Virtuality SU2000

Virtuality SU2000

Mike bought this, quite used, from the [mall of the americas] in minneapolis and brought it to the space as a projecto to repair. The graphics are dated, but it's still a damn impressive system for 1995 - no wonder it sold for $100K then. That technology comes at a price - it's quite complex and has lots of custom hardware that can't really be found or repaired today if anywthing were to break.

Overview

A 2-player VR game systems with 2 platforms, each of which has:

• 'visette' head-mounted display
• 'joystick' handhead controller
• emitter for 3D location of the above devices (Polhemus corp)
• 'Format D' interconnection box (with composite video out)
• magnetic card reader
• power supply

The actual system sits under platform #1 in a rackmount PC case.

System overview

We call it a 486 but that's somewhat missing the point - it's a 14?-slot backplane with one 486 board inside, and about a dozen other boards with custom 3D interface, graphics and sound generation and processing boards, powered by an ??? PC power supply

Resources and media

SU2000 user manual Flickr pictures of Mike's disassembly and cleaning http://www.flickr.com/photos/59845615@N04/sets/72157627434961152/ There are two companies that claim to sell and repair the SU2000, www.arcadianvr.com (which bought the rights to the products when Virtuality closed its doors), and www.vrealities.com. Neither are terribly interested in replying to our e-mails A German forum user has posted a lot of information on his SU2000 system at [] and on the MAME forum at []. His system has a number of details different from ours - different 486 motherboard, ...

Problems and repairs done

• player 1 joystick was moving randomly/strangely along 1 axis/stuttering

 The white wire in a PS2? wire from format D to the joystick port on the System Polhemus board had broken. We switched most of the devices in the system around - joystick, Polhemus transmitter, format D & format C - before switching around the wires to discover this.

• player 2 card reader not working

 Mike opened the device and the read head is flaky, likely due to lots of usage. Both the read head and reader seem to have been made by the UK company ???? which is long out of business. Decomentation indicates that the reader generates a 'complex' signal to the system - probably adding minor encryption or a random number after every card read - so it would be hard to replace unless we can understand its nature. Which troubleshooting, the 'data' button in the damaged reader was pressed for 3sec, which unfortunately erased its stored 'site key' - so it would no longer accept any cards as all the cards we have were programmed with a certain site key. Mike used a card skimmer from his work to retrieve the site key from another card and re-programmed the reader with a correct key.

Some of the reader information above was gleamed from a very similar product from the same company, and [electric panel card].

• player ? display all black after system cleaning

Upgrades

We're doing a number of PC-related upgrades on the system:

• CPU Card RAM - upgraded to 16MB from 4MB. 72pin? SIMMS.
• CPU card CPU overclocking
• HD upgrade - ordered a 2GB CF card to replace the 500MB HD. Note that DOS6.22 only supports Fat16 (2GB partitions), so if we want to store the CD images on the HD we'll need to make multiple partitions
• CD upgrade - currently there are two 4X IDE CDs - we'll try to replace with newer drives to speed up game loading. If we can get the system to accept a DOS CD emulator (0cd / FakeCD / CDemu2?) we'll just store the games on the HD instead of loading from the CD every time
• Format C upgrade (sound board?) - upgraded to 8MB from 4MB.

Storage and emulation

The unit stores system data on a 120MB HD (which was 500MB in ours - likely the original died) and game data on 2 standard? CDs. We did backups of the HD and our 2 games (Dactyl Nightmare and ???). The boards have many programmable ICs which we have not backed up yet. We will volunteer assistance to the MAME project if they're interested in emulating the platform.

Projects

• understand how the system functions, esp. in regards to standard PC features,