Getting a powerpoint presentation on a CD showing you how to use a VGA adapter for your Windows PDA is just about the most early 2000s thing possible.

The dongle/box contains the VGA signal generator (the PDA is too slow). There is a screen buffer which is polling the screen for changes and writing them via the SD interface to memory in the box. The box renders the screen at regular intervals from this memory. Pretty slick.

@kylemproductions

3 жыл бұрын

Good analysis. That's definitely what it looks like. Interestingly similar to modern video encoding only specifying the updated parts of the image.

@absalomdraconis

3 жыл бұрын

@@kylemproductions : Ah, now that's part of the trick- the bits of the Win32 api that allow the program to explicitly specify what parts of the screen to update were part of Windows 95, and were in turn based on high-performance programming practices in DOS. Chances are that Solitaire updates faster because it _doesn't_ do a call to the screen-clear function first, while the other program _does_ make that call, allowing Solitaire to reduce the data that has to be sent through the SDIO bus.

@absalomdraconis

3 жыл бұрын

And yes, I'm aware this device won't be running a Windows 95 version- my poorly-expressed sentiment is that it was already standard practice to _not_ update the entire screen.

@debug9424

3 жыл бұрын

@Bob Sacamano I doubt that the mirroring software has access to the bus used by the screen

@SianaGearz

3 жыл бұрын

@Bob Sacamano The PDA screen is not an SPI device. Nowadays it's common for such screens to be SPI compatible, but back then it was not the time yet for this, the displays were all parallel drive, and it was common to share RAM data bus and display bus and you basically enable the display and then do DMA RAM reads into nowhere to scan them out, and there's a helper chip to help form the H and V strobes for the display.

Those were the days when you could spend hundreds of $$$ to make your PDA not quite a PC.

@no1DdC

3 жыл бұрын

I did the same with a few tablets a while ago. I went through a handful of Atom-powered Windows tablets over the years, because they are just so versatile. A full (if slow) PC that fits into any bag? Yes please. These were good enough for programming, reading, writing, light gaming, anything a PC can. I did however notice that most of the software is of course not ideal for a touchscreen and programs like Touchmousepointer (which turns the entire screen into a touchpad so that you can use older software with small buttons) only gets you so far. I got a small keyboard, mouse, various adapters, hubs, dongles and such. I could have just bought a late netbook or small notebook, but this was actually cheaper and more versatile, with better battery life than any of the other options, so it kind of made sense.

@gmcnewlook

3 жыл бұрын

And yet Apple still does this... 70 bucks (cdn) for HDMI output dongle for an iPhone or iPad...

@Damaniel3

3 жыл бұрын

Not quite a PC, not quite a camera, not quite an iPod, not quite a game console - pretty much sums up the early to mid 2000s PDA experience. That didn't stop me from owning half a dozen of these over the years.

@dregenius

3 жыл бұрын

@@gmcnewlook yeah except Apple's solutions are well designed and well implemented... even in 2009 they had realtime full resolution HDMI mirroring for iPhone. Yes it was an "expensive add on", but it just worked SO much better than products from their competitors. Just like the M1. 😉

@htcmlcrip

3 жыл бұрын

@@dregenius well designed... lmao check out all "apple repair" examples, where products break BECAUSE of stupid design lol

Hi-octane fast-paced Soltaire action with an amazing refresh rate! Just when I thought it couldn't get crazier you switched to direct capture!

This blows my mind even in 2021 🤯

@DumDoger

3 жыл бұрын

same

@KC9UDX

3 жыл бұрын

I thought it was a new product for the "retro" market. I had no idea these existed. I've still got my Treo.

@fzr850

3 жыл бұрын

Most new phone has HDMI output...

@nathanhamman418

3 жыл бұрын

@@fzr850 Maybe on the high end with an adapter, i can find 14 that were released last year that have it, all of which require an adapter. Thats out of 72 released in 2020.

@HAGSLAB

3 жыл бұрын

@@fzr850 Sure, but that's not as cool in my eyes. Those phones are made with that feature in mind. The showcased device in the video is made to bring that feature to a device that don't have such a feature and that's way more interesting to me. The fact that it does it in a non-obvious way through an SD-interface makes it even more interesting.

