Interesting concept, though I wonder how the whole controller to gameport/joystick idea would work. I could be entirely wrong about this, but I don't think modern controllers use axis' anymore?

Either way, I like the idea. 😀

The entire thing could be done in a small FPGA rather easily. If you don't know what an FPGA is, think of it as a chip that you can reprogram to emulate any other chip. You can even get FPGAs large enough to emulate an entire 486 computer if you wanted to.
Basically you would get a small FPGA that connects to the ISA bus, and it would emulate a gameport controller card from the PC's perspective. Then it would recieve the bluetooth signal from a bluetooth tranciever with the data from the controller, and feed it into the virtual gameport.
The PC would interact with the card exactly as it would a gameport, and software would see it as a gameport, but rather than being a physical gameport with a bluetooth adapter, it would be a self contained emulated gameport that interfaces directly with the bluetooth controller through an FPGA. There would be no analog per se, but it would act just like the analog axis to the computer.

8 bit ISA USB is of interest to me.

I am slowly working on a device that fits most of these things, but time and money are the limiting factors right now.

Other things of interest might be EMS support and perhaps including SD cards to the mass storage side of things, they'll be far easier on the MCU compared to USB. For storage you'll need a boot ROM aswell so that you can hook into int13.
I would up the MCU to a proper 32bit ARM, it'll make your life much easier while having little change in the cost, especially when it allows to use a smaller FPGA in the process.
As far as HDMI and DVI go, there's the problem of transmitter chips, I have yet to find one that actually has documentation around and won't require you to have a HDMI license. Have you already found something suitable ? Or you're thinking of using an FPGA with gigabit transceivers and bitbang HDMI out of it ?

I honestly just came up with the idea today. I haven't ever done anything with HDMI before, I had no idea you have to have a license to use it. Seems kinda dumb to me.
I could do SD support, but the reason that I was thinking about USB is because there are already multiple adapters out there to use SD cards with ISA. (e.g. XT IDE and IDE to SD adapter) I was more thinking like a hot-pluggable drive that would appear to DOS to be more like a Zip drive type thing, but it would be able to use a standard USB flash drive.
I am by no means a professional digital designer, I am more learning as I go, but it seems like ISA is a good starting place to learn how to design this type of stuff.

HOLY CRAP!
I just looked up the licensing fees for HDMI. Talk about stupidly insane. Not only do they charge a $5,000 per year base fee, but they also take 1 more dollar for each device you sell! And that's only if you produce under 10,000 units per year!
Haha, that's a big NOPE.EXE from me. Maybe displayport? If I understand correctly displayport is compatible with not only HDMI, but VGA and DVI as well.

That universal video card, if able to be reasonably priced, would be very interesting to see happen. I'd say it'd be best to have a VGA output alongside HDMI (or displayport, since displayport's license isn't insane I think, and has a much more satisfying connector if you ask me 😊, plus you can easily get HDMI/DP adapters), to cover a very wide swath of displays. I guess you can always adapt things back to VGA, though.

I'm surprised nobody's done a USB ISA card yet. A silly idea I had was to effectively spoof a network connection, on a card, so that it thinks a USB flash drive is a remote file server to download things off of. I have no idea how practical or even possible that would be.

I have had a few other ideas of my own, but mostly they're silly one-off things that would be for my own projects; very much not of wide interest. That being said, I would be genuinely interested to learn how to actually create and interface with custom ISA cards... from what I've seen so far it seems like it's just simple enough to be accessible to this sort of homebrew sphere, which is awfully tantalizing.

You could do the USB drive like a file server, but I more envisioned it to behave more like a ZIP drive. It would create a drive letter that would always appear in DOS, and you could use it like a normal drive. However, if you were to disconnect the USB drive, it would just give back a "Drive not ready" message if you tried to access it.
ISA is a pretty easy bus to interface with. It's actually pretty ingenious the way the sockets are laid out. You might think that each slot is accessed independently, but it isn't like that. All the ports are connected together, and the cards just basically take turns using the bus. The neat thing is that you could technically get an ISA backplane (It's just a passive board with 8 or 10 isa slots on it) and link it to a normal motherboard and give yourself 9 more ISA slots.
Another idea that I had was to make an ISA card that basically provided a massive amount of IO (say like 30 pins) on the back of the case that you could break out to a breadboard and use your PC to control stuff. Think of it like the IO cable on a raspberry pi. But like 10x slower. Then you could adapt your PC to do all kinds of cool stuff.
Honestly, I should probably make a thread here that documents my process as I'm designing and building these cards so that others might follow along and learn how to make their own expansion cards.
Another one of my ideas was a USB adapter for 5.25 inch floppy drives. I haven't ever seen a single one in my entire time searching for it on the internet. It strikes me as odd as USB 3.5 inch drives are a dime a dozen but nobody seems to have ever made a 5.25 inch USB drive.

dkarguth wrote:

Another idea that I had was to make an ISA card that basically provided a massive amount of IO (say like 30 pins) on the back of the case that you could break out to a breadboard and use your PC to control stuff. Think of it like the IO cable on a raspberry pi. But like 10x slower. Then you could adapt your PC to do all kinds of cool stuff.

