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This is a great look at the creation of the Tinitron aperture grille CRT. My preference for aperture grille over shadow mask technology cannot be overstated. Once I got my first aperture grill display (a Nokia 447Xi with a Trinitron tube) in the early '90s, I never went back.

I still have my 19-inch Sony G420 that I use almost daily.


A good handful of variants were tested as well, as explained in the article. It doesn't seem it could be items on the list. (Fake chips were discussed and identified as well.)


If you read the article carefully, all AY-3-8913s mentioned fall in 1 of 2 categories:

1) Pulled from, or sitting on boards that were built much later (~2010?) than AY-3-8913 original production. There's no clear indication how makers of those boards obtained their ICs. So "bought from random eBay seller, potentially fake or relabeled chip" is entirely possible. Not excluded, anyway. Even if seller was legit, other options like poor storage, ESD damage etc still apply.

2) One vintage board with original IC. This of course pre-owned, IC not tested outside of this board, and... sample size 1.

Then this link:

https://www.bytedelight.com/?p=6327

Same thing: "AY-3-8913 chips we bought may have been duds or fakes".

If you'd find some gear that actually used these AY-3-8913s back in the day, in unmodified state, with a known history (use/storage/previous owners), pull the AY-3-8913s from that, test in isolation, and then also see the same problems, then you'd have a case.

But with the data as presented in article: could be anything, really.

The only thing I take away from all this: if you're building something that uses an AY-3-891x, stay away from the -8913. Because they're rare / hard to find, and "buy from eBay" has a good chance of getting you a bad chip. Dud, fake, re-labeled or otherwise.

Which is good to know but says little to nothing about genuine, original AY-3-8913.


The comments in some of the news posts covering the auction popping up are curious / amusing. Lots of supercomputer hate - "let's use a few PCs," etc.

ex: https://wccftech.com/iconic-5-34-pflops-cheyenne-supercomput...


Pretty slick. I've been listening to lots of "new" tracker tunes on the 486 + GUS over the past few months, and it's been lovely. A sample: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot/111990410300125218 (so to speak...)


I set it up on my 486-class PC tonight and did my first toot from it (followed by a selfie of sorts).

https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot/111898550167322715


I will say that the Atari ST version of Rogue was one of my favorite games for the ST back when I had it in 1986, published by Epyx as mentioned in the article. Nice tile graphics on that one.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/6710836583/


Though, the article's conclusion that,

This in turn also helps encourage consumers to buy AMD hardware, whether it is just an AMD GPU or an AMD CPU and GPU combination.

Is a flawed notion, as AMD FSR can run on most any modern GPU and a is not tied to those of AMD, which is a particular benefit of the technology, as compared to Nvidia's DLSS, which is tied to Nvidia's RTX hardware.


Interestingly, I've never owned a 386. I was not much of a DOS/Win PC person until 1994, when I got a 486 to run NEXTSTEP. I've had an i8088, NEC V20, i80286, i80486, AMD 5x86, P4, and then on with the Mac starting in 2006 with (well, just before) Intel Core microarch. In those early days I was more Amiga, ST, etc. ( https://bytecellar.com/the-list/ )

I felt more spiritually connected to the MC68K line back when, for lack of a better term.

Amusingly the i386 system I spent the most time with was in college in 1993/4 on a Sun 386 tower running SunOS or Solaris in the APCS lab.


While I got the 80386 programmers manual as one of my teen birthday presents.. I only ever actually did a little ASM programming but I loved that book anyway and read it a lot.

Really annoyed at myself that I got rid of in some fit of "well, I'll never use that again" cleaning some time.. especially given somehow still have "Sendmail, edition 2".

I might read the 386 book for nostalgia.. the Sendmail one..well, PTSD isn't something you get nostalgic about!


I’ll dream in M4 tonight, thank you…


Didn't I use some online payment system in 2001 or so, called Kagi?


"We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the shareware payments platform. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance."

https://help.kagi.com/orion/company/history.html


I wonder if a Mac Plus could do this equally well. I am guessing it can. Would be fun to print from the Mac Studio through the Plus to the Imagewriter II.


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