I love the fact that these PDA products were essentially "Smart Phones" without a phone. It's truly amazing to see how far we have come, but in such a small amount of time.

@willm5032

3 жыл бұрын

Honestly I have to remind myself that I took my school work in on floppy disks because USB storage was ruinously expensive- that was only like 15 years ago or so. Crazy.

@AaronHendu

3 жыл бұрын

Some of them even had a phone...I remember a friend of mine had a Palm OS Treo device that had phone features around the same time I had my Palm Tungsten E2.

@ionstorm66

3 жыл бұрын

@@willm5032 I got a 128mb usb stick for Christmas one year as the big gift when I was a kid. It was way fast than burning cds, and blank cds were actually pretty pricy too.

@willm5032

3 жыл бұрын

@@ionstorm66 Haha I remember those days. I invested in a bunch of DVD RW disks (which could be rewritten many times) which, in hindsight were kind of useful and also fucking stupid in eaqual measure

@goeland4585

3 жыл бұрын

@@willm5032 ... In 2005?

SD... VGA... PDA... This is exactly how technology-lingo sounds to our parents :D

@kaitlyn__L

3 жыл бұрын

Giga, mega, whatsits

@spungbob_spare_pant

3 жыл бұрын

So the SD is connected to the PDA which is connected to the VGA?

@1sonyzz

3 жыл бұрын

RCA...VGA...SDA..PDA...

@JohnSmith-xq1pz

3 жыл бұрын

🤣 yup

@cedricmaguire9329

3 жыл бұрын

Though, this stuff is so old, we ARE the parents now

Why is it all I can think of doing with that thing is hooking up a hilarious amount of video adapters to it. SDio to VGA, VGA to DVI, DVI to HDMI, HDMI to DisplayPort.

@jmalmsten

3 жыл бұрын

Remember to go to composite video and finally a video capture device. :P

@Harey0407

3 жыл бұрын

@@jmalmsten Knew I was forgetting something!

@televisionandcheese

3 жыл бұрын

@@jmalmsten don't forget composite to a television with a RF camera in front of it

@eDoc2020

3 жыл бұрын

After you're converted to DisplayPort you obviously need a DP->VGA adapter. Also keep in mind you can't connect your average VGA-DVI and DVI-HDMI adapters together (DVD-D vs DVI-A).

@jmalmsten

3 жыл бұрын

@@televisionandcheese Dangit! forgot about that step. I fail at videography

The pixelated CE logo on the box really inspires confidence on the product.

Holy crap. This is literally Powerpoint Presentation performance.

@Redhotsmasher

3 жыл бұрын

A literal slide show when the whole screen updates.

@CaveyMoth

3 жыл бұрын

@@Redhotsmasher Powerpoint transitions..without the need for Powerpoint transitions!

I had a Toshiba e750 back when it was new - transflective screen (way easier to read in the sun), CF and SDIO slots, built in wi-fi, and best of all a module that clicked to the bottom that gave it native USB and VGA outputs. One of the amusing things is that it was sold with the fact it had an SDIO slot as a big feature, while it already had most of those features built in. I think the camera from the previous video might have been useful (assuming it worked on a Toshiba, as opposed to some kind of HP-only lock in). edit: oh yeah, and the VGA was real-time, not this smearfest.

You should try to find a Dell Axim X50v or x51v PDA. Those suckers had a 624 MHz processor (faster than the original iPhone) and OpenGL support with its own video RAM. :D

@georg6876

3 жыл бұрын

Could it run glquake?

@retropcs88

3 жыл бұрын

I have got one of those lol (x51v)

@awesomeferret

3 жыл бұрын

Or one of the late model HP Classic series. Paid 5 bucks for one a few years ago, even now they are still worth 30+ times that. 480p screen (high res for WM) and wifi and specs that (if I remember right) rival the X51v.

