VOGONS


First post, by ruthan

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Hi,
i wonder there i quite a lot mainboard without PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, i have some even from 2012 from so HP office machines. These board often not even work with USB to PS/2 cables etc.. and there situation when USB is simply not working and you cant control machine remotely through network.. I can survive for some short task without mouse, but not without keyboard.

Recently i need to recover AMIBIOS for 2012 HP board with wrong bios flashed.. this procedure seems require press of CRTL+HOME/ PageUp/Down (WIN+B etc..) to start blind bios recovery from USB flashdisk or CD, but im unable to start it, probably because not working keyboard.. USB keyboard on machine was working at boot time when board booted normally, but when bios is broken, i suspect that keyboard is not working - I will probably make some thread about bios recovery later.

In description of these card is often driver free.. but also something like WIndow XP+, i wonder how it is wired, if genuine old PS/2 or its somehow glued and wired through PCI/PCI-E+USB controller and some virtual device emulation depending on working chipset drivers etc, or its just fake from the start. There is almost every time not close picture to main chip, to be able to read its label.

Does someone here own or used these cards are they realizable for Bios / UEFI, DOS / Win9x ?

I saw a lot of strange cheap HW from China, some seems simply that some Chinese company is placing random connectors on some card and such HW never can work.. They just made a batch, add it to eBay with fake reviews, under multiple accounts.. sele some batch of cards... account get disabled / deleted.. and few months later different account with new batch surface.
When you write seller, he will always tell you read description and that he cant test items.. Its even worse on ALien Express, here a never got response for any item question above.. and half of the items have simply false descriptions as standard market practice.

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Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 1 of 8, by weedeewee

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Seeing those heatsinks on there, just to drive a PS2 keyboard&mouse, is facepalm worthy.

The one with the USB ports makes me think it is just a usb controller with a PS2-USB adapter on the pcb.

Oh wait, the power connection and the other IDC header on the ones with the heatsink is likely also just a USB-PCIe card with a PS2-USB adapter on board. ugh.

Which leaves the first one PS2-PCI ... too bad we can't see the chip. It definitely has a PS2-USB-PCI vibe to it.

All in all, I, myself, wouldn't bother too much with it.

Right to repair is fundamental. You own it, you're allowed to fix it.
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Reply 2 of 8, by Horun

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SIIG made one long ago that worked for some PCI boards but are discontinued. Have not tried any of the new chinese ones....

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 3 of 8, by ruthan

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Hmm, i asked some sellers about BIOS/UEFI/Freedos support.. and i got 1 response unsupported, he claims that i asked technicians and i asked for double check..

Well in description is drivers less and support in Windows 98.. which would imply that this claim is not right.

I have tried to zoom photos, on 1 it seems to be some Asmedia (its details are unreadable) chip and it could imply usage of asmedia USB3 controller, but it would never work with Win98,
im not sure if asmedia are make some USB2 or other similar chips.

I don't want to be the first guinea pig and haggle about returns, maybe someone already got burned, or can buy it within company as part of research.. I had to scale down in last year, i got burned out for change 🙁

ChatGPT claims that there were chips with Intel i8042 or its clones.. but it often lies, there are supposed card names:
SIIG JJ-PS2012-S6 - PCI
Advantech PCI-1602B - PCI
ICP Deutschland XXX more models PCI + PCI-e
Supermicro AOC-LPIPMI-LANG-PS2 - PCI-e
ASUS PIKE RAID Cards with Legacy IO

Keywords supposed to be "PCI-E PS/2 card native" or "PCI-E legacy IO card".

Its also unclear with PCI cards would work with PCI-E PCI bridges and if yes with which chip, because there are more solution and my testing with PCI-E to PCI are adpaters is mix bag, it could work, or even it is mostly working, but not for every card on every board..

Last edited by ruthan on 2025-01-14, 21:00. Edited 4 times in total.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 4 of 8, by ruthan

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I was digging a bit more. I found this - Advantech PCI-6771 , not even heatsink, but fan.. and it also seems to have own x86 CPU Pentium III / Celeron and memory, even Trident video card working within Win98 and compact flash support, i know that is overkill.. but tried someone with access to server grade of HW such cards within normal PCI, does it work, or it needs some special server bios?

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Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 5 of 8, by megatron-uk

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ruthan wrote on 2025-01-14, 13:47:

I was digging a bit more. I found this - Advantech PCI-6771 , not even heatsink, but fan.. and it also seems to have own x86 CPU Pentium III / Celeron and memory, even Trident video card working within Win98 and compact flash support, i know that is overkill.. but tried someone with access to server grade of HW such cards within normal PCI, does it work, or it needs some special server bios?

That's a single-board-computer. It's an entire PC on a PCI card, hence why it has a vga controller, chipset, cpu etc. It either uses the PCI bus *only* for power, or to talk to other PCI cards (scsi controlls, video cards, network etc). Normally you would use it on a 'dumb' PCI board

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It really doesn't have anything to do with providing serial/parallel/ps2 ports in a PCI motherboard (other than the fact it *is* an entire motherboard itself).

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Reply 6 of 8, by ruthan

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Ok thanks for explanation, i know that there are SCSSI controllers with own cpu and memory, so this could be something similar.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 8 of 8, by ruthan

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Yeah i noticed the same today.
So far only SIIG JJ-PS2012-S6 card seems native PS/2 how ChatGPT call it, but its PCI only.

ASUS PIKE - seems like mistake so far i found only some Sas controllers, i had not idea that Asus are trying to do some servers stuff too.

I also found - 6 years old thread with same goal, i searched for it before posting, but di not find it:
PCI PS/2 Controller Cards
But its also without any positive result.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.