We’re sticking with our impromptu theme of old hardware for another item, this time around about the DB-19 connector, which is pretty much impossible to buy anywhere – until perseverance, hard work, and smart thinking solved the problem.
This is a happy story about the power of global communication and manufacturing resources in today’s world. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve certainly heard me whine and moan about how impossible it is to find the obscure DB-19 disk connector used on vintage Macintosh and Apple II computers (and some NeXT and Atari computers too). Nobody has made these connectors for decades.
[…]
But just as I was getting discouraged, good luck arrived in the form of several other people who were also interested in DB-19 connectors! The NeXT and Atari communities were also suffering from a DB-19 shortage, as well as others in the vintage Apple community, and at least one electronics parts supplier too. After more than a year of struggling to make manufacturing work economically, I was able to arrange a “group buy” in less than a week. Now let’s do this thing!
I love success stories like this one.
“For the moment at least, I have nearly the entire world’s supply of DB-19 connectors, stacked in my living room. I think I’m going to fill the bathtub and swim in them.”
Congratulations to the Bunch of People around BigMessOWires.Com. Also to Everybody who Works or ‘Mess’ with keeping IT history alive and kicking.
For the Amiga 1000 you needed DB-23 connectors to build external hardware for the floppy port (I had three(3) external drives ganged in a case for my machine), and an video adapter to connect my Amiga to a high persistence monitor to see interlaced video with no flicker.
To make the DB-23 connector for the female version I just used a hacksaw on a plastic connector and cut off the extra female holes/body and that worked well.
To make the male version I started with a metal DC-25. I broke off the extra pins, cut the metal body at the same end and then cut the metal so that I could bend and solder the case in the smaller size.
I never found a source for DB-23 connectors so I had to make them like that for years.
Hmm. this one ?
http://www.cabledepot.com/05CQPDB23.html
I did not know of them in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
I was in Oshawa, Ont. Canada – about 30 miles from Toronto. Did they advertise in Canada back then? I don’t remember seeing them in any of the computer magazines I read.
All Amigas (not just the 1000) use the 23-pin connectors for external floppy drives and, perhaps more crucially, RGB video. It made sense at the time (to make it more difficult to plug serial or parallel cables into the custom Amiga ports), but makes it tricky these days. They aren’t as rare as the 19-pin versions however, with small quantities regularly available on eBay and through some suppliers. I have my own personal stash too for making cables…
I recently bough an Amiga video port to VGA adapter and it was made of a very nicely hacked DB-25.
On pictures it was invisible, IRL I can only see the metal of the ground ring had been sanded/soldered on but that’s about it.
The funny thing is something done a lot rougher would have worked just as well, but the people who made it seems to care a lot more than that
I still wish someone would make DB-23s so I can stock a few of them just in case…
Edited 2016-06-07 09:07 UTC
Sounds like something I should grab for when I have the budget to pick up an Amiga.
Who’d you buy it from?
eBay
the one I have isn’t on there at the moment but there’s a few others to find.
Don’t expect it to work with most monitors tho, you need one that can display 15KHz modes @ 50/60Hz.
A good one : BenQ BL702A 17″ 1280×1024 it’s cheap, compact, and pretty good. There’s a 19″ version too, the BenQ BL912.
Given how many monitors I have kicking around, I can probably find something without special-ordering it. (This machine alone has three 1280×1024 LCDs hooked up to it)
I have quite a few at home, none does 15KHz outside of HDMI or Component inputs :/
I’m considering building a passive VGA RGBHV to component converter, I still need time and courage haha
A scan doubler could be helpful.
I never knew exactly why we had them, other than some idiot probably ordered them instead of the DB 25’s we used on our hardware. Or maybe one of the previous generation of products, sold to a different company did?
Also bunches at my old boxes, orders wrongly fulfilled. Not worth the fuss. Also lots of accessory cables and adapters unfit to the tasks at hand.
[bunches of weird cables].
It’s for fear of this situation that I horde certain unusual cables that are related to my machines.