@spunker88

3 жыл бұрын

There were VGA output cables sold for the X50V and X51V PDAs that connected through the docking port and I believe they didn't have the screen redraw limitations that this SD adapter has

@Aser6000

3 жыл бұрын

The HP hx4700 was the best at the time. It had the same 624MHz processor, plus a big 4.0" screen and a little touchpad mouse at the bottom, and a CF card slot. And it still looks awesome.

I'm almost equally as impressed with your monitors control panel, I've never seen one rotate

A rotated image with 3x zoom (option was there but not shown in the video ...) would nearly perfectly fit the screen. I wish I had one of these things 15 years ago. Would have made me the king of slideshows ;-).

@MegaManNeo

3 жыл бұрын

Make it more like 20.

@NightRidersUrbex

3 жыл бұрын

@@MegaManNeo Over here in Germany we're adapting tech five years later ;-). You are right btw, just recalled using my first PDA with SD-slot in 2002.

@MegaManNeo

3 жыл бұрын

@@NightRidersUrbex Or they make their own weird shit like DVB-T2 HD instead of sticking with the European standard. That said, Mahlzeit und viel Spaß noch mit dem Nostalgietrip 👀

I had a ton of fun when I made my first step into the "smartphone / Pocket PC" world with my HTC P4350 aka the T-Mobile Wing back in 2008. Being able to reflash the OS with unofficial updates, slimmed down Roms, tweaking the registry and running custom scripts, discovering XDA, etc, was a thrill back then. I wish Microsoft would get their stuff together and relaunch Windows OS on Mobile. I think it would succeed if .executed properly.

This still blows my mind that this was 15-ish years ago. We've come so far already! Who knows what we will see in the next 15 years?

I worked with a guy in college around 2002-2004 who had a PDA and he was basically got to have MS Office wile in class. I straight up told him why not just use a laptop, which I knew he had one already.

@chompionssawelo3507

3 жыл бұрын

at least he need a reason to use pda

Some SD-card slots can hold onto things put in there pretty well, even those of push-push release variety. There's a mechanism foreseen for that. That's the reason why SD-cards have a notch on them opposite the WP slider!

It only updates pixels that change. So the smaller area that changes, the faster the update. We used this same technique in my first programming class, when programming on extremely underpowered hardware. Double buffer the output and only send changed pixels to the framebuffer.

Looks pretty sophisticated actually. I’d guess it’s only redrawing the part of the image that changes.

Man I really love watching these videos, keep up the good work BLERB MASTER.

Now we need USB over SDIO, or even HDMI LOL

@hicknopunk

3 жыл бұрын

Somewhere i have a freaky Smartmedia to USB adapter. It only supports drives up to 256 megs too. Slow as heck as well.

Cool! Public Display of Affection on a VGA monitor! I know that was a terrible pun, but couldn't resist! Awesome upload as always Clint! :)

Thinking the person who had this back in the day would be the tech master giving a presentation off a PDA. awesome.

that smell is a reason to collect this old stuff lol

@s8wc3

3 жыл бұрын

Sometimes. Most of the time it just smells like lint and has tonnes of pubes inside.

3 seconds in and I'm already immediately on board. Love these blurbs!

Man, that would really mess with my PowerPoint star transitions

It would be really cool if there was a dock for it that had some USB ports and VGA out, it would run Windows Mobile in a desktop interface similar to windows XP.

Wow this would have been extremely useful for my old Palm video. No idea this existed.

Oh yeah such delicious of the PDA era goodness! More awesomeness from the SD Consortia!

And here I was looking forward for video presentations.

Back when having a PDA was still exciting with all its extra gadgets and addons. These days, PDAs either run all the same OS in a different shell or have a bitten off apple on its back.

@ReptilianLepton

3 жыл бұрын

Some of 'em support proper docking stations and have native HDMI-out and can use a 'desktop' UI... but still not very practical.

@xureality

3 жыл бұрын

@@ReptilianLepton these days you can even go wireless display. It's handy in a pinch but definitely not for getting work done.

@KiraSlith

3 жыл бұрын

To be fair, they all run it a bit differently for different types of people.

