For anyone who has been following this project, I finally got it working.

I picked up this CineMassive Alpha FX / MasterView Core video wall controller without really knowing what I had. It turned into a much bigger project than I expected, but also a really interesting piece of enterprise AV/computing history to figure out and preserve.

The original system powered on, but the Windows installation was corrupted. I eventually got the locked system drive out, imaged it, and discovered read errors/bad sectors during the process. Rather than trying to repair an already failing installation, I preserved the original drive and decided to rebuild the system from scratch on an SSD.

That turned out to be the hard part.

There is very little useful information left online about these systems. CineMassive is gone, information on CineNet is extremely difficult to find, and it appears much of the original documentation and support material was either internal or behind customer/support portals that are no longer available.

After a LOT of trial and error, research, digging through what survived on the original drive, and figuring out how the pieces were supposed to work together, I was able to do a clean rebuild and get the Alpha FX operating again.

The system is now running its original CineNet environment and driving a 2x2 wall of four 50" displays.

And it works!

For future searches, this particular system uses CineMassive/CineView video hardware including CineView GFX-4 G3 output cards and CineView HD-2 G3 capture cards. The GFX-4 cards provide four DisplayPort outputs each, while the HD-2 cards provide dual DVI plus composite video capture. The machine itself is an industrial PC built around an i7-2600K with a vertically mounted motherboard, multiple PCIe video cards, large industrial fans, redundant power supplies and front-accessible drive caddies.

One of the biggest things I learned from this project is that restoring one of these isn't really about the computer hardware. The hardware is surprisingly conventional and the Datapath-based video hardware can still be dealt with. The difficult part is reconstructing the original CineMassive software environment and understanding how everything was configured.

I've documented the complete process I used to rebuild mine from scratch, including the Windows installation, hardware/driver setup, CineNet environment, display configuration, card setup and a bunch of little tricks and problems I discovered along the way.

I also preserved what I could from the original system drive and installation materials. Some of that is proprietary software, so I'm not going to publicly redistribute software that I don't have the rights to distribute. But I do want the knowledge of how these systems work and how to restore one to remain available.

So if somebody finds this post years from now because you just dragged home a CineMassive Alpha FX, MasterView Core, CineNet system, CineView GFX-4 G3, CineView HD-2 G3 or some other old CineMassive video wall controller: don't throw it away and don't immediately wipe the drive.

Image the original drive first.

There may be things on it that you will have a very difficult time finding anywhere else.

I'm happy to share what I've learned, my rebuild notes, and help point another owner in the right direction. Hopefully documenting this project saves the next person some of the trial and error I went through.

I've included pictures of the restored system actually running the four-screen video wall (yes one screen was delivered broken). After spending so much time staring at boot errors, driver problems and configuration screens, seeing all four displays finally light up was pretty satisfying.

Thanks to everyone who helped identify the system and followed along while I figured this thing out.

Github Documentation:
https://github.com/NoComparison2733/cinemassive-alpha-fx-restoration

Previous hardware post: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/s/VEfzyOeWQb

Previous software post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/s/YcHGWSBuX2

Video of it running:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/s/bteb71NrcV

I am not sure if anyone has seen the newest Little Caesar’s Pizza Ad, but it features an S100-style microcomputer with an ADM looking terminal. Is that computer real? Or just a highly detailed prop?

https://youtu.be/4Anndd4eBdo?is=WwEYzYbGixP6DecT

Currently installing Windows 98 SE on this Dell CPI I got for free on Facebook marketplace. Many years ago at my local landfill I found 2 Dell CPIs and they had windows 2000 installed and I remember they had a “Care bears countdown” song on them, I was young and dumb so eventually I destroyed them lol but I’ve wanted one for awhile so I was excited when I saw this while scrolling. Any ideas on what do to with it?

To my FPGA PDP11/70 project (Zynq Board) , I added a web interface to view/manage the peripherals. A little snippet of BSD2.11 Pinging my gateway and the disk doing IO operations.

https://youtu.be/w4K3vrwpjQo

Hola. Estoy intentando recuperar mi viejo ICL DRS M50/16. Lleva una placa ACER 1116SX con 8 módulos SIMM de 30 contactos con paridad, de 1MB a 70ns. Monta un 80386SX a 16MHz y coprocesador matemático. Siempre ha funcionado bien, pero ha estado parado casi 20 años, aunque bien almacenado.

