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Mac Portable, Anyone know what this strange card is?
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-08-23 11:14:28
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-08-23 11:21:03 its definitely in the PDS slot.
Posted by: finkmac on 2013-08-23 11:21:16 Looks like a Parallel port…
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-08-23 11:24:22 yes, but isn't parallel port female? could also be a rs232
Posted by: finkmac on 2013-08-23 11:28:50 Whoops, haven't seen a Parallel port in a while… Pictures of the board?
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-08-23 11:52:59 i asked the seller, ill post em once available.
Posted by: Macdrone on 2013-08-23 12:01:15 I would say parallel port card. For use with some mac/pc printer. The gender change cables are pretty abundant. You can still get them at radio shack in the drawers, I saw some the other day.
Posted by: James1095 on 2013-08-23 12:13:41 If that were the case, why wouldn't they use the correct gender in the first place? Male DB-25 is a serial port in the PC world, although most were DB-9 by the Mac Portable era. I'm guessing that was a custom interface for whatever peripheral it came with. It would help greatly to see what's on the card.
Posted by: Macdrone on 2013-08-23 13:32:52 well since all three that have passed through my hands were from business, I would shudder to guess like an engraver...... Its like a mystery game. I am just making fun, take no malice from my comment please. On the serious note you have a point, why wouldn't they put the correct gender from the get go? That is a good point, but a lot of gear was odd back then. SCSI was weird like that also, male to female, gender changes, different pin outs, different modes and settings. It seems like IDE was like the automatic transmission in a car while scsi was a manual transmission.
Posted by: James1095 on 2013-08-23 16:31:55 IDE was a simple hard disk interface, little more than an extension to the AT bus. SCSI was a multi-purpose peripheral bus. It was designed right from the start to be much more than a hard drive interface.
Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2013-08-24 18:15:06 The original IDE port on a PC motherboard is basically an ISA slot pinout in a different form factor. All an early ISA IDE "interface" consisted of were a few 74-series parts acting as address decoders for 0x170-17Fh and 0x370-137Fh address lines connected to a 40pin IDC socket. As for the Portable, I recall seeing a unit on ebay a few months ago that had a video adapter in the PDS slot, but the output was a standard DA-15 Macintosh video port.
Posted by: haplain on 2013-09-05 11:22:03 I've got the card now and here's some photos. Anyone ever seen one, or know more about it?
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-09-05 11:45:01 here is the data sheet on the main chip http://www.labmaster.com/surplus/parts/html/941557-pl/xc2000.pdf
Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2013-09-05 11:48:51 The design is oddly similar to the memory card in my Portable. No surprise considering it was made by the same company. I'm guessing its some sort of video card.
Posted by: Paralel on 2013-09-05 12:13:11 What kind of display though? I've never seen a plug like that for video.
Posted by: NJRoadfan on 2013-09-05 12:30:24 Who knows. Some probing with a scope can be used to find the sync pins. Information is scare: https://www.google.com/search?q=Video+Mac+PAC&btnG=Search+Books&tbm=bks&tbo=1#q=%22Computer+Care%22+Video+Mac+PAC&tbm=bks Says its based on the Lapis DisplayServe, which appears to have been a NuBus video card. None of them used that type of video port though. Hopefully the driver/software is on the machine and can be retrieved!
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-09-05 12:32:10 Hopefully the driver/software is on the machine and can be retrieved! Yeah!
Posted by: haplain on 2013-09-05 13:42:32 Hopefully the driver/software is on the machine and can be retrieved! Yeah! Already loaded them onto my M5126. It seems more like its for data though. I'll have to look at what the extension was called but it was something like Interface Port
Posted by: uniserver on 2013-09-05 13:57:51 Already loaded them onto my M5126. Cool! Hap, you have all the cool stuff!
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