VOGONS


Reply 80 of 143, by Doomn00b

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ruthan wrote:

I found out that Gigabyte is still making some MB with PCI slot, at least few Z270 and 1 Z370 MB, i added them to first post.

Excellent going, Ruthan! = ) I must say... I rather admire you and the people whom are helping you out in this thread - good going guys! Keep the dream of a mega-compatible going.

EDIT:

Just to clarify - the Z170 board - GA-Z170-HD3 (rev. 1.0) - is the plan to use that with some sort of riser/extension back-plane, like one of the industrial ones posted in this thread, to then gain access to more PCI and ISA slots?

Reply 81 of 143, by ruthan

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Doomn00b wrote:

I must say... I rather admire you and the people whom are helping you out in this thread - good going guys! Keep the dream of a mega-compatible going.

Well if so nice, i dont mind some symbolic (i dont accept anything higher that 2 bucks) donate 😀

Doomn00b wrote:

Just to clarify - the Z170 board - GA-Z170-HD3 (rev. 1.0) - is the plan to use that with some sort of riser/extension back-plane, like one of the industrial ones posted in this thread, to then gain access to more PCI and ISA slots?

I think that you would be first who will test some of that industrial risers with ISA slots, but for this you need also special MBs - where is cpu on special card etc. Otherwise for modern MB are proven only these PCIe to PCI risers, where is working lots of things - Pericom chips seems to be better than ASM1083.. but soundcards are not working with them, but network cards, usb controllers, videocards etc are.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 82 of 143, by Doomn00b

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ruthan wrote:

Well if so nice, i dont mind some symbolic (i dont accept anything higher that 2 bucks) donate 😀

Haha! I might just have to do that... That, or I'll try and find some old software or hardware you might be interested in, yeah?

ruthan wrote:

I think that you would be first who will test some of that industrial risers with ISA slots, but for this you need also special MBs - where is cpu on special card etc. Otherwise for modern MB are proven only these PCIe to PCI risers, where is working lots of things - Pericom chips seems to be better than ASM1083.. but soundcards are not working with them, but network cards, usb controllers, videocards etc are.

Ah, I see.

You know, I think I might have found a potential long-term solution to this problem... I wonder if this has been mentioned here in the past? This Taiwanese company sells different kits for making your own PCI to ISA adapter card:

https://www.costronic.com.tw/Ev71p.htm

The cores of the kits are a pair of Winbond W83628F & W83629D integrated circuits, which work together to translate the ISA-signals to PCI and back. These two IC's were created to work with Intel's i810 chipset with LPC - not sure if this messes up compatibility for later chipsets, but I'm guessing as long as they've got an LPC, it should work, yeah?

I also found these guys:

https://www.samba.org/~tridge/tivo-ethernet/

Whom created another, port-to-ISA converter card, of their own design. (this one is intended for the proprietary ports on a TiVO video-system)

They're all involved in Open Source and Linux development, and even had their boards, schematics and everything, published and spread to their community! So, perhaps we could ask them about tips on how to use the kits from that Taiwanese company?

EDIT:

The instructions mention how we need to know which I/O and memory address-ranges the card we want to plug in utilizes as well - SO...!

1. What's the BEST, or MOST COMPATIBLE ISA sound card?
2. And where do we find detailed documentation on it?

Which ISA sound-card would you select if you could have any you wanted, Ruthan? I suggest we start with that one, and then perhaps one other, to see if they use the same ranges - would be neat if a potential adapter could be used for more than one Sound card, but we can't count on it.

EDIT2:

Concerning the potential drivers needed for this thing, I believe that Mateusz Viste might be the man to contact, since he has already written an LPT driver for FreeDos:

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/fr … tml/lptdrv.html

This is his website:

http://mateusz.viste.fr/

Perhaps we can convince him to write a driver for a card like the above?

Btw, I used to train to become an electronics repair-man and assistant electrical engineer, so if someone can somehow sponsor me, I would be willing to give assembling one of these kits and making an ISA-card work on a PCI-port a try - I would have to learn a lot, but I am willing, and there seems to be pretty good documentation.

