dkarguth wrote:

I was pondering the idea of designing a brand new line of ISA cards to retrofit into old PCs. Things along the lines of: - A v […]
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I was pondering the idea of designing a brand new line of ISA cards to retrofit into old PCs.
Things along the lines of:
- 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.
- An 8 bit USB controller that supports hot-pluggable USB mass storage devices such as flash drives, and possibly includes a virtual COM port so that a USB mouse would appear as a generic microsoft serial mouse to DOS.
- A modern network card with integrated wifi
- A card that emulates a Gameport, but connects to Xbox/PS4/Bluetooth controllers to provide wireless controllers
- 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.
- 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.

I am not planning on any PCI cards at the moment, mostly because many of these things already exist on PCI cards. These are some things that were never available on ISA cards.
None of them have been designed yet, these are just general ideas.

If anyone feels like suggesting something that they would like to see in a new ISA card, that would be well received as well.

Note: Mods, if this comes off as too close to advertising, just message me and I'll happily remove it. That is not my intention. I'm not trying to sell anything, I am just curious to see if there would be any interest in this area.

I would buy alot of that. The design of S3 2D cards is pretty well understood and would be great for DOS.

The area that needs the most attention is sound cards, as usual. There really is no silver bullet for DOS sound.

brostenen wrote:

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)

Platformers would benefit from a digital controller, for example. Early FPS would probably work too. There are a lot of games I played exclusively with a keyboard, which is of course digital. Ergonomics of a controller would be a huge improvement to WASD.

brostenen wrote:

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.

For console games, yes. But if a game is designed to use v-sync as a timer, and has enough time to complete its game code within the a 60Hz window instead of a typical DOS game's 70Hz window, then you could improve compatibility with modern displays tremendously by sticking to 60Hz. More to the point, you as a consumer would finally have control over that (without resorting to hacks and TSRs, at least.)

How about an ISA card with 1024Mb flash memory that would emulate ide controller and 2 x 512Mb ide hard drives for those old PCs with the hard drive size limitations? It would be convenient way to get hard drives to just put such isa card there. There could also be USB connector at back of the ISA card that would allow using it as standard USB drive for transferring files there.

Baoran wrote:

How about an ISA card with 1024Mb flash memory that would emulate ide controller and 2 x 512Mb ide hard drives for those old PCs with the hard drive size limitations? It would be convenient way to get hard drives to just put such isa card there. There could also be USB connector at back of the ISA card that would allow using it as standard USB drive for transferring files there.

If you already make the entire card why not simply add a rom with a(possibly modified) XT-IDE bios and get rid of the limitation for good?

Koltoroc wrote:

Baoran wrote:

How about an ISA card with 1024Mb flash memory that would emulate ide controller and 2 x 512Mb ide hard drives for those old PCs with the hard drive size limitations? It would be convenient way to get hard drives to just put such isa card there. There could also be USB connector at back of the ISA card that would allow using it as standard USB drive for transferring files there.

If you already make the entire card why not simply add a rom with a(possibly modified) XT-IDE bios and get rid of the limitation for good?

Generally you don't need any bigger hard drives when using such old PCs and more flash memory would mean more expensive card and you would need to include cost of the extra rom chip too. I was actually originally thinking of suggesting a single 512Mb hard drive emulated on such card, but since one ide channel supports 2 hard drives you might as well emulate 2 of them. For me 1024Mb would be more than enough, but perhaps there could also be more expensive version of the card too if enough people would want it. I think XT-IDE is mostly used because such small hard drives are more difficult to obtain nowadays instead of actual need for bigger hard drives in such old computers.

Someone in China already put together an ISA USB card, here is a report.

http://www.toughdev.com/content/2018/04/usb-f … to-usb-adapter/

Of course, there are 999 limitations. He had it going at 8KBps @12Mhz, (not really sure what you expect with that kind of system anyway) but the disk had to be FAT16, no more than 512MB, couldn't be formatted, only "intended" for USB drives (no mention of keyboards or other peripherals), blah blah blah.

