Radius Full Page Display for Macintosh 512ke/Plus - Cloning project possibilities?

[Trash80toG4]

Does anyone have this VidCard available for a photo session?

It's Radius' first product and one of the very few Radius cards I've yet to collect. Got TPD card for SE in hand and the BT9014 on it appears to be the only problematic Programmable Logic on the board?

NuBus Mafia appears to be down over on 'fritter, but I found this pic:

Given today's progress, that looks eminently doable?

@max1zzz of course your ITXPlus would be the target.

Crazy AM wakeup mode has me thinking in terms of a later version of your masterpiece that puts the 68000 on a riser card in the equivalent of the ITX PCIe slot spec. Passthru for horizontally mounted expansion cards a la IIsi provided of course. PCI connector is perfect for MoBo and Riser.


Caffeine has kicked in some rational thinking, A Killy Klip version of the FPD should work as is for your board and standard Plus board?

 

[Trash80toG4]

Fabulous info here: https://www.retro.co.za/ccc/mac/RadiusDisplayAdapter/

Mac History 86.11 - Radius Full Page Display

This month we gaze at the Radius Full Page Display, hear of the fabulous 100 MHz Motorola 68040, create a blockbuster storyboard, return to labyrinthine wars, and dust off the mahjong tiles in Shanghai.

systemtalk.org

Reddit thread w/ great pics


@Bolle does anything on that card look like you won't be able to mine its secrets?

 

[Trash80toG4]

Curiosity is getting the best of me here. This is the second time I've seen a 68000 used on a card of this era as an embedded processor.

This one uses it @10MHz for generating graphics. WAG would be that system clock can be phase lock looped in the GALs to provide 10MHz? I seethe 51.270MHz Can being involved in oddball timing of video output for the CRT?

Can't believe how few hits wouter has gotten, he started to reverse engineer this puppy some twelve years ago! Are you still around?

 

[Trash80toG4]

Was just wishing that the original card had the BNC output of my Radius TPD/SE and if this might be adapted to it.

Now I'm wondering if we can lop off everything analog output related? Keeping output digitally interfaced to a scaler setup should be a lot less complicated than analog shenanigans. DVI-D (without VGA of DVD-I) would b e perfectly in line with the KISS principle. Input connectors appear to be standard issue on my 1280x1024 displays alongside VGA.

DVI-D is compatible with displays with appropriate aspect ratios. No need to build HDMI conversion into the board. Stupidly cheap converters for stupidly wide aspect ratio displays are readily available. KISS, baby KISS!

 

[Trash80toG4]

Found a fabulous video posted in a seven year old thread searching my old posts at the MLA:

As I somewhat expected, the original FPD Card/Monitor interfaced via TTL signal format! No analog bits to excise!

His system appears to have been an original Radius in house upgrade with Plus' 68000 replaced by socket with FPD Card plugged into it and CPU transferred to VidCard socket. Wondering about the CPUs, his 68000 is marked 12 (MHz?) and the 68000 processors in pics above are labeled 10 (MHz?)

DuckDuckGo fu has uncovered a significant number of TTL->digital video output solutions and an interesting one which might be vastly simplified to run in reverse on the FPD Clone. I Guess having DVI and HDMI outputs on the backplane of the board would be good.

Anyway, can someone please let me know if all components on the Radius FPD card can be duplicated for a new parts build?

 

[Kai Robinson]

The board would be easy enough (*cough*) to duplicate if it's a 4 layer, obviously it'd be destroyed in the process. Then it's a matter of reversing the GAL's. You wouldn't necessarily use like for like parts, like the EPROMs, you could replace with a single one.

Also that board isn't likely using the 68000 as a processor, it looks like the board is a pass through, the systems own cpu, slightly offset.

 

[Trash80toG4]

Also that board isn't likely using the 68000 as a processor, it looks like the board is a pass through, the systems own cpu, slightly offset.

Yep, the board in the Video is an original, factory installed card, the cards in the pics I've posted not so sure. But the 1O and 12 red herring numbers on the CPUs don't appear to mean anything?

Sourcing a board to reverse engineer will be the next hardest part of the project.
- GAL16V8 - cracking is a done deal, no?
- GAL20V8 - ISTR causing some problems, but also a done deal by now as well?

Sticking point will be the PLDC20G10 at U10, its datasheet here:
https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Cypress%20PDFs/PLDC20G10B,%20PLDC20G10.pdf
Damn security feature prevents logic pattern duplication . . . or did so back in the day?

