Old PC cards - prepackaged lunettas?

droffset

Hi all, hope you're doing well.

I have a lot of old obsolete sound and graphics cards.
Let's see if they can do anything interesting with Lunettas!

The approach:
-Learn about the connector pinouts
-Power them appropriately (more or less)
-Find out what the other pins do (address?? data?? huh?)
-Try to get some interesting data out of them for sequencing and CV
-Try to get some interesting audio-rate stuff out of them

I've chosen a first card, will post with some pictures soon.

Happy for others to join in as well.

Ruebezahl · Posted: Mon May 23, 2022 7:12 am Post subject:

Looking forward to that! Are they old enough to have easily accessible pins? I'd figure with todays chips it would be rather hard...

droffset · Posted: Mon May 23, 2022 12:05 pm Post subject:

As far as I can tell, this is called the ATI Graphics Solution Plus.

Here's a link to some information about it, but suffice to say it is very old(1987!) and was one of the very first graphics cards offered by ATI. Quite amazing.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/graphics-solution-plus.c3175
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Wonder_series

But anyway, now it aspires to be some kind of strange sound machine.

The main connector pinout is the same as an ISA slot:

The EGA port pinout is a 9 pin arrangement.

It outputs Analog signals...(CV?)

I'm no expert, quite the contrary, but we seem to have a lot of address pins, some data pins, some control pins, and some analog outputs.
I'm guessing the address pins will output as a binary counter? There are pints to read and write to memory, maybe If I feed it to itself and then play it back something will happen.

Many LEDs will blink.

In a week or so I'll post more. Cheers!

Mods, is this better off in Circuit Bending? Not sure, but my Lunetta will be involved.

@Ruebezahl This is the oldest one I have, chosen for it's easy to access pins. There are some others with tiny tiny pins that will need a more planned-out approach. Very Happy

EDIT: But I should add that I'm not going to try to access the IC pins, mostly just the connectors on the main strip thing.

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wakyct · Posted: Mon May 23, 2022 4:38 pm Post subject:

Love this idea, I'll be following along.

droffset · Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2022 12:41 pm Post subject:

A little update.

Nothing interesting or cool yet in terms of output from the card, but I have some other ideas.

I soldered connectors to the pins on the card and separated the address and data pins. There are 20 address pins and 8 data pins. There are also a number of pins to control the whole thing, but I don't know how to use them yet.

So I hooked up my lunetta to the control pins and started just inputting randon data. Nothing cool is going on just yet.

Here's a video of random data going into the card and no real output from data pins (the blue and white ones on the left.)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NP5GxWBlF1c

Next plan is to work with the individual ICs to try to get something going. There are cool ICs on there, but that is for another post.

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PHOBoS · Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:33 pm Post subject:

love it!

I expect that it could be quite tricky to get something out of it, but then again I don't know much about how these cards function.

blue hell · Posted: Sun Jun 05, 2022 7:04 pm Post subject:

PHOBoS · Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2022 4:53 am Post subject:

The basics of writing data to it which it will turn into a picture I somewhat understand, thanks to Ben Eater and maybe even more
James Sharman. It's the communication that seems daunting, which probably follows some kind of standard protocol that I don't
know anything about and is what I think could make it difficult to get it to do something. It does make me want to have a closer look
at videocards since I am working with VGA signals and if I can feed it some signals and can get some sort of picture out of it that could
be useful. f course if I keep following that path I just end up building/using a PC. (I've already ordered some ALU chips)

I don't expect there will be any analog signals coming from the ISA connector, only from the actual VGA connector which will be in the
0..1V range for the RGB color info (+ TTL compatible sync signals). However the frequency could be very high. (see also this)

droffset · Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2022 1:08 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your comments.

Lots of reading and research at the moment.
I'm going to have to learn how to code interactions with ports and registers eventually, this might be the project to do it.

I don't have a monitor to display the output on, but I was hoping interesting audio would come out of the video port if I run the whole system at a much lower clock rate than it would usually expect. There pins to insert custom clock and oscillator.

The good thing about this board is that it's so old that they haven't reduced whole boards into an all-in-one IC yet. Tons of 74 series ICs on there. Shift registers, multiplexers. It could be a mega melody generator? This creates a couple of options for ways to move forward:

1. Learn to control the address and data ports to read and write memory and see what that brings. Maybe the pseudo-random output of my main lunetta can be saved into memory and read back to have repeatable somethings. I'd like to be able to make proper use of an ay-3-8910 chip someday, so this might be a good path.

2. Treat it like my main lunetta, with all the jumper connections and LEDs, and do a lot of soldering of the inputs and outputs of everything to a companion interface protoboard.

So far it's just fun to try to learn about how the bus interactions work. This kind of coding is way out of my realm of experience.

Fun images attached for general knowledge.

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droffset · Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2022 1:11 pm Post subject:

And just adding some more images. Maybe I should host these somewhere instead...

Sadly I can't find any technical or datasheet information on the ATI CW16800-B main chip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Wonder_series

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droffset · Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 10:36 am Post subject:

So this is fun: Hackaday just started a new contest to design a crazy computer peripheral.

https://hackaday.io/contest/185414-odd-inputs-and-peculiar-peripherals

To focus this project a bit I'll make this monster a MIDI note random sequencer, intended for use in something like Cakewalk or LMMS. I have a cool HID device to make it easier.

Project page
https://hackaday.io/project/185788-midi-note-sequencer-from-a-vintage-graphic-card

If there's time I'll also use it with a DAC to generate random voltages to go into VCV rack.