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First post, by retro games 100

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Greetings Earthlings,

Please note that I haven't posted on this incredible website since 2012, and consequently there are dozens of PMs in my inbox that I haven't read yet. I'll get around to reading these PMs over the next couple of weeks, and reply to them all in due course. I apologise in advance for these late responses. Thank you.

Please can someone explain a bit about the interfaces on this card? I'd like to learn more about it. It's a Goldstar 16-bit ISA multi I/O PC controller card, model: IDE Plus V3L, 002. It's got two 10 pin male connectors that are labelled ASYN1 and ASYN2. Are these serial ports? Is that the same thing as a "COM PORT"? Would that be for a mouse? (Why have two of them?) Would they require a "special" type of cable? (Presumably you couldn't just attach a serial mouse "directly" to them?)

Also, there are two female ports on the backplate. They have 15 and 25 pin holes. Is the 15 pin port for a joystick? (If so, would that be called a "game port"?) I guess the 25 pin port is the parallel port. Is this sometimes referred to as "LPT", and is it just used for printing? Is the connector itself known as "DB-25", and if so, what does DB stand for? Regarding its IDE connector, would that allow an IDE CD-ROM drive to be attached to its primary/master HDD as a slave device?

Thanks a lot for any comments! 😀

The Goldstar controller -
9ENdp35rjjaBb1uU-UM4doExcvWANBQkAB6OXjlyNQDH87wDxsSOlCaEMJI2MQNoMjIPEn90dyAqr41QaPK6cc88RONRMMuJHECFSe7TE2yn1cf8QatyQ5ujPX2ccdVST-btiKR_MjQjvwQEHFSEphS8JBDVH0v0tob2n5K9Gh6WI9DJoqH7sarnYr_Yjk9OxK67D1o8ErQXvpAurB_JzAF-PfjcSi-8gkYy8jOR4V5rlS7pTPsw2LJ44gaEcEllcvgSUQrH3VMcukcX0glYNPlC7whE_koDQiQEbu3EFtfZh-9RGvCVbWyWR3j61ui2b4DAmSoKAIvUkk4FT-8OOSa3Mr2T0JFQnCL3Ace-V0Ggq_SATT5p7_V6SpjIaOmwAQuVnsRUaHx9B_UuPQXraY3P1ANt3UmAvrKkSH0PSQB1gUBkLu8mGzYJT9L-npZTG5LoGeeMtMjPf8QO5spKTrV9YX5e5XzzjaUsPXwRo5_dLVmEgA7iNoDFNm4ng_ETqVoILXke3aUQUogXQdXCxUuTntrd-ogcIHhVx__loOWLLes-zPkYYBQFkzj03N1X-dZYwf2JM7ynE0TINEr-I5pZqg7qRugLGOCWU4UucIx8R92clJcV=w917-h659-no

The controller's Prime 2 chipset -
Tb0SXUXUK_pRaRxQsTDaCoLnSGZsU55bFidzbmzzfr9oylKk1A0eUen6bOp6ColdVW64PCRPe5kd7ZQIgvCCJyloLo2xteBy0LKmFKn59NLYH5_BtwgcUqUQHtbvBHJDcn--tha2kIT0N1HPtUfEXYcbVGB2NwInFqHRQEUtceEGh9cAE7gtrN3A9KeEcWdyYll8NLVmza2NtO1yaw1j1osFQAHHx145j2IqMtDiecYzolWaKWgLRKg37atSLHbxE-yuFHXjeF9tcRG82WN-t2SwWQedueSgtCsV0i7jSYIensy4bfVIVlsj2UuEwtDFdNAvovAGpxebKcKnFlrdvaPejUwC3gvpfZ2d_xpobaMdTkrasD6KZaQRyfe2aKzWpc3N-CUFLOH1NxAYL3gDKytaVhMmHPVeLv1BhhzXqb_SisKviM3cgPYpdlkFYGbAPFHi79LfeuIa3HcBToIUsgMIvLlyKCmxnNsx0vghQebhFPBMzWgHo-TRSDIzxcMahW5-cUrPlGDf4ZDtyuU8HKphBt1AbBAyvBG1J_u3zsKKJPlkhXO1mNx1cPiAY6ifw62mnuP1aoRHGm03P2vM5xF17v3kGf0ggJG8Kk6byhj-kquvNQ7H=w893-h659-no

