-
Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.
Here's looking at you, SE/30 Xceed grayscale!
- Thread starter wally
- Start date
gobabushka
Well-known member
all i can say is sweet!
wally
Well-known member
Hmmm, no, not as far as I can tell. When you connect the external color monitor you get the choice of grays or color, up to 256 levels, but only monochrome for the internal monitor, both of which are then usable at the same time. Some stuff on the net says this also, and I have not yet found the manufacturer's spec sheet or manual.A question?
Can you use both the internal monitor in grayscale and an external color monitor at the same time?
That would be cool.
I'd like to add that finding those boards was totally unexpected; I had not been thinking to upgrade my stock SE/30s. But each of those boards is neat in its own way, and renders pretty sharp images. Keep in mind when you load some really big jpegs or picts and try and display them, you will immediately understand why more SE/30 MIPs by accelerator card are good also! And when you consider the time and money if you are not lucky, well, the Pismo starts looking better and better instead!
Still, I will always be sentimental about the SE/30 in particular, because of long work and hobby association with it as a user. When I put in those boards and took those pictures, it was like taking out someone from a retirement home for a spin in a sports car and for a moment helping them see through young eyes again. Maybe it's just me, but another cool thing is just viewing the Apple Spec Database on any Compact. For that machine to be seeing/presenting what followed, all that engineering, all the lives touched, that all evolved from that humble package, well, that's kind of amazing too, even in monochrome! [
] ]'>
Last edited by a moderator:
wally
Well-known member
On some of my SE/30s depending on the fan I have super-tuned the electron beam focus/stability by adding mu-metal shielding wrapped around the glass neck exposed from the yoke collar back to the crt socket. Several turns of soft steel tin can material might be a substitute, secured with suitable tape used sparingly as not to heat insulate the neck. It's a secret! [Nice job! I like the high-res.
73s 8)
] ]'>
wally
Well-known member
I ended up making one for the Xceed color 30 board. I found enough information on the Internet to know what went where. I bought one connector body fitting the Micron frame buffer, had another from my scrap pile and made another from sawing down and modifying another I had to fit the video amp board connector. Then it was mostly a matter of extracting some precrimped wires and twisted pairs from three spare SE/30 analog to logic board cables (from the original Xceed owner's estate also!) and plugging the ends into the right spots in the collection of ferrite sleeves and connector bodies, and checking things very, very carefully before powering up!
Patrickool93
Well-known member
"Live monitor Composition window"?
Is that where you getting live video from QTake? How?!
Is that where you getting live video from QTake? How?!
wally
Well-known member
That recursive picture is a pict that my grayscale QuickCam (An old Connectix product for the Mac) captured that I then converted to a jpeg and posted. I apologize for black bleed on the high contrast white to dark edges but it was the best my particular QuickCam could do in that lighting where I wanted to washout the background to isolate the platinum SE/30. Modern cameras put QuickCam to shame but in its day it was an amazing product, the little ball that did a lot.
QuickCam comes with a little spherical camera with a 1/4-20 tripod mount hole and a funny triangular hat rubber base that has a matching spherical indentation for the ball camera to rest when used without tripod as a teleconferencing cam. There's also some Connectix application software and driver extension that you install that is built on Quicktime, and when you start it up it opens that continuously updated window that I call the Live Monitor Composition Window. There you can aim the camera, adjust a number of parameters including brightness, and even specify single, or multiple time lapse capture. The size of the window is limited to what's in my picture, but there is very little delay between moving the camera and seeing the window update. It's not really live like a CCTV monitor, but pretty close. When you finally get the picture composed right there is a button, menu, and keyboard shortcut that commands grabbing everything in that composition window, not the whole SE/30 screen, as a 320x240 pict (although, I think you can also do the command shift 3 thing and do a screen snapshot too, working around the application!). There's also a movie capture mode.
The QuickCam driver appears to follow the QuickTime rules for video sources, so if you install QuickCam and call it up, and then invoke AppleVideophone, Videophone will see the live feed from the cam as an available video source and if you select it, work with it as your local camera. I have not tried this on SE/30 but it works well on PB1400/MacOS 8.6. If you are into QuickTime programming, you could cut code that worked with the frames as they were captured to do motion detection for example.
And the grayscale QuickCam, but not the later color version, was powered from the serial port alone and had an internal microphone. Perhaps a bit ahead of its time like the Compacts.
QuickCam comes with a little spherical camera with a 1/4-20 tripod mount hole and a funny triangular hat rubber base that has a matching spherical indentation for the ball camera to rest when used without tripod as a teleconferencing cam. There's also some Connectix application software and driver extension that you install that is built on Quicktime, and when you start it up it opens that continuously updated window that I call the Live Monitor Composition Window. There you can aim the camera, adjust a number of parameters including brightness, and even specify single, or multiple time lapse capture. The size of the window is limited to what's in my picture, but there is very little delay between moving the camera and seeing the window update. It's not really live like a CCTV monitor, but pretty close. When you finally get the picture composed right there is a button, menu, and keyboard shortcut that commands grabbing everything in that composition window, not the whole SE/30 screen, as a 320x240 pict (although, I think you can also do the command shift 3 thing and do a screen snapshot too, working around the application!). There's also a movie capture mode.
The QuickCam driver appears to follow the QuickTime rules for video sources, so if you install QuickCam and call it up, and then invoke AppleVideophone, Videophone will see the live feed from the cam as an available video source and if you select it, work with it as your local camera. I have not tried this on SE/30 but it works well on PB1400/MacOS 8.6. If you are into QuickTime programming, you could cut code that worked with the frames as they were captured to do motion detection for example.
And the grayscale QuickCam, but not the later color version, was powered from the serial port alone and had an internal microphone. Perhaps a bit ahead of its time like the Compacts.
Patrickool93
Well-known member
Ah, I read that as QuickTake, the Apple Digital camera. Oh, cool..
wally
Well-known member
You can get that same effect with the QuickTake, or any digital camera if you can take successive shots from the same exact position. Just take one shot of the entire computer, with with anything at all on the screen. Load the picture into the computer and display it large as you like but showing the entire computer outline and the smaller copy of the screen with the anything at all. Take another picture of the computer, now you have a picture of a computer displaying a computer...wait, I'm starting to get dizzy. Anyway, if you keep shooting and transferring and displaying, you get that series of pictures of repeating, retreating computers, and only the very smallest one will be displaying the anything at all screen that you started with, and it will be too tiny to see. Enjoy! [8D]
(hmmm, an any Mac model recursive or special effects photo contest idea, perhaps another 68kmla thread!) [8)] ]'>
(hmmm, an any Mac model recursive or special effects photo contest idea, perhaps another 68kmla thread!) [8)] ]'>
Similar threads