I was just coming in here to suggest that!

dkarguth wrote:

- A video card that used an FPGA to emulate VGA/EGA/CGA/MDA graphics, settable either by dipswitches on the card or a software utility, that has an HDMI output rather than a VGA. Since an FPGA would essentially completely replicate the functionality of the original VGA/MDA/CGA/EGA cards, it would be able to be 100% compatible with the video cards of the era.

Video cards of the era, even supporting same standard, were not 100% compatible with each other.
This could be interesting in an academic sort of way, a project aiming to build the best/fastest/quirky ISA VGA card for example. Good way of getting familiar with FPGA for the author.

dkarguth wrote:

- An 8 bit USB controller that supports hot-pluggable USB mass storage devices such as flash drives

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?487 … ard-in-IBM-5160!
$3 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=ch375

dkarguth wrote:

and possibly includes a virtual COM port so that a USB mouse would appear as a generic microsoft serial mouse to DOS.

https://hackaday.io/project/27575-ps2-to-rs23 … mouse-converter

dkarguth wrote:

- A modern network card with integrated wifi

$20 AP connected to ordinary network card
esp8266 emulating modem over serial is more era appropriate https://hackaday.com/2017/06/17/bbsing-with-the-esp8266/

dkarguth wrote:

- A card that emulates a Gameport, but connects to Xbox/PS4/Bluetooth controllers to provide wireless controllers

so hdmi lcd, wireless lan, usb mouse and modern joypads? might as well run on emulator at this point 😀

dkarguth wrote:

- A card that uses an FPGA to completely emulate a Commodore 64 and use the PC keyboard and display. Onboard SID chip with audio pass-thru, a commodore serial port on the back to connect authentic commodore accessories, and a simulated serial link in between the PC and the Commodore to facilitate file transfers.

even more niche 😮 why exactly would anyone want to emulate c64 on IBM XT in the first place?

dkarguth wrote:

- A standalone commodore serial card that lets DOS treat the commodore disk drives as a normal floppy drive, or use a commodore printer as a normal printer.

XE1541/XM1541/XU1541 cables exist. What lacks is a driver, not hardware.

Tiido wrote:

Other things of interest might be EMS support and perhaps including SD cards to the mass storage side of things, they'll be far easier on the MCU compared to USB. For storage you'll need a boot ROM aswell so that you can hook into int13.
I would up the MCU to a proper 32bit ARM, it'll make your life much easier while having little change in the cost, especially when it allows to use a smaller FPGA in the process.
As far as HDMI and DVI go, there's the problem of transmitter chips, I have yet to find one that actually has documentation around and won't require you to have a HDMI license. Have you already found something suitable ? Or you're thinking of using an FPGA with gigabit transceivers and bitbang HDMI out of it ?

this http://www.smbaker.com/raspberry-pi-virtual-f … -xtat-computers
could do all of the things you mention with some modifications

Edit: accidental post, can't figure out how to delete

I spent a while looking at RGB-to-digital conversion chipsets and display driver ICs, and arrived at the same conclusion re: video. HDMI is designed to be impenetrable by the unwashed masses. The licensing is a revenue source for one, and they also have a vested interest in keeping the HDCP information within a small, closed community. So, hobbyiest HDMI is not, and likely won't ever be, on the table.

However.... DVI is. And so, there are a great many hobby devices that use a peculiar "DVI" port that just happens to allow an HDMI cable to plug into it. 😉 The degree to which this "decidedly NOT HDMI" port behaves more like DVI or more like HDMI depends on the FPGA IP and the brashness of its author. Suffice to say, if you want compatibility with HDMI displays, there's nothing really stopping you from doing it by brute force, but you can pretty much forget having a legitimate Silicon Image IC driving it. (Thanks, consumer electronics industry.)

Not to kill the party. But there have been 8088/86 kits avaliable for a couple of years now.

https://youtu.be/MW5lApN0gWc

Oh BTW, while we're talking about new designs.... One of the unfortunate consequences of the PC evolution is that audio and video grew up as distinct products. This is in contrast to the AV world, where they've been intimately linked. Specifically, a common clock. In the analog domain, this wasn't terribly important, except that you wouldn't be able to time audio events to V-sync as easily. But, in the digital domain, this can be a problem when the audio and video sink is the same device (e.g., a TV), or when you want to play synchronized video (e.g., HTPC or console emulators).

So, one thing that would be nice is to have an ISA video card + Sound Blaster DSP in one card. That way, the VGA (or whatever) refresh can be locked at 60Hz, and the audio can be derived from the same clock, and you won't end up with sync issues or "audio only when there's video" like you do when using VGA+audio -> HDMI conversion boxes.