The controller's model ID, printed on the reverse side of the card -
ZpC9MY75L2jIeQ6LZZyd8UUG-CPRa6DbCswyRcPrjk8zJTY3W8HpxM5FaPcoXgTneENdEpgqVxVG9F6Q13Aozy30kfSVYFlhq9IxONPkaDGj2tEYyxFCapkkIyBmFrPHXJIbuhv_CjPR3JunZEhxPx0rmlZ6Ab5nbkZ6VPt5fEkXQirPIsO3xTt0oJdkWCAneerEWjR6HrOq4t9WYKSYnR7VFobDUSngFu9QAjECsmKg_kWaR6tYfKyraeyFm2OxRXL5bRztaJOwr4EI4lxNchaFQJESEbQabLwbsYdLNu_Hrga_VwUz-uRSppQ6tXqfj6lmLbL4KpRinYJAGjAXDChqMfDsRi2kVzS6b7QabcU-L1cIt-nMOB1wNU-BXn5SMlEMzA1CO68tQGBL-xDjAyzTKx2bBcowyYgbV1xom4ooNLqHSNNVyk2dVspkuEmYf5ePn_aG-qseq5ZR06COkluC9nhnPzWd5TRGxykeYgjOOfUyzXvAtfYcATaPkV_Jq0iTUbIdikVRYLfHeXO1ZmFrittjf7XaPrC5dIU1wMWeTEl4mCNPL2X0zJACYpo0iYaJLLZMPWRVFBXJ_JfmkySlBuZGs-qIR_ep9YbvZHRGchntVUsi=w750-h402-no

Reply 1 of 41, by dr.zeissler

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ASYN1 and ASYN2 = Serial = Com-Port 1+2

One can be used for a serial mouse, the other for a serial connection to an old mac (adtpro) if you build a special cable.
The other could also be used for an atari-st or amiga serial connection.

Last edited by dr.zeissler on 2017-05-17, 09:36. Edited 1 time in total.

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 2 of 41, by konc

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Another common use for a serial port was modems, so it made perfect sense to have more that one.
A CDROM should work on this IDE connector, but I HAVE come across similar controllers not working with ATAPI drives. So the answer is most probably yes, but it's not certain without confirming it in practice of from the manual.

Reply 3 of 41, by badmojo

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retro games 100 wrote:

Greetings Earthlings

I don't have anything to offer with regard to your question I'm sorry but I would like to say welcome back! I've enjoyed many of your 'review' threads over the years.

Where you been at all these years?

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Reply 4 of 41, by retro games 100

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Thanks very much for everyone's replies, they are all really appreciated, and thanks very much for the welcome back! 😀 My departure from retro computing and also this website was due to a series of crappy personal life events.

Reply 6 of 41, by Jepael

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The serial ports (ASYN) just need an adapter that brings the wires to a bracket in unused slot next to the IO controller. There are a couple of different pinouts so don't assume the first you find is a correct one. But the bracket will have 9-pin serial and 25-pin serial connectors (DE-9 and DB-25 male connectors). The adapter looks so new it should have 16550A UART with a 16-byte FIFO handling the COM ports. In the era before PS/2 mice, the DE-9 connector was used for mice and DB-25 unused or for any other serial device like modem, printer, another PC, etc. Other than the connector size there no difference.

15-pin connector is game port. But it looks like there is a catch. Based on the count of wires and the NE556 dual timer chip, the joystick port can support only one standard 2-axis 2-button joystick. Normally there would be more than 10 wires and NE558 quad timer chip to support a full 4-axis 4-button gameport.

25-pin DB-25 connector is the parallel port (LPT). Mostly used for printing, but you can connect any other devices with parallel port too, like scanners, ZIP drives, COVOX or Disney Sound Source sound devices. DB-25 means "D-subminiature" connector, B is the length of the connector and 25 is the pin count. Therefore, serial mice and digital monitors have DE-9 connectors and VGA is a DE-15 as they are mechanically the same length but with different pin counts.

The IDE connector can most likely take a IDE CD-ROM as a slave, but most likely that is at the primary IDE interface address by default so if you already have an IDE interface in your system you have to configure one of them as primary and other as secondary. Each IDE interface can take two devices, and in theory there should be no difference if they are master or slave but sometimes it's best to jumper drives as master if it is the only device on interface. If this is the only IDE interface in your system, it should work with HDD as master and CDROM as slave.

Reply 7 of 41, by retro games 100

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Thanks a lot keropi, and awesome info Jepael, many thanks. I have some follow-up questions please:

* Regarding the two ASYN male pin connections on the card's PCB. Would the corresponding DB-25 serial port connector (male) be for something called an "RS-232" port?

* Would ASYN1 always lead (go) to a DE-9 serial mouse port, and ASYN2 always lead to the other lesser used DB-25 serial port? Or, could they be switched around, so that the cable from the ASYN1 connector lead (went) to a DB-25 serial port on the backplate?