EDIT3:

Cool! They sell a development test-board, of a programmable ISA-card! At least I think so? This way, one can then test various signals, without putting your own, actual real ISA-card into this test-contraption. Well, gents - I think we have found what we need...

Reply 83 of 143, by Tiido

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The Winbond chips need few signals connected sraight to the southbridge chip to get IRQ and DMA functionality, those signals are not available on PCI slot and newer chipsets lack these signals which is why there's a lot of motherboards out there with ISA slots that don't have DMA and/or IRQs, only IO accesses.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 84 of 143, by Doomn00b

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Tiido wrote:

The Winbond chips need few signals connected sraight to the southbridge chip to get IRQ and DMA functionality, those signals are not available on PCI slot and newer chipsets lack these signals which is why there's a lot of motherboards out there with ISA slots that don't have DMA and/or IRQs, only IO accesses.

Well... FRAKK!!

Then we're back to the same spot as earlier in the thread then, aye? I believe someone here mentioned these things earlier... about how they would solder wire work-arounds to supply the signals, directly to the cards, one day.

On the other hand... That's certainly a smaller task to do, than the work needed to put together one of these kits.

Kind of cool that you're in here though Tiido! The fact that you made your own soundcard is just crazy! Amazing work, dude!

EDIT:

Eyy... while you're here... what do you think, in general, about the Taiwanese kit? If assembled the right way, and then with soldering+wiring on the right MB, could it finally break the PCI-barrier, as Ruthan calls it?

As far as I can tell, the only other way forward, is really with an industrial board.

Reply 85 of 143, by ruthan

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I thing that most compatible ISA cards are just Creative SB 16, or SB pro. What card is best for gaming i dont know, im not expert in ISA stuff. There is at least some source code for unofficial ALS4000 PCI sound cards, its only one which is able to play at least music on Z97 board, so maybe someone can continue with it.

Details are in this thread:
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

For ISA it seems that only way to make sound cards working on newer MBs is MB modification, nobody so far was able to find any other Software only solution.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 86 of 143, by Doomn00b

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ruthan wrote:
I thing that most compatible ISA cards are just Creative SB 16, or SB pro. What card is best for gaming i dont know, im not expe […]
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I thing that most compatible ISA cards are just Creative SB 16, or SB pro. What card is best for gaming i dont know, im not expert in ISA stuff. There is at least some source code for unofficial ALS4000 PCI sound cards, its only one which is able to play at least music on Z97 board, so maybe someone can continue with it.

Details are in this thread:
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

For ISA it seems that only way to make sound cards working on newer MBs is MB modification, nobody so far was able to find any other Software only solution.

Indeed - a hard nut to crack.

Anyways, googling away I actually found a third company whom has created these type of LPC-ISA chips - National Semiconductor has their PC87200 as well. Checking the database website digichip also revealed quite a few different LPC-ISA chips... There are 3 different variations of the Fintek chip, and they all seem to have the same DMA and Interrupt addresses, so I'm guessing all 3 may work similarly to the one on the Ruby-board.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox- … C+to+ISA+Bridge

Here's the NS chip... Oh. The info was actually from the same Taiwanese company... they sell a variation on their board, I believe.

https://www.costronic.com.tw/PC87200.pdf

It's not much, but at least we now have some more parameters to search for, when looking at motherboards.

Reply 87 of 143, by ruthan

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You never new for sure, but if there is not explicit mention of new chipsets and some sound cards support, i doubt that it would work.. You can ask vendors to test that. I dunno if these special industrial MBs are using some special chipset or not, it they are using just normal desktop / server chipsets, it would be dead end to.. from ISA sound card perspective.

How you can see in this table:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cvhr6 … K4l0/edit#gid=0

Last chipset here at least some PCI dos sound cards (Aureal Vortexes and Yamaha 7x4) are working are X58 and H/Z 6x/7x and maybe, maybe X79 (untested) i dunno if they have enough PCI magic to support sound cards on some PCI to ISA addon card? Probably not because SB-Link for behave PCI card as ISA card on much earlier MBs.. and it needed special cable and header on MB.

