Virtuality SU2000

Mike bought this unit, very used, from the Mall of the Americas in Minneapolis and brought it to the space as a repair project. Although the graphics are dated, it's still a very impressive system by 1995 standards, when it sold for $100K. That technology comes at a price - the system is quite complex and uses a lot of custom hardware that's almost impossible to find or repair today if anything were to break.

Overview

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

'visette' head-mounted display (was it 1 screen or 2 for 3D?)
'joystick' handhead controller
emitter for 3D location of the above devices (Polhemus corp)
'Format D' interconnection box (with composite video out)
magnetic card reader
speaker and buttons
power supply

The main electronics box sits under platform #1 in a rackmount PC case.

Electronics overview

We call it a 486 but that's an oversimplification - it's a 14-slot backplane with one mini-pci board with 486CPU/RAM/etc, and about a dozen other boards with custom 3D system, graphics and sound generation and processing boards, all powered by an ???W PC power supply. There's a 500MB HD and two ?X IDE CD drives, also a floppy drive.

Cards, from the right, viewed from the back:

Dual graphics interface card, with a ribbon cable going to each of the following:
2 graphics rendering cards with 2 fan-cooled DSPs? on each
graphics pass-through card
2 Polhemus 3D interface cards, also have a Polhemus box on a ~8in cable connected to the DB15?
2 Visette/system interface cards
486 mini-PC card
10Base-2 network card
standard VGA card for configuration/control
sound/CD interface card

The system boots like a standard PC into DOS6.22, then run the Virtuality software. It auto-loads the CDs if they are in the drives, else allows the use of diagnostic software from the (VGA) control screen and (AT) keyboard.

Resources and media

SU2000 user manual
Flickr pictures of Mike's disassembly and cleaning [1]
There are two companies that claim to sell and repair the SU2000, [2] (which bought the rights to the products when Virtuality closed its doors, but now seems to be closing as well [3]), and [4]. Neither seem too interested to replying to our e-mails.
A German forum user has posted a lot of information on his SU2000 system at [5] and on the MAME forum at [6]. His system has a number of details different from ours - different 486 motherboard, ...
Another MAME forum thread here: [7]

Problems and repairs done

player 1 joystick was moving randomly/strangely along 1 axis and stuttering.
- The white wire in a 6-pin Mini-DIN 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. Documentation indicates that the reader generates a 'complex' signal to the system - probably using minor encryption or adding a random number after every card read - so it would be hard to replace unless we can understand its nature. While 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. We're considering replacing the read head with a compatible one or simply generating a signal with an MCU.
- Some of the reader information above was gleamed from a very similar product from the same company, an [electric panel card].

player ? display all black after system cleaning
- Two issues - cable from the graphics card to Format C was backwards, also the ribbon cable on the graphics card was loose.

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 upgrade/overclocking - will have to jog our 486 memories for this
CPU card cache upgrade - need to find the pinouts to see if it's possible
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 ?X 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, will it do anything?

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 made 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

get it working - mostly done, card reader is the last problem
understand how the system functions, esp. in regards to standard PC features, so we can adapt it to a newer motherboard or just to a recent PC to run recent games in 3D.

Virtuality SU2000

Contents