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!
On 3/24/21, Camiel Vanderhoeven <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> on behalf of John Ames via > cctech <[email protected]> > Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2021 4:41 AM > To: cctalk <[email protected]>; cctech <[email protected]> > 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? > > This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain privileged, > confidential, proprietary, private, copyrighted, or other legally protected > information. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual > or entity designated above. If you are not the intended recipient (even if > the e-mail address above is yours), please notify us by return e-mail > immediately, and delete the message and any attachments. Any disclosure, > reproduction, distribution or other use of this message or any attachments > by an individual or entity other than the intended recipient is prohibited. >