Regarding game port. Yes, a USB connection for joyaticks would be nice, yet playing dos games with controllers (or joypads as they were known as back then) is perhaps not a choice that many gamers want. And besides, the PC had mostly analog joysticks. Digital were a thing of consoles and non Pc/Mac computers. (ZX Spectrum, C64 and so on)

SirNickity wrote:

Oh BTW, while we're talking about new designs.... One of the unfortunate consequences of the PC evolution is that audio and video grew up as distinct products. This is in contrast to the AV world, where they've been intimately linked. Specifically, a common clock. In the analog domain, this wasn't terribly important, except that you wouldn't be able to time audio events to V-sync as easily. But, in the digital domain, this can be a problem when the audio and video sink is the same device (e.g., a TV), or when you want to play synchronized video (e.g., HTPC or console emulators).

So, one thing that would be nice is to have an ISA video card + Sound Blaster DSP in one card. That way, the VGA (or whatever) refresh can be locked at 60Hz, and the audio can be derived from the same clock, and you won't end up with sync issues or "audio only when there's video" like you do when using VGA+audio -> HDMI conversion boxes.

If a game is designed to have smooth scrolling on 50hz, then it will be choppy in motions, when forced to run at 60hz. It is one of many headaches in the various Nintendo/Sega/Commodore camps of retro gaming.

rasz_pl wrote:

Video cards of the era, even supporting same standard, were not 100% compatible with each other. This could be interesting in an […]
Show full quote

dkarguth wrote:

- A video card that used an FPGA to emulate VGA/EGA/CGA/MDA graphics, settable either by dipswitches on the card or a software utility, that has an HDMI output rather than a VGA. Since an FPGA would essentially completely replicate the functionality of the original VGA/MDA/CGA/EGA cards, it would be able to be 100% compatible with the video cards of the era.

Video cards of the era, even supporting same standard, were not 100% compatible with each other.
This could be interesting in an academic sort of way, a project aiming to build the best/fastest/quirky ISA VGA card for example. Good way of getting familiar with FPGA for the author.

dkarguth wrote:

- An 8 bit USB controller that supports hot-pluggable USB mass storage devices such as flash drives

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?487 … ard-in-IBM-5160!
$3 https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=ch375

dkarguth wrote:

and possibly includes a virtual COM port so that a USB mouse would appear as a generic microsoft serial mouse to DOS.

https://hackaday.io/project/27575-ps2-to-rs23 … mouse-converter

dkarguth wrote:

- A modern network card with integrated wifi

$20 AP connected to ordinary network card
esp8266 emulating modem over serial is more era appropriate https://hackaday.com/2017/06/17/bbsing-with-the-esp8266/

dkarguth wrote:

- A card that emulates a Gameport, but connects to Xbox/PS4/Bluetooth controllers to provide wireless controllers

so hdmi lcd, wireless lan, usb mouse and modern joypads? might as well run on emulator at this point 😀

dkarguth wrote:

- A card that uses an FPGA to completely emulate a Commodore 64 and use the PC keyboard and display. Onboard SID chip with audio pass-thru, a commodore serial port on the back to connect authentic commodore accessories, and a simulated serial link in between the PC and the Commodore to facilitate file transfers.

even more niche 😮 why exactly would anyone want to emulate c64 on IBM XT in the first place?

dkarguth wrote:

- A standalone commodore serial card that lets DOS treat the commodore disk drives as a normal floppy drive, or use a commodore printer as a normal printer.

XE1541/XM1541/XU1541 cables exist. What lacks is a driver, not hardware.

Tiido wrote:

Other things of interest might be EMS support and perhaps including SD cards to the mass storage side of things, they'll be far easier on the MCU compared to USB. For storage you'll need a boot ROM aswell so that you can hook into int13.
I would up the MCU to a proper 32bit ARM, it'll make your life much easier while having little change in the cost, especially when it allows to use a smaller FPGA in the process.
As far as HDMI and DVI go, there's the problem of transmitter chips, I have yet to find one that actually has documentation around and won't require you to have a HDMI license. Have you already found something suitable ? Or you're thinking of using an FPGA with gigabit transceivers and bitbang HDMI out of it ?

this http://www.smbaker.com/raspberry-pi-virtual-f … -xtat-computers
could do all of the things you mention with some modifications

Most of these things you mention get the job done in one way or another, but not exactly cleanly. Personally, I would much rather have an internal ISA card than 15 adapter dongles hanging off the back of my PC to be able to connect a few things. The point of the idea is to create a clean solution that requires minimal setup or complexity to get to work. When you present these modern devices as an actual floppy drive/hard drive/com port/gameport, the system handles it better and you have almost 100% compatibility with existing software. I can see where you're coming from though, nothing that I have suggested is entirely a unique and new idea, I was just suggesting that rather than adapting existing hardware with messy adapters, an internal card could be designed to simplify the process.

Also, I've never seen a card that allows you to connect a 1541 drive to a PC and have it accessible like a normal floppy drive. No extra drivers needed, it just works.

dkarguth wrote:

Also, I've never seen a card that allows you to connect a 1541 drive to a PC and have it accessible like a normal floppy drive. No extra drivers needed, it just works.

you dont need a card for that, you need a dos driver