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Anybody knows what this might be?
image.jpg
 
Paterino Del Galaxia said:
Hi everyone, i am making a retro game console/pc hybrid and i need help in terms of trademark, licensing and patents. Can someone explain and clear these stuffs to me...
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Umm.... what are you planning to do with this hybrid piece of hardware? For own personal use, you don't need trademak, licensing and patent. However, if you plan to make it into commercial product and sell it e.g under SEGA name, you need to contact the current trademark/license holder about this.

And patents are for inventions, not redesigns. If you take existing console and merge it with existing PC, it isn't an invention, it's a redesign and can't be applied for a patent. Though, patent laws vary between countries and are often very expensive to obtain.
 
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Aeacus said:
Umm.... what are you planning to do with this hybrid piece of hardware? For own personal use, you don't need trademak, licensing and patent. However, if you plan to make it into commercial product and sell it e.g under SEGA name, you need to contact the current trademark/license holder about this.

And patents are for inventions, not redesigns. If you take existing console and merge it with existing PC, it isn't an invention, it's a redesign and can't be applied for a patent. Though, patent laws vary between countries and are often very expensive to obtain.
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I want to make it a commercial products, am i able to make my own small company? It is not an inveention and redesign, i just want that my product won't be copied by other people, No, i made it with my own hardware design. It is a hybrid for it can be a game console(i made my own games) and a normal computer system. I would rather not resell it to any other companies if i have no full control over the unit that i designed.
 
RememberThe5th said:
Anybody knows what this might be?
Click to expand...
Yeah....as mentioned by others, this is a 8-bit ISA expansion card.
2 - Parallel port (top right-hand DB-25 connector, and bottom-left pin header)
1 - Serial port (top left-hand DB-9 connector)
1 - Joystick interface connector (top-left pin header)
The giveaway on the joystick interface is the 15 - conductor ribbon cable.

These were pretty common, back in the late-80's/early 90's. I/O cards that predate this one would be just about full-length cards. This one looks like a half-length card. Cards of the mid-90's vintage would more highly integrated and would often have an expanded function set.

A hard disk / FDD controller card of this era would more than likely have more pin headers for drive interface, with ribbon cables on them with keyed edge card connectors on them, and a set of twisted conductors at the end edge card connector, for drive identification....and the card would certainly be larger and possess drive controller chips.

A HDD controller would have usually been a stand-alone affair, and would have had a clearly identifiable ROM BIOS chip on it, as well as base address selection jumpers for the entry point for the HDD ROM BIOS extension.

What's missing from this card are the I/O port address jumper pins, and IRQ select pins for the serial and parallel ports.

(HISTORICAL NOTE: Low-Level Formatting of MFM and RLL Hard Disk Drives was quickly initiated by running 'DEBUG' (MS-DOS or DR-DOS), entering:
"G=C800:CCC" on Adaptec Controllers,
"G=C800:5" on Data Technology Controllers,
"G=C800:6" on OMTI Controllers,
"G=C800:5" or "G=C800:800" on Western Digital Controllers
and hitting 'ENTER'.
"C800" was the base address for the Hard Disk Controller ROM, and whatever followed the colon :)) was the offset to the entry point of the LLF routine contained in the ROM code of the controller.

In the contemporary understanding of Low-Level Formatting, the drive contents are zeroed-out. In the historical context, however, Low-Level Formatting involved zeroing the drive contents along with laying down LLF code, as well as denying for file storage, any sector of the disk surface which wa defective. Drives of the era were supplied with a defect map on the drive case, which aided in entering the sector defect map during the Low-Level Formatting process.

AFTER a LLF was completed, then the Operating System format utility was invoked to suitably prepare the drive for file storage, under the Operating System intended for use.)
 
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Paterino Del Galaxia said:
À

I want to make it a commercial products, am i able to make my own small company? It is not an inveention and redesign, i just want that my product won't be copied by other people, No, i made it with my own hardware design. It is a hybrid for it can be a game console(i made my own games) and a normal computer system. I would rather not resell it to any other companies if i have no full control over the unit that i designed.
Click to expand...
Well, make your own company 1st and any product that you produce would fall into your own company's intellectual property rights including copyright.

Though, Tom's Hardware forums aren't geared towards legal advice. Talking to a lawyer would help you much more since lawyers know the legal side of the world best.
 
