and TTL threshold levels there is a pretty substantial difference and when you use 74 LS parts the older LS parts are TTL chips and there are newer versions that are not TTL logic but are TTL compatible and I think which are called act and HCT as if the T part is the TTL part, but the HC parts like 74hc are purely based on Coss. chips and they don't always work correctly on older computers and that's again because of those threshold levels, so I've run into a lot of situations where the Retro chip tester Pro here, you know, said something was wrong, like the RAM chips for example and then put it in a real computer and it works perfectly and my only guess is that the output drivers on those Dam chips that you said were bad are probably outputting a lower level than expected but anything higher at 8 volts or one volt in TTL it shows up as high and usually works, it's one of the reasons you can take a 3.3 volt part like a microcontroller and plug it into a TTL bus and the TTL bus is perfectly happy with it because those high 3.3 volt signals for TTL just show up as high and ultimately as long as that microcontroller can tolerate 5 volts on its input and not damage it then it works just as well if you are an experienced electrical engineer especially in the '80s, when you worked a lot on these things and you can talk more about this.

I'd love to hear more about it in the comments for other people to read, but for now, um, oh, this cable is a little annoying. He is in front of the camera. I'm not going to condemn him. this particular chip because this says it's bad. I think this chip totally works and the only way to really test it would be to install it in something like my tr80 and then run my March test ROM that is available in my GitHub repo. which my friend David did for me with this chip there and I'm pretty sure this chip is totally good so I'm going to leave this on the foam pad for the future when I need the 4016 chip but what next we can do is take one of these 256 kilobit chips here to make sure this socket doesn't bend and we'll put one of these here, let's see what happens here so that it fits into the same socket as the 64 kilobit chip. press the button and this will definitely take a lot longer to taste, so while we wait, I'm going to eat one of these chocolates.

Yes, I had lunch a while ago, but this is a nice little extra dessert snack. I was about to talk about RAM testing on this device, but I finished testing that chip and it took quite a while, but that's how it works and the test was good, so I'm just going to leave the next one in place. Actually, I didn't review or test them, so we can also do it now, according to the PDF here below, this is the RAM testing procedure, so it measures the RAM size, you probably like to read and write. the different blocks and if you're trying to write to a smaller dam to treat it like a larger one, you're going to get repeat mirrors basically so you can detect the size pretty easily there, so do some high speed testing where you fill the Ram. with zeros and ones it checks it, it doesn't even have a hash chest and an odd hash chest fills it with random data and then it checks it and repeats the above test several times so it doesn't do a march test.

There may be some. errors it doesn't catch properly filling it with zeros and ones it only checks for stuck bits doesn't really give you anything the random data is decent it says it repeats the random test a few times so I hope that means it's going to find out there's something wrong now. I'm not an electrical engineer or a chip designer, but from what I understand, simply doing a March test is literally one of the best Ram tests you can do and identifies pretty much everything. These problems are a bit slow, so quickly creating a password only fills it with zeros and ones, and simple patterns can be a quick way to identify a good number of problems, but ultimately the March test is the better and it's really going to catch all the problems, like stuck bits and bit flips occurring with adjacent bits and anything else that's going wrong with the chip.

I think a random test when you run it enough times is probably about as effective as a March test, but I think there are some situations where the random test can actually miss things and that's simply because it's random or pseudo-random data. , meaning that the particular patterns you are writing to RAM may not cause the bit flip to occur somewhere else in memory. and you may not be able to detect it, so since the retr Pro chip tester does March testing, that means it will be one of the best non-computer ways to detect bad memory, this one unfortunately doesn't.

It would be nice if it was implemented. I doubt there's any way to update the signature on this anyway, so there's probably no chance of this being implemented in the future. Well, I tried a couple of these 256 kilobit chips and they worked perfectly. Let's switch to the other tester and try to test one of those 4-bit chips like the ones on the shortboard and this chip is a 41464 and that tells you that those four in front of the 64 means it's a 4-bit chip, the pins are a little rusty, I'm going to place this here, make sure you line it up with the top here where that little notch is.

