Reply 18720 of 27643, by creepingnet
- Rank
- Oldbie
Bondi wrote on 2021-04-15, 20:40:creepingnet wrote on 2021-04-15, 20:27:A USB card would be another cool one and something else I'd love to have. I have seen USB ISA cards before, they're very rare, but they are doable apparently.
I didn't know a USB controller for ISA bus actually existed. Are you sure? I was always under the impression that USB was exclisively PCI and on compatible.
Actually LoTek made something like that for a time - https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_ISA_USB_Adapter - basically it allowed you to boot off of a USB Stick as a Hard Disk drive without any drivers and mapped it as a regular HDD using the BIOS on the card, which could double for loading BIOS Boot ROMS for other things like PXE or XT-IDE.
Then there's this thing - https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A% … QAAAAAdAAAAABAO - Simtec ISA board with USB Slots on it, I think it's for development uses but I'd think there would be a way to utilize that or map it.
While I'm not really a coder I Can see where the problem with a full featured, functioning as expected in Windows USB card on ISA would be impossible. We would need to have new expectations and a more creative way of going about it than just "let's make it where it plugs and plays like expected" because in DOS or Win3x it will never ever happen. I would liken it to things like using WiFI in DOS - people say it does not exist because it's not a common thing to do, or have done at the time, but it exists, and it's clunkier, and takes more skill and knowledge, than say, just plugging in a USB stick or punching in an SSID's password in WIndows.
I could see this working similarly - sort of like SHSUCDX - it'd be a small storage TSR you could load temporarily when you need the card, and unload it when you don't - sort of like MSCDEX. However, this is all unresearched and theoretical based off my limited knowledge of how these things work at the moment, but I won't throw it out the window since I've been right on this stuff more than once. If someone wanted to use I/O devices - like mice, and whatnot, there would need to be custom DOS drivers written for them, which as the VCFED thread said about it - would be "driver hell" - but most of us I think would only be using this sort of thing for storage anyway really.
~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/