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Our DigiCart Finally Died :(
I mean this little gal had an amazing run. It lasted a good 35 years. Mostly at a local TV station and then 5 years in our broadcast classroom. Honestly it was rock solid for what we used it for with our school newscasts and sports broadcasts. Also, so simple to operate.
Our major recent upgrades on it were the SCSI Zip 100 drive (from a Bernoulli Drive), new bios battery and a massive 500 MB drive to replace the one inside that died.
Sadly the logic board is fried. District IT kinda laughed when I took it to them to troubleshoot. I don't blame them one bit. We are hoping to find a replacement. It has the keyboard and remote unit still that are working.
Does anyone happen to have an old (or slightly newer) DigiCart in an e-waste pile or old equipment room closet they would be willing to give to a good cause? We have an account for shipping.
Thanks in advance!
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Funny enough, I'm working on a truck that has an old (but newer than this one) DigiCart Ex, missing the controller. I'll see if the owner is willing to part with it.
Thank you so much. That would be awesome. It would totally work with our remote.
I'll look around tomorrow, we had two of these beasts. If we didn't scrap them I would bet they still work, I know they were still working when we replaced them. Setting a reminder to look in the morning, fingers crossed we still have at least one of them!!
We have a small pile of Zip disks here with our different shows. Sadly we can’t read the file format to pull off recordings or music. Anyone done that before?
There are a number of retro computing enthusiasts (like Adrian Black, of Adrian’s Digital Basement) who get a kick out of troubleshooting and repairing stuff like this. Often it’s just a capacitor that has died. Some ICs have common replacements; custom, not so much.
Heck, I’d be tempted to try, but my skills are nowhere near his.
I second this! It would be awesome to watch Adrian work on this.
nowr
Anyone need a boat Anchor? Honestly for anyone with a working on it would be great for spare parts.
Techmoan would probably make a video of it.
nowr
You were still using it? Wow!
For the few things that it can do, it does them very well.
Fly high, you beautiful stallion
Any reason you wouldn't just replace it with something more modern like Qlab?
We would need a Mac and monitor and interface for AES to the audio console. Plus it seems like a big learning curve for a middle schooler. I don’t think we could turn around recordings as fast as a DigiCart can of you can even record with the free version. But our theater department would get a lot out of this program. Thanks for the suggestion!
Ah yeah, the recording thing would be a complication. Curious though what your workflow is that needs that. When I think of Digicarts I mostly think about playing music under packages or to break in sports.
Sad day :( those were awesome. Sadly mine are long gone.
There was a rack mount version of this at some point, it also used zip disks. We had a road case with 4 of them in it. We'd do staggered live recordings on two and use the other two for playback. Somewhere I've got a massive box of zip disks that had everything from preshow playlists to wacky sound effects. If memory serves me the things sounded amazing.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
there's a ton of these on ebay, many for less than $300
Awwwwwww. I have fond memories of running VOs with one of those!
Ours isn’t this old, but we still have one in operation
Where are you located? I left one at my old job in NYC that worked fine. If you accept one shipped make sure it’s packed really well - especially the front panel, and the rotary encoder bends really easily.
Hi Did you need one ?
I have a mint one , in box. - w remote
In La.
Tom Hilbe.com
T
I'm a big retro tech enthusiast, with my own lil Zip drive collection and too many other things, but I'm struggling to understand the use case for something like this, aside from 'it's cool', which it is haha. I also feel like depending on Zip disks as a media format would be dicey, I recall my dad yelling upstairs after a few of his disks became unreadable or developed the click of death haha. Either way appreciate stuff like this immensely.
I have no idea about this model but I would expect that several electronics' experts might be able to repair it (and i would definitely watch the repair video :) )