Building a serial and VGA “everything console”

The Old Vintage Computing Research blog has an  interesting build:

Some of our recent (and some upcoming) projects are oriented to systems with serial consoles, but it’s been getting pretty old dragging around old CRT terminals or tying up Mac laptops with a serial port.

I’d like something that’s self-contained, a little more portable and a bit less heavy. I’m sure there’s any number of all-in-one setups you can buy to do this, but I’m cheap, so I’m going to DIY it.

We’ll start with this used, slightly abused IBM 1U console that I got for $120 (shipped) from eBay, add a terminal emulator, and put all the fixin’s on.

I eventually selected this one from Tattler Solutions, comes in a nice self-contained case and can be USB-powered, runs up to 115200bps, and has demonstrably good VT100 terminal support. All up it cost me $86 shipped.

However, it also has a big drawback: its USB controller does not support combo devices like our IBM keyboard, which he does warn you about, and believe me, I tried really hard to get that to work because I really like the keyboard. Unfortunately, it truly is (and in fairness, as described) a fundamental hardware limitation that can’t be programmed around, so that means we can’t use our nice UltraNav.

See thee complete build process in the post here.