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Sony VIEW System

NeXT

NeXT

Veteran Member
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Oct 22, 2008
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Kamloops, BC, Canada
I am in talks with another member in regards to an early 90's system manufactured by Sony under the "VIEW" product line. Basically it is like my Matrox E-VDP which I worked on and inquired about here on the forum over the last decade but instead of a passive backplane Sony has made nearly the entire system a set of proprietary boards. There is a great set of scans for the product brochure available online.

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This particular unit has a Sony LDP-2000 player bolted to the top. Again. There's great brochure scans available.

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>>Link in case any of the images above are not working for you<<

The "VIEW" name is pretty vague. It's about as useless as Sony's NeWS naming scheme. I've been digging around on and off for a few weeks now trying to find additional information about the system but I'm not having much luck. Does any of this ring a bell for anyone before I start doubling up on known information?
The brochure also brings up compatibility with the IBM "InfoWindow" system. While I can find promotional images that show people using a touch enabled video display I have never seen a similar videodisc product from IBM, however I can assume that they had something going back to 1986 as they operated kiosks at Expo 86.
 
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Does the VIW-3015A have a motorized eject floppy drive? If so, that would certainly be a first for a PC compatible and likely shares parts with Macintosh floppy drives (also Sony built). Also curious about that Mode 5F 640x480 256 color mode. Is that proprietary or backwards compatible with an earlier IBM standard (8514/A or PGC?)
 
I have a Sony ViEW System VIW-5000A. It's a standard 80286 PC with a Laserdisc built in. Plays laser disks as well through a standard VGA PC monitor, if I recall. You can see some info here: https://edmullen.net/lasernerds.php I'll have to check but I think it even has InfoWindows on it. Sadly, I don't have the original monitor and keyboard for it (I'd love to find those) but I can take some pics of it if you like.
 
Nice photos Snuci. :)
Hmm. That model resembles my E-VDP a lot more due to the card arrangement. I'm still waiting for logistics to deliver this machine so sorry if I'm not delivering pictures in this thread yet. ;)

Also no, from the blurry photos I've seen and the above brochures it's a regular manual eject. I am however curious what touchscreen technology they might of used. Microtouch was an option by the 286 era but sony uses their own names for their touchscreen equipped monitors.
 
I am really sorry this took months to get back to however the machine was hung up in excessively expensive logistics for a while.

IMG_0870.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/IMG_0870.jpg

CGS_8057.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8057.jpg

CGS_8058.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8058.jpg

CGS_8059.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8059.jpg

CGS_8060.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8060.jpg

Unfortunately my time is really tight at the moment so it will be a few more weeks before I can crack it open and take photos of the internals. There is however the telltale sounds of a Miniscribe buried somewhere deep inside.

Does the VIW-3015A have a motorized eject floppy drive?
Click to expand...
No. Manual eject and my bet is 720kb. Can't answer questions on the video modes yet either. Anyone else able to try?

As for documentation, it seems someone surfaced with service manual, however it's behind a paywall - http://www.manualscenter.com/manuals/sony/viw3015a-service-manual.html - Before I spend $5 I will search around and see if anyone already has it freely available.
 
And sure enough someone does have it available free. As of this post you should be able to get the file here without worrying about it being something shady: http://www.givefile.net/smanuals/video_surveillance/sony/file/30814.html

First thing I notice is that this manual seems to have inconsistencies. Some features are either not as we see on the photos above or do not exist. More research is required but at least it implies the matching Sony keyboard is membrane and should therefore be not too expensive if in the wild because the "usual people" don't like that. ;)
 
If I'm reading the service manual correctly you should be able to run a regular AT style DIN keyboard with an adapter:

Code: 
1 - KBCLK
2 - KBDATA
3 - N/C
4 - GND
5 - +5v

Also I was puzzled as to what the VD stood for in that three position boot selector switch because you cannot boot a computer from a laserdisc and the service manual specifically states "this position is invalid" but no, I am wrong. As soon as I tried googling for the VIW-3020 model on the back of the CPU instead of the VIW-3015 model on the front (what is it with Sony always doing this with their computer products???) I discovered a Japanese page that confirms what I assumed was impossible. A proprietary variant of laserdisc exists that stores data in a composite image format. Simply insert the laserdisc and the machine boots from the disc without the aid of the hard disk or floppy drive. Sheer heresy!