* Is it true that a female port (on the backplate) is always a parallel connection, and a male port (backplate) is always serial?

* Regarding the Dx lettering; B and E. At first glance, I thought that these letters might represent hexidecimal values. However, it seems that the shorter length is associated with a 'larger' letter, and so there must be another explanation. Are these letters simply "categories", used for simple "grouping"? Or, do these letters actually represent something?

* Regarding the controller's configuration, namely its main bank of jumpers (JP1 to JP11), and also its single JP12 jumper, does anyone have a jumper settings description for these please?

Thanks a lot!

Reply 8 of 41, by jade_angel

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retro games 100 wrote:

Thanks a lot keropi, and awesome info Jepael, many thanks. I have some follow-up questions please:

* Regarding the two ASYN male pin connections on the card's PCB. Would the corresponding DB-25 serial port connector (male) be for something called an "RS-232" port?

* Would ASYN1 always lead (go) to a DE-9 serial mouse port, and ASYN2 always lead to the other lesser used DB-25 serial port? Or, could they be switched around, so that the cable from the ASYN1 connector lead (went) to a DB-25 serial port on the backplate?

25-pin and 9-pin serial ports are functionally identical, and in fact you can use an adapter to connect a device with one connector to a port with the other. Serial ports use the RS-232 standard, yes, so if you hear of an RS-232 port, that's the same thing as a serial port or COM port. A few weirdos call them TTY ports sometimes too.

It's common - but by no means universal - for the first port to be 9-pin and the second to be 25-pin, but since they're functionally identical, you could reverse that. On some early PCs, both were 25-pin. On later ones (most ATX motherboards, for example, before they starting phasing out serial ports) both were 9-pin.

* Is it true that a female port (on the backplate) is always a parallel connection, and a male port (backplate) is always serial?

Not quite, especially outside the realm of PCs. However, you can generally assume that a female 25-pin port is parallel, unless it's marked as SCSI, and that a male 9-pin or 25-pin port is probably serial. There are exceptions, but not usually on multi-I/O controllers like this one.

* Regarding the Dx lettering; B and E. At first glance, I thought that these letters might represent hexidecimal values. However, it seems that the shorter length is associated with a 'larger' letter, and so there must be another explanation. Are these letters simply "categories", used for simple "grouping"? Or, do these letters actually represent something?

As far as I know, they're just categories.

* Regarding the controller's configuration, namely its main bank of jumpers (JP1 to JP11), and also its single JP12 jumper, does anyone have a jumper settings description for these please?

Thanks a lot!

I'm afraid I don't... All the ones I have, have different jumper blocks which are generally clearly marked. Yours, alas, is one of the annoying ones that doesn't have them marked.

Main Box: Macbook Pro M2 Max
Alas, I'm down to emulation.

Reply 9 of 41, by Jepael

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retro games 100 wrote:

* Regarding the two ASYN male pin connections on the card's PCB. Would the corresponding DB-25 serial port connector (male) be for something called an "RS-232" port?

Yes, COM (communication) ports use signals and voltage levels compatible with RS-232.

retro games 100 wrote:

* Would ASYN1 always lead (go) to a DE-9 serial mouse port, and ASYN2 always lead to the other lesser used DB-25 serial port? Or, could they be switched around, so that the cable from the ASYN1 connector lead (went) to a DB-25 serial port on the backplate?

You can connect them in any way you want. There is no much difference, other than COM2 (address 0x2F8) uses higher priority interrupt (IRQ3) than COM1 (address 0x3F8) which uses IRQ4, but that may be irrelevant. Mouse is a slow 1200 bps device while modems were used at highest possible rate of 115200 bps.

retro games 100 wrote:

* Is it true that a female port (on the backplate) is always a parallel connection, and a male port (backplate) is always serial?

On a multi-IO card yes, but otherwise on other cards they could be anything. For example network cards have AUI connector identical to game port.

retro games 100 wrote:

* Regarding the Dx lettering; B and E. At first glance, I thought that these letters might represent hexidecimal values. However, it seems that the shorter length is associated with a 'larger' letter, and so there must be another explanation. Are these letters simply "categories", used for simple "grouping"? Or, do these letters actually represent something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-subminiature

retro games 100 wrote:

* Regarding the controller's configuration, namely its main bank of jumpers (JP1 to JP11), and also its single JP12 jumper, does anyone have a jumper settings description for these please?