@BaumInventions

3 жыл бұрын

Unlike today... Where you have the choice between Android and IOS. Instead of WindowsCE and IOS.

@Slay1337pl

3 жыл бұрын

pop a USB-C dock onto them and off you go!

I'm wondering if the refresh selection option has something to do with it redrawing only certain portions of the screen (fast speed) vs perhaps redrawing everything every time (slow speed).

Love this secondary channel. It's like the primary channel 2-3 years ago :D (love both)

My guess is that it has a framebuffer that gets sent "real time" to the VGA output. But the framebuffer is updated by scanning the screen line-by-line. Updating the framebuffer might be the bottleneck (SDIO limitation?), so it is faster when only parts of the screen are updated. Also my guess is that medium speed refresh would not scan the lines, but update them "frame-by-frame", so there's not "tearing" (like seen in the solitaire portion). I wonder what the slow speed would be like? Slower, but without the scanning-type update? Maybe the dongle has enough memory to do some kind of double-buffering v-sync? Could you give it a try, Clint? Comparing to early e-readers, this is fairly acceptable. Newer e-readers support partial screen refreshes, which allow them to be used as a note-taking tablet.

Do note that there are several of large button batteries with various numbers that are inter-compatible. If it's the same size and voltage, it'll be fine to use. (I learned that when building my first PC last year.)

Such a neat add-on for a fun little gadget. Also an interesting coincidence to see an iPaq here today, considering I happened to get a Compaq iPaq just a week ago. Missed that earlier Oddware video, so needs to fix that too.

What an awesome treat to get home from starting night shifts and see a new blerb! I'm hype!

@nickm5419

3 жыл бұрын

im hype too Comrade, are the train stations in Russia still Soviet era?

@gd0012

3 жыл бұрын

It's a nice surprise for a Wednesday afternoon here in the UK when the work computers stop working! :)

@yolobathsalts

3 жыл бұрын

@@nickm5419 lmaoo to be fair I'm Canadian. Just Russian heritage & know the language. It's just a nonsense phrase. My username translates to "Daddy Deep Dick" hahahahahahahahah

Can't wait to show people my vacation photos that I took with my PDA.

That was the early version of screen casting! Many phones made in the past 5 years have this built in nowadays.

yeah looks like it just screenshots it into memory in the controller then transfers it over, but it can be interrupted by taking more screenshots faster.

... A consistant piece of blerb! thanks a lot, my ipaq 1950 also thank you. take care

I love how all the regulator agency stamps are all bit mapped to hell. I'm totally sure they went through all the proper channels to get all the proper approvals before putting this product on the market. ;-)

It's displaying at 1024 x 768 at 6:21 (1024 x 768 @ 60Hz has an effective vertical refresh of 48.36kHz) Edit: Also it's very likely using a form of RLE if I'm guessing the date right. It's very easy to implement in a microcontroller with very constrained space using a two-word sliding window. Basically it goes left to right in an image buffer in the top of the connector, counts how many consecutive "tiles" of the image in that line have the same exact color, then send a packet down the wire to a receiver that reads Pixel Value + Number of Consecutive Pixels. It also looks as if it's hard locked to a scan frequency, so if it can't send all the data at once, it'll sweep back to the top and do it in a later scan.

I have the Handspring Visor version of this. Actually did buy it meaning to use it for presentations back in 2005 or so, as I was doing a panel at anime cons and got tired of lugging my laptop around all the time - but never actually presented with it.

I connected my ppcs over USB to my pc ...not only for data but actually also for screen mirroring... Was absolutely amazing to play the win mobile games on a big screen

I remember that I had a device-specific VGA adaptor for my Dell X50v back in the day that connected to the port at the bottom and got me (real-time!) VGA output. I don't remember using it much, except when I started on a new project and they didn't give me a computer.

This is awesome. I didnt even know such accessory existed! lol

There was a 3x zoom option that appeared when you had it rotated left and right Think that would fill the screen great

What a neat little dongle! I think you're right about it just sending screenshots rather than an actual video feed. If you ever get that remote working, I'd love to see a follow-up, maybe with PowerPoint!