"Sony VIEW System" combining SMC - 2000 and video disc was a product developed for a specific project. It was developed for a kind of simulator project for training equipment for the US Army troops called "EIDS" (Electronic Information Delivery System). At that time, Sony delivered a large amount of U - Matic video tape system for business to the US military, it seems that it was planned on extension.

...

This EIDS requirement specification is very sophisticated, it is not merely to be able to superimpose a PC and a laser disc in conjunction with each other, it seems to anticipate application of the later CD-ROM and DVD later there were. Specifically, application software that runs on the PC side is recorded on the laser disc medium itself, and the PC starts "single media" to launch the application from there, while playing back a still image (analog record) on the disc Two functions of "still frame audio" to reproduce digitally recorded sound were requested. It seems that this was intended to record and distribute all the information necessary for training on one laser disc.

In order to realize this, it was necessary to record and reproduce digital data on the laser disk. However, it seems that adding digital data mode to the industry standard laser vision standard for this system seemed to be difficult, digital data is handled as a video signal to the last, digital data is a black and white pattern image And encoded and recorded. Since it is an analog recording, techniques such as block correction code and data interleaving similar to CD etc. were also used so as not to corrupt data due to noise or the like.

In the CAV mode in which random access is possible, 30 minutes can be recorded on one disk for moving images, and the number of frames is 54000 frames per one. For EIDS discs, this 54 thousand frames are allocated to digital files such as analog moving pictures and still pictures, digitized voices (playing at the same time as still pictures), MS-DOS executing programs, data, etc., encoding, formatting, etc. , And a master tape (1 inch tape) is produced by analog recording of the whole contents of one disk as a video signal. Then, I sent the master tape to the factory of the video disk of Hamamatsu, carved the stamper, and completed the disc through the processes such as press and plating.

- https://translate.google.com/transl...14/smc-2000-3-eids-usarmy/&edit-text=&act=url
Click to expand...

So like those ISA cards you could use to backup a PC to a VHS tape this is doing roughly the same using hardware on the video input card, however it also allows you to bootstrap from the composite video signal.
It's also worth pointing out that same page indicates the ViEW system was in competition with Matrox and Emerson for DARPA funding. Ultimately Matrox won out which is how my E-VDP system came into existance and why it has a boilerplate with a US military catalog number.
 
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Hey snuci.
Might you know of anyplace I can find the supplementary diskettes for the VIEW systems? It seems that like the PC AT and a few other machines of the time if the battery goes flat the system loses its configuration and you need a utility diskette to reconfigure it. I didn't receive a diskette with the machine so I can't re-enable things like the hard drive. The service manual also seems to imply there were two other packages available that supplied the tools for the superimposer board/laserdisc control and another form application development.
Additionally, it seems that this machine has an additional mode it can boot into. Some form of ROM Monitor that requests you look at another manual but the example clearly is not BASIC.
 
Hi NeXT,

I don';t have a set up disk and if I remember correctly, I removed the battery and put in a battery box so I can just add AAs. I also have the drive type written on the computer so I can set it the next time I use it. I haven't had it out in a bit but I'm pretty sure it has a regular BIOS screen. I have a few projects on the go but if you PM me after next week, I'm on vacation and will bring it out and try to download the software from the hard drive. Hopefully, it will work for you.
 
Yeah, it seems the 386 model separates from the 286 model in that I do not have an "enhanced" BIOS where I can configure the system from a key sequence. You have to boot the utility off a diskette. There may be a copy on the hard drive but....can't access that. :D
 
That I might be able to pull off as the controller is an ISA card. The only thing that might interfere is if the drive is not using a standard drive type.
 
