Wouldn’t it be easier to just go with workaround 1) a right-angled single ISA riser and then use whatever height of card you have clearance for horizontally?

The issue with that is I've got limited horizontal space available too. I plan to use right angle risers for (low profile) video and sound cards which leaves me just a tiny amount of space for the last card I need for the project, IDE.

But overall the 3 cards are interchangeable and if I could find a sound card or VGA card similarly as short as the top card shown above, even if it only has internal connectors, that would be great and I could put it in the space I currently anticipate the IDE card going, and instead use a taller IDE in the right angle adapter. I just figured it is probably an easier ask to find IDE that short vs VGA or sound.

xorlof wrote on 2023-12-11, 18:03:

I have a project that's got very little vertical clearance over a motherboard. I'm looking for the lowest height ISA IDE card I […]
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I have a project that's got very little vertical clearance over a motherboard. I'm looking for the lowest height ISA IDE card I can find. Something like this would be perfect:

...except I need to be able to boot from it and it doesn't offer options to set it up as a primary IDE device.

The closest I've found looks like this, but it is a bit too tall:

I know of three possible workarounds
1) using a taller IDE card with a horizontal ISA adapter,
2) somehow getting something like an XTIDE bios loaded to boot from the card at the top even though it is a secondary adapter
3) using the bottom card, but hacking off that top part of the PCB and second audio port plus soldering a new IDE connector that doesn't point upward
...but ideally I'd like to just find something without workarounds.

Care to share some details?
What is the motherboard?
How does the case look like?

The motherboard is an unknown model of 286, but it is very small for a 286. It has six 16-bit ISA slots and one 8-bit slot. The case, well you might recognize it:

NOTE that the riser card is just a random aftermarket one--it didn't come with the motherboard, but it works fine. Also, the motherboard will actually sit ever so slightly further down than this image suggests, but it is pretty close to what is depicted. (I just dropped it in to take this picture for you--it is skewed and nothing is ready to be properly mounted). Here's a more dead-on closeup:

On the riser card, I plan to dremel off the top 3 slots (just above the slot holding the video card) and clean up the result, so the riser will only hold two cards.

I was hoping to use one of those two unpopulated slots that are not covered by the horizontally mounted cards to host the IDE card. There isn't enough room to put yet another riser over there and mount the IDE horizontally.

xorlof wrote on 2023-12-11, 22:22:

The motherboard is an unknown model of 286, but it is very small for a 286. It has six 16-bit ISA slots and one 8-bit slot. The […]
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The motherboard is an unknown model of 286, but it is very small for a 286. It has six 16-bit ISA slots and one 8-bit slot. The case, well you might recognize it:

NOTE that the riser card is just a random aftermarket one--it didn't come with the motherboard, but it works fine. Also, the motherboard will actually sit ever so slightly further down than this image suggests, but it is pretty close to what is depicted. (I just dropped it in to take this picture for you--it is skewed and nothing is ready to be properly mounted). Here's a more dead-on closeup:

On the riser card, I plan to dremel off the top 3 slots (just above the slot holding the video card) and clean up the result, so the riser will only hold two cards.

I was hoping to use one of those two unpopulated slots that are not covered by the horizontally mounted cards to host the IDE card. There isn't enough room to put yet another riser over there and mount the IDE horizontally.

Interesting.
How do you get power into the case?
So you will have just two cards, IDE and graphics, no sound card? Just in case that you find such cards.
You want to use an compact flash adapter? I guess for a 3.5" harddisk, there is no space 😁
Maybe I overlook something, but that seems not feasible to me.
Maybe a tiny 486 board with PCI and ISA + onboard IDE would be the better option.

This is an outgrowth of a project where I am writing a Gameboy emulator that uses a bunch of tricks and should be able to run full speed on a fast 286. (I've previously mentioned the project here.) Putting the test computer for this emulator in a Nintendo case is thematic and because of the goals a 286 is a hard requirement.

Getting power into the case is the easy part--I have tested and can run the entire system on 5V (first thought about that here), so I'm using custom cabling that will connect to the original power connector used by the Nintendo. Now getting video OUT of the case is the harder part, but I have a solution for that. (It's hard because I want the system to look basically like a stock Nintendo and don't want to modify the case in any way).

There will be 3 cards--VGA, shown on the left in the picture above (above the reset button), sound (those ports are towards the right, kinda above controller port #1), and I had hoped to put an IDE in one of the open slots towards the far right, kinda above controller port #2. I can already make it work. I have an IDE card just like the one shown in the second picture of the OP. If I remove the part of the PCB that is higher than the rest and solder a new connector for the IDE so it comes off the card sideways not upward, then everything will fit. But I'd rather not chop up that card if something exists that I don't have to modify.