So very cool to finally see that, but it also seems a little too rough around the edges.

Thats jj_pearce design from lotech.

https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/product/isa-usb-adapter-pcb/

its so slow you can even boot via XTIDE BIOS and a USB-RS232 Cable..

Something cool that hasn't been talked about here (though it could be made in another form that ISA card) would be a CD-ROM emulator with audio output. See, for windows we have Daemon tools and for dos, shsucdx to simulate a CD-rom drive. But in one case CD audio isn't working properly in most cases and in the other it's just out of question. Plus you can't boot from these CDs using software, and burnable CDs sources are slowly fading, and unlike floppy disks, finding CDs that you can burn in the future might become really really hard.

So it'd be the gotek of cd drives kind of.

The CD-ROM emulator would be awesome. Probably doable with a small ARM or other MCU that reads ISOs from an SD-card? Not that I could build such a thing...

I wouldn't buy any of the suggested cards, as I see no need for them. I don't need USB, WiFi, or other modern technology in a PC that wasn't meant for that. WiFi is easy anyway, as all you need is a LAN card with a WiFi bridge attached. Doesn't even require any additional software to work - apart from that for the LAN card itself.

What I wish to see is a single ISA card combining VGA, SB/Adlib compatible sound and mass storage (that is, IDE or CF card slot with XT-IDE bios). I have many retro PCs where I have to make compromises due to not having enough ISA slots. That sucks. Examples are Tandy 1000 RL, IBM 5150, Amiga 2000 using a bridge board, etc.

dkarguth wrote:

I was pondering the idea of designing a brand new line of ISA cards to retrofit into old PCs.
Things along the lines of:
- 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.

Oh yes. Oh yes. With D-Sub, TTL, HDMI (although there would be license problems here?) and composite outputs. I'm very interested in such card!

dkarguth wrote:

- An 8 bit USB controller that supports hot-pluggable USB mass storage devices such as flash drives, and possibly includes a virtual COM port so that a USB mouse would appear as a generic microsoft serial mouse to DOS.

Yup, very interested.

dkarguth wrote:

- A modern network card with integrated wifi

semi-interested. Although I would be interested in a card that would emulate a modem over Wifi (something like WiFi232).

dkarguth wrote:

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

Not interested.

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.

Not interested.

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.

Not interested.

Also I would be interested in covox-on-ISA card.

HanJammer wrote:

Also I would be interested in covox-on-ISA card.

Some Sound Galaxy cards emulate Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source.

Grzyb wrote:

HanJammer wrote:

Also I would be interested in covox-on-ISA card.

Some Sound Galaxy cards emulate Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source.

Yes, I know, I have some of them. Still I would like to have a dedicated device in the ISA card form factor. I wouldn't mind if it would also act as AdLib compatible card.

What you should do is build "THE HOMER"

On the backplate:
VGA and Displayport - Emulating every conceivable video chipset, even one which is only needed by one crappy game.
Audio - Emulating every possible quirk of every audio chipset but running through a hipster/audiophile Russian made tube amp.
USB - which can be for regular USB or PS3/PS4/XBOX controller appearing as a gameport joystick.

Internally: USB header, Audio header, SATA/m.2 slot which appears as a native IDE controller.

Crucially, this discussion should go on for 5 years, not even reach any crippling production problems and be abandoned after taking optimistic pre-orders. Various people will attempt to resurrect the project over time but will lack all the crucial, undocumented information which is only in someone's head who now has kids.

Finally, someone will release an open-source product which meets 80% of the goals shortly after announcing it. Make a short production run and then realise that very few people actually want the product because it's all emulation anyway and leave others to manufacture. </s>

Sorry, I jest but only with cynicism on a few projects which had lofty ambitions and now don't even come up in a search due to the successful but not particularly popular projects which came after.