Otherwise only "solution" is LPT Adlib emulation:
https://www.serdashop.com/OPL3LPT .. only music and only sounds when game supports Adlib sounds.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 88 of 143, by cyclone3d

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If you really want full ISA support with a newer motherboard, you can always use on of those USB to ISA adapters. Pretty sure they were mentioned somewhere earlier in this thread.

There is even DOSBOX code to make them work with DOSBOX.

As far as using them in DOS through Windows 98, I am not sure if DMA is supported or not. The Univeral Software Layer page doesn't specify DMA although the pages for the cards themselves say they handle DMA.
The come in 1, 3, and 7 slot configurations:
http://arstech.com/install/index.php?app=ecom … 77o&portrelay=1

https://www.arstech.com/install/cms-display/ste_usl.html

The download link for the software comes with the cards. I have a couple of the 3 slot cards I picked up used, but still need to get a power adapter.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 89 of 143, by ruthan

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Dos window in Win98 is not pure Dos.. here is even SB Live in PCI-E to PCI adapter working fine, on MB where is not Dos sound support at all. I dunno if is that Dos implementation bettter or worse than DosBox, but i always tried to avoid it..

Maybe its bad habit from age when we had DOS /Win9x multiboot machines. But i thing that some thing are really not working with it.. i never tried it, but on modern machines, Dos games needs some slowdowners, i doubt that they are working well with Win98 running..
Lots of people are still booting into pure DOS, i dont thing that it would make sense, if Windows 98 Dos window would be better or same.

I dunno maybe is somewhere list of DOS games, which is not working fine in Win98..

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 90 of 143, by RayeR

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Hi,
it was told many times here that PCI2ISA adapters doesn't work on new chipsets. As intel removed necessary signals from chipset there's nothing to wire on the MB. The only possible way are LPC2ISA bridges but there are very few industrial motherboards using them. I know about one ( listed at http://rayer.g6.cz/hardware/mbisa.htm ) but it's now also old - obsolete LGA775 board. I know it would be possible to design own LPC2ISA adapter connected to TPM header but it will also include some wiring because TPM doesn't include DMARQ signal that would need to be stolen from SuperIO chip (it may use it for LPT ECP mode and floppy). The problem is that I didn't find any cheap source of that Fintek LPC2ISA bridge, I saw only a bigger lot for big money. And of course it will cost some TIME to do the design. I have still a lot of unfinished projects so it's not on my priority. Also because I have now a quite good solution with PCI YMF724 that I can play my favorite FPS (Blood, Duke, etc.) native... But when I would see the bridge chip for a few $ with free shipping I will buy it for some further tests.
BTW DOSBOX + USB2ISA adapter - doesn't make a sense for me because use slow DOSBOX, I want to run native or at least HW virtualized.

Gigabyte GA-P67-DS3-B3, Core i7-2600K @4,5GHz, 8GB DDR3, 128GB SSD, GTX970(GF7900GT), SB Audigy + YMF724F + DreamBlaster combo + LPC2ISA

Reply 91 of 143, by ruthan

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I have one more question, lets say that i have MB which is able to make PCI soundcard working.. Like X58, but i dont have enough PCI slots or MB competly without it, would or would be PCI sound card working through PCI-E to PCI bridge ASM 1083 / Pericom? Its still dead end or not?
Or is there something like 1 PCI bridge to more PCI slots adapter?

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 92 of 143, by RayeR

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PCI soundcards are different story as it relies on emulating driver like DSDMA.EXE (without hardware assistence as SBlink was). As you know it's a lottery if it all will be compatible with MB BIOS or not. PCI-E to PCI bridge that supports subtractive decode have a chance to work - as IT8892E on my MB proved. But it seems something else in BIOS must be done correct way to make it working. I don't think that intel 7x, 8x, 9x chipset series differs much from my P67 (BTW all they use UEFI instead of mine use old classic Award BIOS)...
Also it will probably not work if you have 2 PCI-E to PCI bridges in one MB (one onboard second on adaprter) as only one of them can be configured to subtractive decode mode - in my case the onbard bridge so Pericom adapter didn't worked for me. But I think if I would have P67 MB without onboard bridge there will be a chance it work via Pericom adapter...