Yes, I am going to use a compactflash card. There actually is a lot of space in the case below the motherboard for various other "special" bits of the build that I'm working on. I'm soon going to start a youtube video series documenting my experiments in doing this build as part of #doscember.

I'm using one of these IDE host adapters.
They're Secondary Master/Slave, of course, so they won't collide with AT Bus adapters on ISA multi i/o cards.

Booting from them needs either modification to Primary Master or using something like XTIDE Universal BIOS.
It can boot from all IDE ports, as far as I know.

Edit: Here's an old photo of my Tower AT w/ the IDE host adapter and a DOM.
XTIDE is in the EPROM that's installed on the NIC next to it.

Now I’m wondering if anyone on here would be kind enough to design a custom ISA riser that contains the required components for an XTIDE EEPROM.

Or even with closer spacing to allow three cards to occupy the available height.

Maybe a tip - I have a similarly tiny system in a somewhat more generic case, but just as cramped. I really only have two usable ISA slots, but want VGA, sound and IDE.

My solution? A combined VGA-I/O card. Nothing fancy, UMC VGA and I/O, but works well enough. Such cards are uncommon, but they definitely exist. Don't have pics as the system in question is on my desk at work (and I work from home half the week).

Finding one of those may be easier than trying to find an extremely low-profile card that is bootable. Additionally you get serial, parallel and game ports too.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-12-12, 12:37:

Booting from them needs either modification to Primary Master or using something like XTIDE Universal BIOS. It can boot from all IDE ports, as far as I know.

Edit: Here's an old photo of my Tower AT w/ the IDE host adapter and a DOM.
XTIDE is in the EPROM that's installed on the NIC next to it.

Photo missing?

Yeah, sticking a very tiny xtide card was my "option #2" in the OP. At this point, I think I'm going to end up going with option #3 unless something turns up in this thread.

I have also started looking to see if there were some tiny bootable scsi adapters since I'm not opposed to that route for this project. There's some impressively small cards, but not one that quite meets the requirements yet.

dionb wrote on 2023-12-12, 18:05:

Maybe a tip - I have a similarly tiny system in a somewhat more generic case, but just as cramped. I really only have two usable ISA slots, but want VGA, sound and IDE.

My solution? A combined VGA-I/O card. Nothing fancy, UMC VGA and I/O, but works well enough. Such cards are uncommon, but they definitely exist. Don't have pics as the system in question is on my desk at work (and I work from home half the week).

Finding one of those may be easier than trying to find an extremely low-profile card that is bootable. Additionally you get serial, parallel and game ports too.

I haven't found one of these yet, but thanks for the tip. I'm looking...

paradigital wrote on 2023-12-12, 16:52:

Now I’m wondering if anyone on here would be kind enough to design a custom ISA riser that contains the required components for an XTIDE EEPROM.

Or even with closer spacing to allow three cards to occupy the available height.

Yeah, I thought of maybe trying to create my first-ever PCB for this. That's definitely outside of my expertise, but this seems like a simple "starter project", just traces to the slot connectors (plus maybe decoupling capacitor)...

Have you seen this thread? Mini ISA ROM Card

xorlof wrote on 2023-12-11, 18:53:

But overall the 3 cards are interchangeable and if I could find a sound card or VGA card similarly as short as the top card shown above, even if it only has internal connectors, that would be great and I could put it in the space I currently anticipate the IDE card going, and instead use a taller IDE in the right angle adapter. I just figured it is probably an easier ask to find IDE that short vs VGA or sound.

The shortest ISA VGA card that you will find are those with the Realtek RTG3105 (or RTG3105ieh, or RTG3105e) chipset:

The biggest problem with them is that despite having 16-bit ISA connectors, almost all of the time they only have traces to the 8-bit pinouts so their performance is bad, but on the flip side it might be a good card for seeing how far you can go with optimisations.

xorlof wrote on 2023-12-12, 22:29:

Photo missing? […]
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Jo22 wrote on 2023-12-12, 12:37:

Booting from them needs either modification to Primary Master or using something like XTIDE Universal BIOS. It can boot from all […]
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Booting from them needs either modification to Primary Master or using something like XTIDE Universal BIOS.
It can boot from all IDE ports, as far as I know.

Edit: Here's an old photo of my Tower AT w/ the IDE host adapter and a DOM.
XTIDE is in the EPROM that's installed on the NIC next to it.

Photo missing?

Yeah, sticking a very tiny xtide card was my "option #2" in the OP. At this point, I think I'm going to end up going with option #3 unless something turns up in this thread.

I have also started looking to see if there were some tiny bootable scsi adapters since I'm not opposed to that route for this project.
There's some impressively small cards, but not one that quite meets the requirements yet.