Okay so the analog video port is making me scratch my head a little. The service manual being slightly not for this system, but it is never lists the presence of the Digital Video connection, so I have no idea if that is the standard RGB piunout or not. Likewise I can't really speculate because the Analog RGB port is also not what I would of guessed. I was thinking similar to the Macintosh DB15 pinout, but it's not.

Code: 
1-RED
2-GND
3-GREEN
4-GND
5-BLUE
6-GND
7-Audio?
8-GND
9-?
10-?
11-?
12-?
13-GND
14-SYNC
15-?

In comparison, here is the macintosh - http://old.pinouts.ru/Video/maclcvideo_pinout.shtml

...and the IIgs - ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/misc/Apple IIgs Monitor Pinout.txt

..and I also looked at the pinouts for systems like the MicroVAX/VAXstation line and whatever came off the top of my head that ised a 15 pin RGB connector. I didn't find anything until I looked up japanese machines like the X68000, PC98 and the FM Towns that I was able to verify some of the pins but still not all of them due to minor differences I have yet to find documented because it seems of the westerners if you get the basic signals who cares about the rest of the pins, right?

https://gamesx.com/wiki/doku.php?id=av:japanese_rgb-15
 
Why the question marks? If there's only 1 sync pin, it means composite sync and you need a monitor that accepts it. I haven't read this thread through, I likely will tomorrow.
 
The question marks are pins I still cannot verify what they are doing and their designations vary between the other similar pinouts, so I can't even make a good guess outside of vertical sync on pin 15.
 
Internal photography complete. Here's what's going on inside.

CGS_8125.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8125.jpg
Sony 1.44mb 3.5" floppy, Toshiba 1.2mb 5.25" floppy, Miniscribe 3650 MFM 40mb hard disk


CGS_8126.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8126.jpg
The motherboard and all the cards have a protective shield over the top as the laserdisc player directly above has no bottom plate.

CGS_8109.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8109.jpg
The Sony proprietary mobo. Note the 34 pin floppy ribbon cable is hardwired to the board and cannot be removed.

CGS_8110.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8110.jpg
The MFM controller.

CGS_8111.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8111.jpg
The backside
The I/O board for one serial and one parallel port, plus logic for other peripherals such as the front serial port.

CGS_8113.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8113.jpg
The backside
The CPU board. 8mhz 80286 under the heatsink and a spot next to it for a co-pro. Note the turbo switch and the pads for a keyboard, serial and volume control on the back.

CGS_8115.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8115.jpg
The backside
Ram daughterboard that plugs into the CPU board.

CGS_8117.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8117.jpg
The backside
"Digital RGB" board. The three Sony IC's are CXK5864 8K SRAM chips. The larger IC in the corner is a Hitachi HD46505SP, which is a clone of the Motorola 6845.

CGS_8119.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8119.jpg
The backside
The analog RGB board (which for some reason has the audio in and out even though it just goes to a connector and off to another board). The white ceramic is the legendary NEC D7220AD High-Performance Graphics Display Controller. The ZIPP's are likely the VRAM.

CGS_8121.jpg

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a166/ballsandy/Computer related/Sony ViEW/CGS_8121.jpg
The backside
A mix of audio and analog video circuitry. Presumably the overlay control board. Note the BNC is the composite in from the laserdisc player and the port above that is the Analog RGB out port.
 
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Looking for software for the Sony VIW-5000A

Looking for software for the Sony VIW-5000A

@Hello Next (CelGenStudios),

I saw your Youtube video showing the teardown of the Sony View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt5BOefdESc
This is how I discovered this VCF posting.

I have a Sony VIW-5000A, and this seems a bit different than your computer setup.

Did you manage to find software for your VIW? I wonder if the software would be compatible with my VIW-5000A?


@Snuci, Next (CelGenStudios)

Are you willing to share the software with me?
This would really help me out, I have been looking for this software for ages.

Here is a link to a magazine, called "The Engineer - The professional bulletin for army engineers" (November 1988), explaining everything about the Electronic Information Delivery System (EIDS):
https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16021coll8/id/2715

Happy reading!


Thanks
Regards,
Christian
 
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