Might be hard to find that info specific to card you have, as there are so many cards with same chipset. Fortunately it is near impossible to break anything, I've once determined jumper settings by changing one of them at a time and rebooting the PC.
First hit with google provided this:ftp://www.bf.lu.lv/pub/OS/I_O/Goldstar/prime2ide.html

Reply 10 of 41, by Nipedley

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I just got a near identical one of these myself last week, a V4. Apparently they were made by Kentech

Here's the jumper list for V4, the layout of ports looks slightly different to your V3 but the jumper bank looks the same and it should give you a good idea

www.uncreativelabs.net/index.php?site=h ... eplus4.htm

Reply 11 of 41, by jesolo

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I have a similar one with the Goldstar (LGS) Prime 3B chipset.

LGS Prime 3B.jpg
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This is an 8-bit card, with only a floppy connector and ASYN connectors, but I've been unable the find the jumper settings for this one.
Nice card to use in an XT.

Reply 12 of 41, by elianda

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I use these a lot and usually as default for test systems. Also made photos of a few in my gallery http://retronn.de/imports/hwgal/hw_goldstar_prime2.html

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Reply 13 of 41, by retro games 100

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Thanks a lot for the great info everyone! It's intriguing, because the more I learn from the above comments, the more I want to learn, specifically:

If these two size types of serial port on the backplate area are functionally equivalent, then what is the purpose of having two different sized ports, with a different number of 'pinout wires/pins'? I'm guessing, but due to the extra number of 'pinout pins/wires' on the DB-25 port, compared to the DE-9, would it support extra 'functionality', and consequently not be exactly the same as the DE-9? Thanks for any additional comments.

@elianda, I notice on your screenshot for the Controller 1 image, that you have jumpers JP3 ad JP8 enabled, and all other jumpers on that particular jumper bank (JP1 to JP11) disabled. Can you confirm what any of these jumpers do, and do their configuration settings match up with any of the jumper configuration settings pages that can be found online? Also, are you able to confirm what jumper JP12 does? Thanks a lot if you can provide any info about this!

Reply 14 of 41, by Jepael

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retro games 100 wrote:

If these two size types of serial port on the backplate area are functionally equivalent, then what is the purpose of having two different sized ports, with a different number of 'pinout wires/pins'? I'm guessing, but due to the extra number of 'pinout pins/wires' on the DB-25 port, compared to the DE-9, would it support extra 'functionality', and consequently not be exactly the same as the DE-9? Thanks for any additional comments.

Standard only defined DB-25 connector and it could support all kinds of exotic features on its pins nobody never really used and therefore never implemented.
It was a standard nevertheless so this connector was used to be directly compatible with existing equipment and cables.
And at first one ISA board provided only one serial port. Later on when IBM introduced the AT, to fit two serial ports ( or maybe it was one serial and one parallel port ) on single card, smaller connector had to be used for the serial port and that could be done without losing any features, only mechanical adapter was necessary to convert to 25-pin connector.
That's why the 9-pin port is also known as AT style serial port. As time passed, the use of smaller connector became normal, even defined in later standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_port#Connectors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232#Connectors

Reply 15 of 41, by elianda

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In reality external modem use commonly the DB25 connector as they use also the DTR/DSR signals.
Earlier Multi-I/O cards only had a socket for the second UART chip controlling the serial ports (8250 / 16450 type) and could be upgraded on demand. Like this one http://retronn.de/imports/hwgal/hw_io_controller_sis.html (only serial/parallel here)
Basically you can also have separate cards for serial / parallel / game / floppy and hdd, which would fill 5 slots.

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Reply 16 of 41, by Jepael

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elianda wrote:

In reality external modem use commonly the DB25 connector as they use also the DTR/DSR signals.

Those do exist on 9-pin port as well. Regarding serial ports on PCs, there is nothing more the 25-pin port can offer compared to the 9-pin port.
(except the non-standard option of jumpering the connector on XT serial adapter for current loop interface instead of RS232).

I think modems use DB25 just because that was the standard RS-232 way and DB-9 was IBM proprietary solution.

Reply 17 of 41, by PhilsComputerLab

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It's terrific to hear from you again! 2012 seems like yesterday and I thoroughly enjoyed all the contributions from you and have fond memories that's for sure. I wish you all the best going forward!

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Reply 18 of 41, by retro games 100

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Thanks everyone! Thanks Phil for your kind words!

I feel that the commentary regarding the "AT style serial port" above makes perfect sense, and explains the situation regarding the port sizes really well. Thank you.

Reply 19 of 41, by chrisNova777

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in my brief time on the forum looking at older posts researching topics of interest to me, of course I remember coming across many insightful posts started by him and i was wondering what happened to RG100 😀

im glad you have found your way back to your passions;)

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