Need to identify this controller, I know the headers for com ports are missing and I want to be sure nothing else is missing before testing it ) as it has dual floppy headers.
naa, nothing yet...
Do check the pins on the ATronics chip! Some look like touching...
Requests are also possible... /msg kixs
kixs wrote on 2020-12-04, 19:41:Do check the pins on the ATronics chip! Some look like touching...
Thanks, was miner bent in two legs, easy fix 😀
naa, nothing yet...
tabm0de wrote on 2020-12-04, 19:36:Need to identify this controller, I know the headers for com ports are missing and I want to be sure nothing else is missing before testing it ) as it has dual floppy headers.
It looks like the missing ICs (IC2/IC3 and the one near the ISA connector) are all about the optional BIOS ROM extension. Your board seems to be the cheaper version that needs a driver for initializing extended IDE speeds and providing more modern access methods like IDE block mode. From experience, it seems obvious that the big missing IC is a (EP)ROM chip (27C64 or something like that), the chip beneath it is a 74xx245 data driver, and the third missing chip is a PAL 16L8 decoding the high address bits (you see connections from Pin 1 to Pin 7 to the corresponding ISA address lines) to select the ROM.
I am confident that the board will work fine without these chips.
One thing to watch out: The board has an NE556 timer chip, not the NE558 timer chip. The 556 is two-channel only, which is enough for one joystick with two axes, but the card will not support a second joystick or a joystick with throttle control on a third axis. You find "proper" gameports on most sound cards, and many "high tier" multi-I/O cards, but 2-axes gameports are very common on cheap and mid-level multi-I/O-boards. Th NE558 is no drop-in replacement, you would need a different PCB with different track layout to support all four analog axes.