Gigabyte GA-P67-DS3-B3, Core i7-2600K @4,5GHz, 8GB DDR3, 128GB SSD, GTX970(GF7900GT), SB Audigy + YMF724F + DreamBlaster combo + LPC2ISA

Reply 93 of 143, by ruthan

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There is nice, 7 long PCI-E slots X58 board, if someone want to take a risk. Sometimes is about skill, sometimes only about money.. and results report could help community. You can buy it, test it, sell it again.. if it will not work.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-X58A-UD9-rev-10#ov

2992.jpg

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 94 of 143, by cyclone3d

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ruthan wrote:

I have one more question, lets say that i have MB which is able to make PCI soundcard working.. Like X58, but i dont have enough PCI slots or MB competly without it, would or would be PCI sound card working through PCI-E to PCI bridge ASM 1083 / Pericom? Its still dead end or not?
Or is there something like 1 PCI bridge to more PCI slots adapter?

There are PCI expansion systems but getting a full setup together isn't usually cheap.

MAGMA (now One Stop Systems) is the primary company that makes them. They come in 1 (half or full size), 3(with space to add at least 1 internal drive - may also be a version with ATX size power supply but pics are not conclusive), 4 (regular ATX power supply with space to add drives including a 5.25" bay), 7, and 13 slot configurations.

The 1, 3, and 4 slot chassis' include a proprietary interface card. The 7 and 13 slot use a slot for a PCI interface card. The backplanes are actually 8 and 14 slot.

I have these:
1 slot - half size
3 slot
2x 4 slot
13 slot
Cardbus host interface card.

There are 32-bit as well as 64-bit PCI slot options.

The interface cards to hook to the host computer can be: Cardbus, Expresscard, PCI, or PCIE. You have to make sure you get matching cards as there are a couple different models with the same connection.
The cardbus cards are NLA.

Getting the cables is the hardest part unless you get a full setup.

They are also driverless although I am unsure if they will work in DOS or not. I need to test that.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 95 of 143, by ruthan

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cyclone3d wrote:

They are also driverless although I am unsure if they will work in DOS or not. I need to test that.

Thanks for long decription, but this is the most import, if they works in Dos with sound card, on machine were other Dos sound card is working in normal PCI slot.. Best way is just test same sound card in MB slot and after in adapter and we will see.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 96 of 143, by Doomn00b

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I have a question here... I have a Asus M3A78-CM rev 1.01G motherboard in my possession, it's an AMD board, it features an SB700 southbridge chip - just to make sure, I had a look at the specs, and unless I've misunderstood it, this Southbridge has very complex DMA support, with Midi and Adlib mentioned:

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012 … rg_pub_1.00.pdf

Is it me, or can this MB use PCI soundcards which will work quite well in pure dos??

Here's the specs for the entire board:
http://static.highspeedbackbone.net/pdf/Asus% … rd%20Manual.pdf

AMD rarely gets mentioned in these threads, so perhaps it's a good idea to take a closer look at their chipsets. A common thing I keep hearing, is that AMD has terrible support for ISA and DOS PCI sound, but as Ruthan says... "there are many urban legends spouted".

EDIT:

Some of the urban legends are indeed true... the SB700 line of southbridge chips are all good, but later chipsets have various types of DEFECTIVE LPC controllers - so, SB750S is the last one to definitively have a functional and rich LPC - complete with advanced Super-I/O.