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Aeacus said:
Well, make your own company 1st and any product that you produce would fall into your own company's intellectual property rights including copyright.

Though, Tom's Hardware forums aren't geared towards legal advice. Talking to a lawyer would help you much more since lawyers know the legal side of the world best.
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Thanks!
 
I have had a slew of old systems one of my most notable was a ps/2 model 80 with all the goodies! It had windows 3.1 12mb of ram a 25mhz 386 a tape drive a floppy drive a caddy cd drive a big ol 2 board graphics card ( name escapes me) a 120mb hard drive and a 512mb hard drive a mca sound card a capture card literally all the bells and whistles. And a new addition to the list is a silicon graphics Indy
 
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I present you; where the old and the new merge to make this 40 year old machine keep on trucking: I just finished a commission for someone, a 1982 TRS-80 Model 3, Z80 CPU, 48K Ram, High Resolution Graphic Card, 1x Teac 360K 5.25" Floppy Drive, 1x Gotek w/16GB USB (permits to hold about 23 thousand 720K floppies) an internal FREHD (SD card HD device ) with a 16GB SD Card (each system image contains 4x 1.5MB HDD images, that can be multiplied for various applications needs., comes preloaded with LDos v531, Newdos v2, 180 Games, Allwrite office application, Pascal, Assembly, and Cobol programming languages and more), and an internal 2w amp/speaker system.

wCpoAKV.jpg


here is a link for the curious of a quick video of the sound being produce with a game :
TRS-80 Model 3 Sound demonstration
 
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Its been soo long and I was young and didn't knew a lot by then. I believe my dad got a intel 286 first but it was only for like a month to see how we (my brother and I) reacted to it. After that he bring home an intel 386SX, then we went to the 486DX and at some point to the AMD K5. From there it was mainly AMD CPUs (K6, K6-II, Duron, Athlon, Phenom II X4 810) to my first intel CPU in years the Core i5 3570 and at this point the last contender the Ryzen 5 3600. I had a Cyrix cpu at some point, but can't remember the exact model.

Ive seen all kinds of RAM sticks, FPRAM, EDO, S (single) DRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, DDR4. I used all floppy drives, zip, etc.


God, soo many things that I have seen, 3dfx voodoo cards, matrox gpus (can't remmber the model), quantum and maxtor hard drivers, Epox motherboards, VIA and SIS chipsets, the coprocessor, etc, etc.
 
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I am so sad.My mother through out all my old pc parts.I still have some scussy controllers + cables.I even had my first pc i built myself in 1987(i think)it was an IBM 386 with dual 386 SX cpu's at 33mhz each.It had 32mb that i installed with a type of ryzer card.But only 24mb could be read.Tech wasn't advance enough back then.It ran neck on neck with a 486 dx 2.

At least i could see the rise of pc's.I am not that old but man old tech are the bomb.I remember dipswitch oc and jumper oc.I may later on get myself a small lower class pc to use as a dos based pc(i know dos box exist but it's just not the same..I have an amd 939 4600+ and core2duo E7500 that i can use but i want to go even futher than that and get a pentium 1/2 if i can.
 
Lately, I have been using an AMD Athlon A1200AMS3B. Very decent CPU indeed I also get to run windows 7 with most of those demanding software like Photoshop, even Aftereffect (LOL), I also attempted to get it to work with windows 8 but didn't work but I am glad I had CPU. very powerful back in those days. RAM support was bit of a pain though.
 
Hi there!
Remembering the first computer... it got upgraded to an AM486 120 Overdrive... that thing kicked ass! Did anyone else ever keep a computer so long that the DRAM on post would count a different amount avail on each POST? hahaha; literally computer senility. Can't beat it.
 
I just saved a banged up Compaq Computer with an Amd Atlon 1GHZ 512MB Ram, S3 Pro Savage Video and 250MB HDD into another case slapped an edimax Wifi card on it, and Blam ! Windows Xp loading updates and running... this box will become my Eprom burning station. Ill have to see in a while what can be done in upgrades
I am thinking SSD and ram, as I dont n3eed no fancy video card for eprom burning.
 
The Radeon might attract some attention for vintage gaming PC builders. Not bad for an AGP card. You won't get a lot though, mostly would just be helping someone get an old system running for old school gaming.

Some guy in Germany selling a big pile of them for $80 a piece.
 
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