That slow screen refresh reminds me of playing a certain Uno card game on an underpowered 486SX25, but only when it was running in 256-color mode. The hi-color drivers handled it fine though.

It looks like its calculating the parts of the screen that update and then re-rendering just those parts, which would explain why Solitaire updates quicker as it was only the top part with the cards that needed redrawing. Very interesting gadget! Makes me wish I still had my Pocket PC.

Great Video Once Again Hello From New Zealand

I used to play quake on that thing. Loved it back in the day. PocketQuake the game.

Wow, sd card slot. What a great way 😍

Love these obscure accessories

I always wanted some of these SD card addons for my Mio P350 Pocket PC... (I still have it, and it still works!)

Very nice thing, and super that there is the rotate function... But it could be faster.

Somewhere I have a VGA output dongle for my Dell Axim x51v, that provided real-time VGA output as a clone of the display. If you put the device in landscape mode then the 640x480 resolution matched up perfectly. It even had a jack for power injection so you could charge and use the output at the same time.

But what about a PowerPoint slide?

I used SDIO extensively back in the early ‘2000s with my Palm Zire 72 PDA. It didn’t have Wi-Fi from the factory, so I used a SDIO wireless card to add the feature. I can 100% confirm that SDIO devices are very easy to accidentally pull out- since the slot retention mechanism isn’t designed for something protruding from the top.

lol the screen refreshing constantly is very similar to the zx80s original quirk of the screen blanking out for a second everytime you press a key. Only about 20 years later haha.

SDIO was an awesome idea.

My Dell X51v PDA came with a simple VGA adapter, and that worked directly with full refresh rate on the monitor. That said, it was a 624Mhz CPU with a 3D-accelerated GPU. It could play Quake in 640x480 with 3D acceleration

pretty dope back in the day

It's clearly scanning down the screen at some fixed rate and changing anything that's changed, which is why it seems to start from a different line when you change something on screen during one of the refreshes

slide show on next level

You can often (though not always) jam a (much more common) CR2032 into a CR2025 slot. The only difference is the physical thickness of the battery (3.2mm vs 2.5mm) so if there's enough tolerance in the slot it'll work.

That flipout button panel on your monitor is almost as cool as this PDA adapter

I had a Toshiba PDA (e740 or e750) that came with a VGA dongle that plugged into the docking port at the bottom. Also provided a USB port, probably for charging. Not sure I ever tested the VGA output.

Does sound like quite a handy device, I suspect the short vga cable was so it could be plugged into a crt (or early lcd/dlp) projector of some kind.

Oh man this is some clever software work my friend. I'm not 100% positive, but I think this program is only updating a portion of the screen at a time, or more specifically, only portions that it needs to. You can even see it working when you were changing the Options in the Margi PDA App, the highlight would update on the VGA Monitor "instantly". My guess is that this Margi app operates based on a Grid, and it only takes a screen capture of the grid blocks that have had any pixels updated. That means that when you were playing Solitaire, it was only updating small portions of the screen such as the card you were dragging along.

Wow those loading speeds are very nostalgic I'm surprised LGR didin't show a PowerPoint presentation for us. 😪

I wouldn't be surprised if it's hooked to responding to Windows OnPaint events. Based on how it redraws sections, that seems likely.

It doesn't run Doom, but it'll _walk_ Doom!

Very interesting peripheral indeed! I had also never seen one of those before. The refresh rate of 4 seconds in painful to see. I got suckered into the Pocket PC fad back in 03' I had a Toshiba pocket pc E755. That thing was expensive at a little over $500.00 I only used it for a few months and that's it. It was very cool that it had built in WI-FI as it was one of the top of the line models. But to be honest, it was a waste of money for the devise that played that bubble popping game.

Expecting to hear "yes you did" in Duke's voice after Clint says "I turned it on"

Serial GDI mirror - hooks all the windows CE graphics calls. Used to be a CE developer, did web based versions of this.