Reply 97 of 143, by Doomn00b

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I may have found something... I did some googling, and this doesn't appear to have come up on Vogons. There's a Taiwanese company called ASIX which provides multiple, complex, PCIe bridge-cards - have a look here:

https://www.asix.com.tw/products.php?op=pItem … emID=256;74;110

The AX99100 has quite a few I/O options, specifically the PCIe to Local Bus (ISA-like) option seems quite interesting... I'm having a hard time getting a hold of the documentation though! They require a company-account verified with their support or something... I dug up this presentation though:

http://www.lestina.com/media/pdf/asix.pdf

What do you think, guys? Would be especially interesting to hear Rayer's opinion on the ASIX -chips.

EDIT:

I've talked to RayeR and it seems to be a no-go... They lack DRQ and DACK, which means they can't support ISA soundcards.

Reply 98 of 143, by LSS10999

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Doomn00b wrote:
I have a question here... I have a Asus M3A78-CM rev 1.01G motherboard in my possession, it's an AMD board, it features an SB700 […]
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I have a question here... I have a Asus M3A78-CM rev 1.01G motherboard in my possession, it's an AMD board, it features an SB700 southbridge chip - just to make sure, I had a look at the specs, and unless I've misunderstood it, this Southbridge has very complex DMA support, with Midi and Adlib mentioned:

http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012 … rg_pub_1.00.pdf

Is it me, or can this MB use PCI soundcards which will work quite well in pure dos??

Here's the specs for the entire board:
http://static.highspeedbackbone.net/pdf/Asus% … rd%20Manual.pdf

AMD rarely gets mentioned in these threads, so perhaps it's a good idea to take a closer look at their chipsets. A common thing I keep hearing, is that AMD has terrible support for ISA and DOS PCI sound, but as Ruthan says... "there are many urban legends spouted".

EDIT:

Some of the urban legends are indeed true... the SB700 line of southbridge chips are all good, but later chipsets have various types of DEFECTIVE LPC controllers - so, SB750S is the last one to definitively have a functional and rich LPC - complete with advanced Super-I/O.

Modern AMD chipsets are a complete no-go for PCI audio cards. I once had boards of each generation (700/800/900) and none worked, not to mention on those chipsets, the games still can't detect sound blaster even after I loaded the TSR (and confirmed the TSR is indeed loaded).

EDIT: I briefed the datasheet a bit and did find references of legacy audio. It seems starting from pages 171 (SMBus Module and ACPI Block) there were references about enabling some legacy audio hardware I/O addresses (Adlib 388-389, MIDI 300-330, Sound Blaster 220-280, WSS 530/604/E80/F40) to trigger SMI# (System Management Mode).

This makes it possible on SB7xx to emulate legacy audio using system management mode hacks, but it doesn't provide any means to make existing hardware's legacy TSRs usable (as they don't and can't use SMI). One needs to develop specific SMM code against the chipset and the target sound card then integrate it to the BIOS to get legacy audio working. For this, it might be more practical to target the onboard audio than targeting a specific discrete audio card (as if targeting a discrete card you'll probably need to modify the BIOS code every time you change stuffs, unless if it's possible to put soundcard-specific code in a higher ring from SMM(ring -2)). I'm not an expert in SMM so I'm not entirely sure). Again, this is only a possibility.

EDIT 2: Did not find any similar references on SB8xx register reference guide (and there's no SB9xx databook out yet), but on SB8xx databook it has references about LPC (which isn't useful on its own, SB7xx also has such mentions). The audio-related SMI# stuffs are so far only mentioned on SB7xx chipset documents.

PS: It has been possible to use SMI# to emulate legacy audio and other stuffs before (see Virtual Subsystem Architecture (VSA)).

Last edited by LSS10999 on 2019-05-08, 10:46. Edited 4 times in total.

Reply 99 of 143, by ruthan

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I looke at that Magma cases:
https://www.onestopsystems.com/product/3-slot-pci-expansion

But even if they would work they are expensive as hell, simply company stuff where you need it and prices are not matter.. and we will not know if they are working for sound cards.. but contruction seems pretty simple some special card and case with backplate own PSU..

Regardless i tried to write them, but no lock:
MS DOS is not supported and not compatible with 3slot PCI Expansion unit,

Thanks,
OSS Technical Support

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.