brostenen wrote:

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?

That goes further, connecting to IDE with FPGA and all. What I meant was using ethernet as connecting medium and device driver that connects via ethernet to something running on RaspberryPi which handles cd-rom emulation and audio file playback. Modified EtherDFS maybe, or something.

But how do you boot from such "CD" ?

I think this is possible with something much simpler than a raspberry pi though. Almost anything would be much faster than any CD drive from the time.

Deksor wrote:

But how do you boot from such "CD" ?

I think this is possible with something much simpler than a raspberry pi though. Almost anything would be much faster than any CD drive from the time.

You probably won't, unless you create a suitable boot rom for the network card and add the drivers for the contraption to the image. I don't really see much use for CD booting, 486/early Pentium systems do not usually support it anyway. Main point for me would be the audio emulation for games that use CD-DA soundtracks.

Yes, something like STM32F4 would probably be enough for emulator that plugs to IDE, but it would require custom PCB with additional hardware (3.3V-5V level converters etc.) which built in small scale would end up costing a lot more than a RaspberryPi/OrangePi. I'd imagine majority already have an Ethernet card.

If one buys one of these and adds a custom PCB it should be allright and would still cost less than a pi with ethernet.

Also, I differ with you about pentiums not being able to boot CDs. Some don't indeed, but the most common ones seem to do (at least those I can find).
The advantage of this would also be that it won't be just compatible with PCs, but anything with IDE ports and CD-Rom support (such as late PowerMacs, amigas ...) without needing specific software relying on hardware you might not have

ZipoBibrok wrote:

That goes further, connecting to IDE with FPGA and all. What I meant was using ethernet as connecting medium and device driver that connects via ethernet to something running on RaspberryPi which handles cd-rom emulation and audio file playback. Modified EtherDFS maybe, or something.

I don't believe that project supports ATAPI yet, although it looks very interesting.

Someone already mentioned it, but doing as much as possible in software on a Raspberry Pi seems like a wise investment in time. There's a project to make a drive emulator out of a Pi I'm keeping an eye on hoping it matures to the point where I can get help coding for a proprietary 36-pin RLL drive. Someone else basically did the pinout work and recreated the instruction set. Anyway, a Pi probably would fit on an ISA card, so you could integrate it and do drives/video/audio and some other hardware emulation in software.

https://www.recantha.co.uk/blog/?p=18807

Otherwise,

1) Don't do many things, do one thing. I mean maybe one card-slot device that has multiple functions, but still.
2) Don't do a wish-list, look for what most people complain is missing. Like a general-purpose sound card for ISA 8-bit as mentioned above.
3) If I *was* adding to a wish list it would be a VGA/EGA/CGA/MDA/Herc adapter that converted the EGA/CGA/MDA and Herc to a VGA signal internally. I still haven't got one of those adapter boxes and I don't have an RGB/EGA/15khz monitor. I'd like to run an EGA/286 or so on a more modern monitor.

On the other hand I'll probably need the converter for my 80s laptops. Ehhh. The real reason I haven't got one is all the ones I've seen have DB-15 inputs for CGA/EGA, which is daft.

Merovign wrote:

Someone already mentioned it, but doing as much as possible in software on a Raspberry Pi seems like a wise investment in time. There's a project to make a drive emulator out of a Pi I'm keeping an eye on hoping it matures to the point where I can get help coding for a proprietary 36-pin RLL drive. Someone else basically did the pinout work and recreated the instruction set. Anyway, a Pi probably would fit on an ISA card, so you could integrate it and do drives/video/audio and some other hardware emulation in software.

Another interesting possibility would be Terasic DE10-Nano or similar SoC-FPGA board on ISA card.

There are virtual CD-Rom mounting tools for Linux. There are FPGA chips. And it is possible to build an IDE adaptor for the RPI.
I think the absolute best way to do a virtual CD-Drive, is to do some Linux distro, that boots into a custom virtual CD program.
Then you can do some ISO file selection, through some network bridging or other clever way. All from Dos command line.

I think this aproach is the absolute best. And to be honest. A RPI-ZeroW does not cost much.

TBH, it seems like a huge kludge to me. There are ARM Cortex chips with SD interfaces. Place one of those on the bus with a tiny bit of glue logic for address decoding and bus cycle management, and there's not much to go wrong. Using a whole computer, with all of its complexities, on an ISA card for the same task is a fine way to prototype -- or even a hack DIY solution -- but it's kinda facepalm-worthy as something to productize.

brostenen wrote:

There are virtual CD-Rom mounting tools for Linux. There are FPGA chips. And it is possible to build an IDE adaptor for the RPI. […]
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There are virtual CD-Rom mounting tools for Linux. There are FPGA chips. And it is possible to build an IDE adaptor for the RPI.
I think the absolute best way to do a virtual CD-Drive, is to do some Linux distro, that boots into a custom virtual CD program.
Then you can do some ISO file selection, through some network bridging or other clever way. All from Dos command line.

I think this aproach is the absolute best. And to be honest. A RPI-ZeroW does not cost much.

The trouble is, without going for an embedded/dedicated solution, it might not be ready quickly enough to be booted from. Maybe a pi with a very cut down OS would be fast enough, maybe not in all circumstances

BushLin wrote:

Maybe a pi with a very cut down OS would be fast enough, maybe not in all circumstances

That is the exact aproach, that the maker of Combian64 have done. And what I suggested.