I guess that's the right way to do it and we press the button and it flashes now when it comes to the duration of the test, oh. we have a green light there and it looks washed out, but it's a bright green. I was going to say the lifespan of this will be about four times the lifespan of a normal 1-bit 64k chip, but I don't know, maybe it's optimized in a certain way, but I guess it's a good result. We can check out the PDF here, so this is revision 2 and it's good for 44 64, which is what we're testing here.

I mean, it's marked 4164, which Actually, that part number is there, but it also works with the 44 256 chips and 1 megabit, well, a Time 4 megabit and the 16 kilobit versions. The 4416 is the video RAM chip of the Commodore 128, if I remember the original 128 and you can. Upgrade them to 44 64 to increase the RAM capacity or video RAM capacity of your 64come on let's do a test here so I'm on the micromac website here so there's the interpreter that's the card we have with an optional math code processor that looks like 16 mahz that's what we think until 300% improvement, optional 25MHz FPU, oh maybe that's why they had that Crystal in there, actually runs the fastest math code processor, compatible system 6 7 and performance se30 7.1 user installable says on Mac SE the performance we have here is good for a 300% improvement now on sale for $49 this is like what everyone thought you could still order although it looks like it's the same part number pf16 PF oh no its not okay because I guess it has that different uh connector and then there's also a classic version, unfortunately check this out, here's the software we probably need to make this work.

Pig was not found, so that's unfortunate. What about this? The SP link doesn't work either, that's the program I'm running right now. This really works. Oh, it's still being tested. The CPU performance should be 1.0 and you are getting 0.051, so yes, this machine is definitely not running properly with the throttle. installed there I guess what I need to do is try to find this utility here, let's look for this, oh boy, well, it doesn't look like it's obviously available from the start, so what we need is someone. Hopefully I have this on hand and yeah that's the only link, well that's not helpful it's not even done but something is very wrong with the system right now with this

accelerator

card here, CPU speed 0.051, it should be a Mac classic.

I think not really. no, this is a newer version and a Quadra 605 is a 1.0, so it actually froze, the system is frozen, well that's unfortunate, I have to turn the computer off and on here, now, here's a little bit one side while editing. I ended up running the speedometer. the previous version and look at this, it actually shows up as 68020 even though it is 68030, but then when running the benchmarks, the performance was worse. I know for a fact that a Macse in this test gets a 1.0 and gets exactly the same score as a classic Mac. and it's clearly not running properly here so I guess without the software it's even slower anyway I think I really need the software for this to work perfectly or correctly and you know what I know Max and this is too long for this. phase of the boot process should have gotten to that in a matter of seconds on the blue scuzzy on unstock SE so something is the problem here and no it doesn't feel good SC feels a lot slower than it should be but it just move the menus around and everything feels like it's stock, I don't think there's any performance improvement.

What happens on this machine is definitely not 300% faster like the se30, that's a very noticeable feeling when you have a se30 and this machine doesn't seem to be running at full speed, but it's very possible that without that software the throttle would lag. card is not enabled until you have an extension that loads, which is totally normal and in fact on these classic Macintoshes without that software, often while in accelerated mode the sound becomes corrupted unless the software that runs there have a solution for it. and i know this because i made a previous video about the

accelerator

on macse and the sound is also corrupted on that one too, so again my question arises: if anyone knows where to get the software for the micromac accelerators, please let me know. strange effect.

I'm going to lower the screen so it stops. If anyone knows where to get the software please let me know and don't be fooled by the fact that the website is still up and you can still get them. cards because believe me you can't and obviously those links are dead. This is just an old website that is still up and running. Let me turn it off so you don't have to listen to that fan. This SE has the old squirrel. cage fan that is very, very loud, so thank you so much to everyone who sent things in the mail-in episode, sorry if I haven't gotten to any before, there's still a giant pile of things back there, but at the I went through at least three of today's articles, so I'm slowly eliminating things.

Many thanks to my sponsors, their names are on the back of the screen. I want to thank you for making all this possible. I do this full time because without your support I would have to get a job and I wouldn't be able to make even the amount of videos I make now, which is like two a week, plus I do some behind the scenes stuff for my higher level sponsor tiers, so that will be all, thanks again. for everyone they sent stuff and if you like this video, a thumbs up if you didn't know, you know what to do and here we go, that'll be it, so stay healthy, stay safe.

See you next time, bye.