Ah, sorry, my bad. I've thought I've edited the post properly and added the link. 😅
Here it is, with the photo: Re: Schneider Tower AT and XT-CF-Lite 4.1

Meanwhile, I've changed the DOM for a CF adapter, also.
But the basic idea is still the same (using the slimline IDE card).

jmarsh wrote on 2023-12-13, 03:07:

Have you seen this thread? Mini ISA ROM Card

No, I hadn't but that looks to be about a perfect option for getting XTIDE if I needed to. It even looks like things could be pushed together a bit more vertically to take even less height.

DEAT wrote on 2023-12-13, 06:13:

The shortest ISA VGA card that you will find are those with the Realtek RTG3105 (or RTG3105ieh, or RTG3105e) chipset:

s-l1600.jpg

The biggest problem with them is that despite having 16-bit ISA connectors, almost all of the time they only have traces to the 8-bit pinouts so their performance is bad, but on the flip side it might be a good card for seeing how far you can go with optimisations.

I actually do have someone sending me one of those. Yeah, it's basically an 8-bit card, but I'm going to play around with it. Maybe for 8-bit cards, we just say 30fps is good enough instead of 60fps. I do know that it is possible to get a vertical blanking interrupt from these cards, so that helps a lot.

Now, if somebody knows of a super short AUDIO card, then there is the possibility that with the super short IDE, super short (8-bit) VIDEO, and super short AUDIO, I could plug all of those in without ANY horizontal adapters which would be so much cleaner. Even if the super short sound card is something simpler like a tandy 3-voice, that combined with mixing in some effects from the pc speaker, I might be able to do a passable recreation of gameboy sound. (But to be honest, emulating gameboy sound is the part I understand the least.) If nobody knows of a similarly short audio card here, I might make a post in the audio hardware forum.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-12-13, 07:25:

Ah, sorry, my bad. I've thought I've edited the post properly and added the link. :sweatdrop: Here it is, with the photo: Re: Sc […]
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Ah, sorry, my bad. I've thought I've edited the post properly and added the link. 😅
Here it is, with the photo: Re: Schneider Tower AT and XT-CF-Lite 4.1

Meanwhile, I've changed the DOM for a CF adapter, also.
But the basic idea is still the same (using the slimline IDE card).

Thanks. Yeah, I've got a bunch of 512MB CF cards I got a while back for $1 each. They're great because they're fast, pretty big, yet fit below the 520MB limit on old computers .

The low height ISA sound cards that I remember were ALS100-based cards, like the one in this picture: Re: Any low profile ISA/EISA sound card out there.

Thanks. Those are pretty low, but not low enough for this case unfortunately. PCI had some impressively low cards I've found but nothing quite like those in ISA that I've come across, although I just found the Tandy Nano. I might have to do some measuring to see if it could fit.

For ISA, this one looked like it was maybe shorter than even the ALS100s, but it could just be a trick of the angle of the low res photo, plus I have no idea what card it was. The page is gone so the link is to a wayback archive.

...and here's an example of a very low profile PCI.

xorlof wrote on 2023-12-13, 16:54:

Thanks. Those are pretty low, but not low enough for this case unfortunately. PCI had some impressively low cards I've found but […]
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Thanks. Those are pretty low, but not low enough for this case unfortunately. PCI had some impressively low cards I've found but nothing quite like those in ISA that I've come across, although I just found the Tandy Nano. I might have to do some measuring to see if it could fit.

For ISA, this one looked like it was maybe shorter than even the ALS100s, but it could just be a trick of the angle of the low res photo, plus I have no idea what card it was. The page is gone so the link is to a wayback archive.

...and here's an example of a very low profile PCI.

The tandy nano seems to be a little less than 30mm high, not including the isa connector.
the other isa card on the archive seems to be about the size of a D15 game port connector which is... a little less than 40mm, not including the audio jacks.
the pci card seems to be around the 30mm as well. not including all the audio jacks.

What height limits do you actually have ?

weedeewee wrote on 2023-12-13, 17:03:

The tandy nano seems to be a little less than 30mm high, not including the isa connector. the other isa card on the archive seem […]
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The tandy nano seems to be a little less than 30mm high, not including the isa connector.
the other isa card on the archive seems to be about the size of a D15 game port connector which is... a little less than 40mm, not including the audio jacks.
the pci card seems to be around the 30mm as well. not including all the audio jacks.

What height limits do you actually have ?

I don't have the measurement handy, but it is somewhere around a little over 30mm high (~33mm?) available for cards, including slot connector...so this could be a fools errand looking for such a short thing. 😀

EDIT: BTW, it looks like the tandy nano thread says it is 38mm high including connector. Maybe it could be reworked using a 16bit length to be shorter?

I have a similar/identical ISA riser and from the mainboard up to the top of the second isa slot (cutting off the top three isa slots) I measure about 45mm.
I think all of the soundcards would fit ( aside from the pci one since you only have isa slots ).