Focus on solving one problem really well. If you succeed, people are buying and begging you to solve another, think about adding that functionality into version 2 or making another product.

The sad thing is even if some of these ideas were produced, most of these boards made by enthusiasts are usually priced beyond my budget.

Stuff costs money. I am sympathetic to both sides -- I have passed on projects because it just wasn't worth the cost to me, and I have built stuff from scratch that costs so much more than something I could have just bought from Ebay and used day one. Manufacturing only really makes financial sense in large quantities, which is why it has been done that way traditionally.

That's the way it is. The one thing I can't stand (and this thread is not an example of this, it's just tangential) is when someone goes to great lengths to make something fantastic -- like retro console optical drive emulators or HDMI retrofits -- and someone on YT reviews it, and the comments section is filled with a bunch of peasants crying out about "This is a rip-off! $100?! This should be like $15, MAX!!" when they don't even have the faintest clue that the FPGA on that board alone probably costs nearly that much. This is what the Wal-Mart paradigm does to consumers.

Woops, I'm on my soap-box again.

HanJammer wrote:

Grzyb wrote:

HanJammer wrote:

Also I would be interested in covox-on-ISA card.

Some Sound Galaxy cards emulate Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source.

Yes, I know, I have some of them. Still I would like to have a dedicated device in the ISA card form factor. I wouldn't mind if it would also act as AdLib compatible card.

This is on my to-do list, after I finish up an ankle-biter project I'm working on now. Will I ever get to it? Who knows. Will anyone care when / if I do? Probably not. More than likely I'll post a thread and get half a dozen replies about others who did it first and probably better. But it sounds like a fun project and my PS/2 needs a sound card, so eh why not? 😀

SirNickity wrote:

This is on my to-do list, after I finish up an ankle-biter project I'm working on now. Will I ever get to it? Who knows. Will anyone care when / if I do? Probably not. More than likely I'll post a thread and get half a dozen replies about others who did it first and probably better. But it sounds like a fun project and my PS/2 needs a sound card, so eh why not? 😀

Wait a min... a PS/2 ? You mean a Microchannel one?
For many, an MCA sound card seems to be the Holy Grail - http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?618 … MCA-sound-cards
Not an easy task, safe bet nobody has made a homebrew MCA card yet, but obviously there's a demand...

Haha, no, sorry. I have a model 30, so just plain old ISA. Is there even enough technical info on MCA available to DIY? I know IBM kept that under lock and key back in the day, but I haven't looked, so for all I know it could have been busted wide open. But I wouldn't be surprised if nobody had bothered to RE it yet.

(Edit: Or I guess I could just read the linked thread. 😊 Yeah, it's still a black box.)

Deksor wrote:

Something cool that hasn't been talked about here (though it could be made in another form that ISA card) would be a CD-ROM emulator with audio output. See, for windows we have Daemon tools and for dos, shsucdx to simulate a CD-rom drive. But in one case CD audio isn't working properly in most cases and in the other it's just out of question. Plus you can't boot from these CDs using software, and burnable CDs sources are slowly fading, and unlike floppy disks, finding CDs that you can burn in the future might become really really hard.

So it'd be the gotek of cd drives kind of.

Cheapest solution to CD-rom emulation could be ethernet card connected to RaspberryPi and some code...

ZipoBibrok wrote:

Deksor wrote:

Something cool that hasn't been talked about here (though it could be made in another form that ISA card) would be a CD-ROM emulator with audio output. See, for windows we have Daemon tools and for dos, shsucdx to simulate a CD-rom drive. But in one case CD audio isn't working properly in most cases and in the other it's just out of question. Plus you can't boot from these CDs using software, and burnable CDs sources are slowly fading, and unlike floppy disks, finding CDs that you can burn in the future might become really really hard.

So it'd be the gotek of cd drives kind of.

Cheapest solution to CD-rom emulation could be ethernet card connected to RaspberryPi and some code...

Something a bit like this?