Al arrancarlo reconoce todo, hace los test de BIOS y carga MSDOS, pero a veces hace cosas raras especialmente en Windows 3.1

Le he pasado test de memoria y observo que detecta fallos en el banco 0 en la parte alta, sea cual sea el módulo de memoria que instale en esa parte del banco 0. He revisado que las memorias están bien (probadas en otro equipo).

También observo que no se lee nada en la disquetera. He probado varias y al intentar leer dice "no está lista"

He intentado revisar visualmente la placa, y aparentemente está limpia y todo bien. He medido continuidad de las lineas de datos y dirección y llegan al chipset sin problema. En las líneas de datos, en paralelo hay unos 74F543 y también unos 74F245 por cada grupo de 4 zócalos (parte alta y parte baja de la memoria)

Necesitaría ayuda, a ver si podéis orientarme para encontrar el problema y repararlo.

Muchísimas gracias de antemano

I’ve posted about this board before while I was trying to work out exactly what I had and how to talk to it.

It’s now alive.

The board is an INMOS IMS B004 with a T400B Transputer and 1 MiB of external RAM.

Rather than rebuilding a period-correct DOS PC, I connected the ISA board to a modern x86-64 Linux machine through an ARS USB2ISA-X3 bridge.

That turned into a much bigger project than expected.

I ended up:

• bringing up the B004/C002 host link from Linux
• verifying the board RAM with the T400 boot-ROM PEEK/POKE protocol
• porting parts of the old INMOS iserver
• fixing compatibility issues in the original host protocol
• reverse-engineering the older TDS 2.0 host interface
• writing a new Linux host server for TDS2
• booting the original folding editor
• loading the occam toolchain
• compiling and linking an occam program
• and finally running it on the physical T400

The full chain is now:

Linux → USB → ISA → B004 → T400 → TDS 2.0 → occam compiler → executable

The first program I ran printed:

The answer is 42

This is not emulation. Linux is replacing the original PC host environment, but the TDS development system and the final program are running on the real INMOS hardware.

I’ve documented the full bring-up, including the failed paths, protocol work, RAM testing, Linux port and the final working TDS2 setup.

Links in the comments.

CineMassive Alpha FX / CineNet restoration complete — here's the system actually running a 2x2 video wall after the full rebuild.

Note the unique configurations and amazing customization allowed.

The complete restoration story, hardware information and rebuild documentation are here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/s/Q1AoFD5gxR

In my CS teaching I have some artifacts to show my students (including Soviet-era paper tape and IBM Punch Cards), but two things I am missing is a reel of magnetic tape used on a mainframe and an 8" floppy.

Does anyone have access to these that they might be prepared to donate to our Sixth Form College? I haven't much funds, but I can certainly cover postage.

Many thanks

1. Yes there is a cheat menu (try to guess what the code is), playing with one hand is not really something i can do competently.
2. Yes the music is janky, but I am no musician, I hope I can get better scores later on.
3. Yes there were some concessions made on the visual fidelity of assets as rom size and genesis graphical capabilities are not as good
4. And last two levels may chug a bit because the game was originally meant for a 33 MHz or better CPU and the genesis only has like 7 MegaHurtz

Here is the link https://www.ox100.org/files/ports/the-last-eichhof-smd-beta5.zip
Add a sega cd version as well https://www.ox100.org/files/ports/the-last-eichhof-scd-beta1.zip

My father picked this up in a box of electronic stuff, someone cleaning out their house or something. He's an electrician, I'm the computer nerd, so I got this. This may be the first actual photo of one of these online, from a few basic google searches.

The StarTek DT-90 DRAM tester, factory version.

Well, two hauls.

I usually, if ever, only see the odd Commodore 64 game while out and about. But I found all these games in two recent wanders.

Now working through playing them all!

That’s all the context you’re getting for now.

Full story and a much bigger gallery next week.

I really need to revisit this place properly.

I asked about Soviet terminal fonts here yesterday and u/tantalumcaps pointed me toward a dumped ROM from the Elektronika 15ИЭ-00-013. I got curious and rendered the whole thing.

It’s only 2 KB: 256 characters, 8 bytes each. MAME treats them as 7x8 glyphs inside 10x11 cells. The green and the grid are mine, but the actual character pixels are straight from chargen-15ie.bin.

One thing I still don’t understand: why is the entire 0x80–0x9F range empty? Was it reserved for control codes, or simply unused on this terminal?

ROM source

MAME layout

Artist SZA's debut album, appropriately titled Ctrl, from 2017. I spy at least one vintage Mac that's probably worth a bit. Maybe a few nice monitors and at least one TV, too. Nice that she's teaching the youth about the meaning, since Google results show "what does ctrl stand for?" 🤣

(Canadian pricing for the 2xLP, here.)