It’s definitely polling the state of the screen line by line and sending it to a rolling buffer

I rescued a few (4?) HP and Dell PDAs from the scrapyard, no cool accessories though apart from the charging docks, can't be bothered to get new batteries yet. They only connect to WEP or WPA WiFi, WPA2-PSK just makes them hang/crash, LOL.

Clint could you throw a random old school game review in the mix sometime soon? Miss them.

Well that's some top class oddware

Damn.. PowerPoint is something I ain't crossed paths with in 25 years.. Took a little while to learn and then I was your go to bod for PP stuff for making slide shows and most definitely making normal stuff and some seriously bizarre stuff too for sh.ts & giggles. As for that SD ("Help.. I've come loose again") issue, a small 3D printed cradle would fix that as elastic bands would cover the screen.

It would make sense that the screen would only update only what changes considering the speed of early SD card technology was barely faster than 2x CDROM. It's also a neat way to abuse SD card technology. What the application is likely doing is indeed taking a screenshot then writing it to a specific address on what the pocket PC sees as an improperly formatted storage device. A shining example of how slow SD card transfers were.

It seems like it's doing some of video compression similar to MP4 where it's only sending what needs to be updated. Which is why full-screen changes take longer than just a few sections of the whole screen.

I forgot how much I miss playing Bubble Breaker in monochrome mode, with a stylus, on my HTC Touch HD.

All the way back to the first Macintosh, graphics speed was achieved by the concept of regions (not necessarily rectangular areas that can be smaller than the graphics ports being displayed) that are marked as invalidated, triggering the automatic system task of refreshing those regions according to the contents within memory. For example, a 'port' can be a whole window, including its title bar, its scrollbar and its content, but if you just messed with a little element inside of it, smart programs would strive to find out the smallest region possible in order to increase speed. Even though the whole 512x342 black and white screen is a mere 22kb, it was still worth it to go as small as possible to have snappy speed. This programming pattern has existed everywhere ever since.

Love the Blurbs

Genius! Is very smart!

It looks like it's constantly scanning the screen and only sends the current line if it's different from the last time that line was scanned. It would explain why solitaire is faster since it only would run an update for the size of the height of a card if it needs updating at all. This is also apparent around 7:30 in the way the previous position of a card that is moving downward doesn't clear until the scanning loops back to the top of the screen.

The original Apple Newton predates the SD card spec. But it did have PCMCIA slots, and you can get PCMCIA to SD card adapters. So with the right software, you could probably hack support onto hardware made in the early 90's.

Windows (and most UIs) render using a method known as 'region invalidation' where only changed data is updated to the display - so yes it's only rendering what changes but it does so by plugging directly into that part of the UI - just like how Remote Desktop Connection works.

the power of compression!!!

Bit of a tip with 2025 batteries (since I have a Psion Series 3mx that also takes them). The sum total difference between a 2025 and a 2032 battery is that the 2032 is 0.7 millimetres (yes millimetres) thicker and has a correspondingly longer battery life. In literally all other aspects they're exactly the same. So if there's at least 0.7 millimetre's worth of give in the battery compartment you can use a 2032 just fine and it'll last longer too.

That's pretty neat, and totally sufficient for a slideshow presentation. I wonder where the bottleneck is? Copying the framebuffer into RAM for transfer, the SDIO interface or the video card in the adaptor unit?

It most likely hooks into the video driver of Windows CE to know what portion of the screen has been redrawn and transfers that portion pixel by pixel via the SD bus which is just a simple but apparently very slow serial connection. It must do some double buffering because it doesn't slow down the refreshing of the PDA screen itself. I would be interesting to see if it can display full screen slideshows with PowerPoint.

It's almost like Slow Scan TV, except a lot less impressive.

when the screen was rotated, there was an option for 3x zoom there.

There's a still image on the SD card, but it updates the pixel rows separately. The heart is the speed of how fast it generates one row. It's not a display that is measured, its the rate of update.

LGR, I wonder if you had heard of an old app called "MyMobiler"? I remember using it with my iPAQ rx3715 I had back in the day, and it allowed me to view and control it from my PC, including screen recording if I recall correctly!