25 Mar
2021
25 Mar
'21
12:31 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 1:01 AM John Ames via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Huh - wacky. Still pretty curious how it works just on
a basic "how
the hey does the framebuffer even function" level, but that's
certainly interesting. Does make me feel less guilty about planning to
cannibalize it for a homebrew project later, though!
It's a text mode, which generates the screen image using rasterized fonts
from the text + attributes stored in video memory.
There is no frame buffer. With that little RAM it can support the text
modes easily enough, but none of the graphics modes.
Warner
On 3/24/21, Camiel Vanderhoeven
<camiel.vanderhoeven at vmssoftware.com>
wrote:
It's neither X nor ethernet. These worked
with a special controller card
that had 4 RJ45 connectors. That allowed four users to share a single
Windows NT system.
________________________________
From: cctech <cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of John Ames via
cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 4:41 AM
To: cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>; cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org>
Subject: MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation
So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked
up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA
connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication"
port. I got it bare, without the external PSU that would've gone with
it, and I've since been unable to determine just what the heck I'm
supposed to feed this thing. It's a standard barrel jack, but there's
no markings on the case or the PCB to give any clue as to what
voltage/amperage or polarity it expects, and Google has been no help
at all. Does anyone have any recollection of these things? Any idea
what they want for juice?
To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the
case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART,
and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a
W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen,
not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on
how these things operated? Given this, my only guess would be some
kind of insane networked-framebuffer scheme where the host would blast
video data in on the fly, but there's no way this was even 100Mbps
Ethernet, and 10Mbps isn't nearly fast enough to transfer 150KB at
60FPS, and there's no memory to buffer it for a slower refresh. What
in the heck is going on here?
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