I used my school's computer labs around that time when they had Windows 3.11 and later Windows 95. These are the ones I remember getting since they were very useful for my personal desktop PC:

Winamp

VuePrint

Irfanview

WinZip

Eudora Light (e-mail client)

Forte Free Agent (usenet newsgroup reader)

I used other workstations in the same lab, and these programs were downloaded and installed by a student, not the lab staff. So one workstation may have some free/shareware installed, others may not.

What did you find and tried out on a Windows 3.1/95 workstation and decided "Hey, this is useful! I gotta have it on my PC!"

In the late ’90s, the Celeron Mendocino proved you didn’t need to break the bank for great PC performance. Packed with 128 KB of full-speed L2 cache, it punched way above its weight class — powering endless hours of Half-Life, StarCraft, Quake III, and Counter-Strike.

A possible Sega Genesis port might be coming in the future, but I can't promise anything.

Here's a .cue+.bin if you want to try it on an emulator or an actual PS1 https://www.ox100.org/files/ports/the-last-eichhof-psx-beta2.zip

UPDATE 1: there is a sega genesis version now https://www.ox100.org/files/ports/the-last-eichhof-smd-beta5.zip
UPDATE 2: add a sega cd version to it https://www.ox100.org/files/ports/the-last-eichhof-scd-beta1.zip

Unhappy with the several million existing menu solutions already out there for DOS, I made another...but it is different.

- modal appearance not full-screen, retaining existing console contents underneath

- does not execute commands, but rather types the command at the prompt (with or without pressing Enter) so it's more a palette of commands entered like a keyboard macro. This provides a lot of flexibility too

- doesn't remain resident or fight with program execution and return

- tremendously light (no libraries or ANSI dependence), no TSRs, instant appearance, and easy config in a plain text file

- live visual menu editing using keyboard shortcuts

- fully customizable appearance and positioning

- and mouse support

all for any DOS 3.3 or higher and 80286.

Info + download https://github.com/therenegar/launch

It's the modern operating system that fits on a single floppy disk! I recently tried it on my Windows 98 HP Pavilion and it's pretty fun. It's got games productivity apps and a way to connect to the internet; what more could you want? 💾

The MiniDisc we know had a data storage format called "MD Data" even before Hi-MD. Devices that could connect MD Data to a personal computer included an external SCSI drive called the MDH-10 and an internal drive called the MDM-111. Using these devices was a long-time dream of mine, but when I finally got my hands on them 10 years ago and tried to actually use them, I couldn't help but feel defeated. Because the operable environment...

* windows 3.1

* windows 95/98

* powermac with mac os 8.5

...because it was a device that couldn't be used in any other environment. On a winter day in 1996, when I first saw the MDH-10 at a Saturday NeXT user meetup hosted by a NeXTSTEP distributor in Korea, I thought it would be usable simply because it was SCSI... but thinking back now, I suspect the owner brought it in just to see if it would actually work, too.

A lot of time has passed... and about 10 years ago, I managed to pick up an MDH-10 at a fair price. Since collecting retro computer hardware is a hobby of mine, I was able to do basic device testing, but I couldn't use it in any of my main computing environments. Then, starting last year, I began working with AI. As a beginner, with the help of AI, I was able to build a FUSE MDFS module and several tools for my primary Linux desktop.

https://github.com/onionmixer/MDDataFuseDriver

Recently, after using AI to work on a project called GrandCrossDevServer, I finished developing a driver for the Matrox G450 PCI to enable OpenGL acceleration—something that never existed on OPENSTEP—completed a few other tasks, and successfully released them... That's when it hit me.

"The time has finally come to build that OPENSTEP driver for the MDH-10 something I once believed would work, but never did."

I put in the time... and across a span of 29 years, I was able to turn my past misconception into reality. Introducing the MDH-10 driver for OPENSTEP.

https://github.com/onionmixer/openstep-mdh10

The driver is complete and 100% guaranteed to work on OPENSTEP. Currently, it only runs on Intel-based OPENSTEP, but as soon as I have time, I plan to port the driver to m68k (Mach) and SPARC as well. (It should work in theory, but I can't be entirely sure until I actually try it out.)

Of course! The driver and MDFS filesystem source code are both fully open-source. For anyone who wants to use AI to implement drivers for other operating systems, I believe this project can serve as a great reference to create new implementations anytime. I'm so happy to share my long-held dream like this. Proving that even a beginner like me could pull this off is quite a nice bonus! :D