Wondering just how difficult it might be to brute force that pesky PLDC20G10 sucker if worse should come to worse?

Attempt is to a do a ground up new build using no original parts as there pretty much aren't any in the wild.

Thanks for popping in with help, I hate talking to myself in a vacuum around these parts. Far more discussion over yonder, but guest permissions make it impossible for me to get anything done in down time at work. Love this place for that, but few threads and fewer real discussions it seems to me. Are all the goings on here done on Discord?

 

[Trash80toG4]

SN54F253
SN74F253N
74F161AN
74F161N
74F109N
SN74LS393N
LM311N
RGBtoHDMI
HFI6 Series Connectors

Mac Plus with Radius FPD & CPU card - Pinout Ask

Hello, Sorry for my bad english, I have a Mac Plus with radius upgrade and want to push a monitor on the FPD card. Which pinout does the card have? Which monitors can I use? Thanks and Best regards from Austria. Edi

68kmla.org

 

[Trash80toG4]

Been looking at the Radius FPD and TPD Cards for the SE for the possibility of cloning them.

Started with the TPD, with its Bt9014 PLCC44 Programmable Logic Array complication. Was hoping it might be involved only with combining all the signals into just the one Mini BNC signal setup. But to no avail, it connects to the ROMs, which bodes ill for such dreams of simplicity.

Looking at the TPD for SE next, appears to be a "refined" version of the TPD/Plus/512ke with no programmable logic at all, just readable GALs and two empty spots for huge ICs. They're on (unpopulated) the TPD/SE card as well.

What the heck could the purpose of these ICs have been?









Hoping these cards might be convinced to work backward compatible with the Plus. Dunno, but the hardware is coming together to test the possibilities.

 

[JDW]

I read through this entire thread today. Curious what the use cases are for the card WITHOUT the full page CRT. Because those are extremely rare beasts that I don't often see. And if the intent is to use a modern LCD, is there any meaning to clone the card?

I also wonder WHY there aren't so many FPD's out there for sale. I cannot imagine that Radius only sold a few dozen. They must have numbered in the hundreds. Is every own still retaining them in their collection? Or all they all now dead for one reason or another?

In other words, the effort behind the cloning of this card would seem contingent upon finding a supply of suitable monitors that the card can drive. I'm just curious where those monitors are. Indeed, I think it would be great to have one myself one day. But the one's I've seen online, especially the Apple edition FPD, have cracks in the plastic, usually on front at the corners, which takes away from the awesomeness of the CRT.

 

[Trash80toG4]

First, on the fly run at the Radius TPD with Extron Scaler. Managed this right out of the box, without reading the manual or any experience at all.

Got SuperMac Spec8 SI running just about right with image at lower right corner of the 42" 1080p TV next to the SE over HDMI. No banding at all, front porch is off a tad, so no rounded corners bit on left side of image.

Pics taken with a relatively rudimentary digital camera.

Misplaced my link to the YouTube Vid of setting the FPD up using RGBtoHDMI? No image rotation available at that point.

Big hopes for dumbing the 6-bit TTL version down to a single bit. Rotation is a thing at the very high end, but for high end video streaming. Maybe scaling the single bit Portrait image and flopping it over on its side to fit a 1280x1024 LCD (standing on its side) will be a more reasonable goal?

RGBtoHDMI - 6-bit TTL Edition - TexElec

The RGBtoHDMI is an excellent open project created by Hoglet67 (David Banks) and IanB (Ian Bradbury). The purpose of the RGBtoHDMI is to convert many different TTL and analog video signals from vintage systems to a modern HDMI or DVI compatible output. It uses a Raspberry Pi Zero along with a...

texelec.com

So three VidCards on the benches in decreasing order of difficulty:
- TPD/SE - horrid Bt9014 44pin Programmable Logic
- FPD/Mac Plus - Middlin' nasty PLDC20G10 24pin Programmable Logic
- FPD/SE - every IC is either a readable GAL or standard 74LS Logic IC

@Bolle snagged the FPD for Mac Plus/512ke and he has the two I have as well I think?.


edit: I keep the link to that video upthread!

 

[Trash80toG4]

@JDW I forgot to say thanks for the questions!

 

[Trash80toG4]

Wondering about that pair of unpopulated chips again, 8Mbit ROM came in that 40pin DIP package. Wondering if they were there just in case the code couldn't be optimized to fit into the ROM that wound up on the board?