I think it sounds swell 😀 So I wish you luck with it, and I believe quite a few people are interested in it.

Well that's the only problem, we need to find out how many are 😀

Some useful items on ebay...

- 24 to 20 pin PSU adapter (no soft power, though).
- Three Compact Flash to IDE adapter. Some of those allow only one CF card (but you may choose if it is master or slave), other adapters allow two CF cards.

There are plenty of these items on ebay, I put the first items I found.

> The benefits would be the higher load handling capability of new ATX PSU's
> and also better tolerances on voltages

Why would nowadays chinese power supplies be better than the old ones? It's more depending on luck and on how much you are willing to pay...

A nice thing would be a protection cirquit that kills the bad power supply and saves the other components 😉

piksi wrote:

Our next project is an IDE adapter that allows replacing old unreliable hdd's with an USB memory stick or other usb mass storage.

What would be amazing, it's an usb to scsi converter
USB mass storage protocol works by embedding scsi commands in usb bulk-only transport

- Your old crap can do nothing
plug an usb pendrive in the front of your 286 and boot from it
- My 286 is still up do date, it works with usb devices
then make it detect your usb dvd burner

Adapters IDE - SD-card already exist.
It's more of a problem that at least some 286's don't support IDE harddisks.

Zup wrote:

24 to 20 pin PSU adapter (no soft power, though).

This is no ATX to AT adapter, but an ATX 24-pin to 20-pin plug converter, which won't help in this case.

My 486 runs from an ATX power supply. The idea to make an adapter board is neat, but a bit over-engineered and probably still quite expensive for the purpose. After all, you only need the mainboard connectors from the old AT PSU and some wire terminals to connect any ATX PSU to an AT board.

I don't think those old (mostly taiwanese) AT PSUs were worse than modern cheap ATX PSUs. The main reason why they often fail is the simple fact that they are 10 - 20 years old.

The idea to make an adapter board is neat, but a bit over-engineered and probably still quite expensive for the purpose.

Well, the actual part costs are neglible (i.e. ATX socket plug is ~0,3€ etc), the only bigger cost is the PCB and it will range down to ~4€ per board with 20-30 copies and drop down with more copies. Oh, and as 5u3 said, simply using a pin adapter won't be enough to make it work.

I don't think those old (mostly taiwanese) AT PSUs were worse than modern cheap ATX PSUs. The main reason why they often fail is the simple fact that they are 10 - 20 years old.

Well, judging from my experience the rise in the appreciation of PSU quality has pushed the manufacturers to develop more robust units (even though it's true that many cheap ones are dangerous crap). But even if they're equal in quality with the old AT supplies, there is still an advantage in using this kind of adapter: you don't have to risk using 20 year old PSU, you can buy a reasonable price ATX PSU with protection circuits and better voltage tolerances and use this board to hook it up and save your old mobo and cpu from frying with an old PSU 😀

And we're not interested in using CF adapters, USB is much more versatile, with a proper firmware one can do miracles with an USB controller with IDE interface. We might possibly do something for the XT computers lacking ATA support. Perhaps SCSI oslt.

I wouldn't waste your time with making a USB adapter that connects through IDE on an XT class system. There are very few IDE controllers available for XTs, and those only support up to 512mb. USB flash interface for SCSI would be much more useful.

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Startech-ATX-to-AT-Mo … bayphotohosting

Moogle! wrote:

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Startech-ATX-to-AT-Mo … bayphotohosting

Too bad he doesn't ship outside the US 😵

The point was more that they exist. 😀

Make sure you have a -5V rail for those ISA cards. Lots of PSUs have dropped it.