Sphere478 wrote on 2026-10-08, 18:30:

I have one, it’s packed away. One of the generic ones for giving dos a thumb drive I may have posted specifics earlier in the th […]
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I have one, it’s packed away. One of the generic ones for giving dos a thumb drive I may have posted specifics earlier in the thread but I sont recall.. Currently I’m using it as a 5v power source on a different 95c rig though 🤣.

I could probably buy whatever card is working the best, what one would that be?

I’d like to use usb sticks in windows 95. That’s probably the biggest need.

Past that, a usb hub and mouse functionality.

Keyboard could easily just stay on the Din/ps/2

There are 3 general categories of USB to ISA devices that I can think of off the top of my head--

1) 8 bit Industrial DOS boards

• CH375 cards like this https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/wch-isa_rom3-1009 that have DOS drivers for USB mass storage but don't support hotswap. Use the FreddyV driver for transfers of about 1MB/s
• CH376 cards have started to show up and people are working on making enhanced drivers available for them

2) Pico boards

• PicoMEM - mouse joystick and USB mass storage support via microusb with some asterisks, caveats and exceptions
• PicoMEM2 - mouse joystick and USB mass storage support via microusb and usb-A with some asterisks, caveats and exceptions
• PicoGUS - mouse support or Panasonic CD-ROM emulation using bin/que files

3) IDE emulators that present USB drives as an ATA drive, although they are a little hard to find these days and have been out of production for a long time. Still not hot swap. I'll post a picture of one if you want to see what they looked like. Listing it here because IDE is pretty much a subset of ISA in some ways.

Did I miss anything?

jdredd wrote on 2026-10-08, 18:46:

Probably pointless and useless to you.. as I did this for ME an my old DOS systems I am messing with ( IBM PS2 with an NEC V30 C […]
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Probably pointless and useless to you.. as I did this for ME an my old DOS systems I am messing with ( IBM PS2 with an NEC V30 CPU )...

Can use the CH375 for other things if put the effort in. USB>Serial, USB>Webcam, USB>Ethernet, blah....

https://github.com/jdredd87/CH375USBTools

So if limited on space/resources/ect, could use the CH375 to work with other things besides storage.

But may give others ideas....

That looks like a lot of cool stuff! I'm going to look into it more.

For reference, this is my ISA CH37x card that I have designed and have been using, in case it is useful for anybody else:
https://github.com/dfmcwhir/ISA_CH37X_XTIDE_DoC_combo_card

dylanfm wrote on 2026-10-08, 22:36:

That looks like a lot of cool stuff! I'm going to look into it more. […]
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jdredd wrote on 2026-10-08, 18:46:

Probably pointless and useless to you.. as I did this for ME an my old DOS systems I am messing with ( IBM PS2 with an NEC V30 C […]
Show full quote

Probably pointless and useless to you.. as I did this for ME an my old DOS systems I am messing with ( IBM PS2 with an NEC V30 CPU )...

Can use the CH375 for other things if put the effort in. USB>Serial, USB>Webcam, USB>Ethernet, blah....

https://github.com/jdredd87/CH375USBTools

So if limited on space/resources/ect, could use the CH375 to work with other things besides storage.

But may give others ideas....

That looks like a lot of cool stuff! I'm going to look into it more.

For reference, this is my ISA CH37x card that I have designed and have been using, in case it is useful for anybody else:
https://github.com/dfmcwhir/ISA_CH37X_XTIDE_DoC_combo_card

Yah it is pretty neat I think. I picked up a P3 450mhz box yesterday. So I can run 3.11 / 95 / 98 / XP on.... And an attempt here soon to get Windows examples of everything maybe working.
My fav really was the ethernet adapter.. i bought a few to try out to get a few chipsets working... Then what was neat, was the USB>DisplayLink , having a working ( but slow ) 2nd display of sorts.

Mostly just demos and proof of concepts for some things, like the webcam, but its nice to know can use the CH375 for other things than just keyboard/mouse/storage.

I do want to pick up a CH376 to try out...

I do have a new driver too for DOS storage too @ https://github.com/jdredd87/CH375
Idea on this was over FreddyV's was all in one driver and any improved abilities I could get squeaked out.
As far as I know 8086 and 486 have been tested. Nothing in the middle yet?
Slower the machine ( 8086 NEC v30 in my case ) the better the results. As it has V20/V30 optimizations.

Now that I have a 486 and P3 system to work with i'd like to see what more can be done.

And with the sources I posted maybe give others a starting point to work with and create their own wacky things.

Here it is from earlier in thread

dylanfm wrote on 2026-10-01, 05:32:

Attached are the datasheets for the CH376 and CH375 chips. There are definitely some differences in the commands (the commands for RD_USB_DATA and WR_USB_DATA are different, the SET_DISK_LUN input data is different, etc). Which differences matter I don't know.

But the data0 and data commands are the same except for something about locking which I think is irrelevant for disk mode, and the SET_DISK_LUN command is not actually called by anyone (seems to be missing from the datasheet, but I think it's still there anyway).

In fact, since I still have the suspicion that the CH376 is a strict superset of the CH375...
I was able to get your AI's ch376usb.sys to work on my ch375 just by commenting the parts that are definitely new to the ch376:
- The "busy" bit in the status word (not sure why it should be used in ISA/parallel mode? this seems to be for SPI access which ch375 doesn't have. and we also wait for the interrupt anyway).
- The "disk_connect" and "disk_mount" which are the new commands for file based access, which do not exist in the ch375. But this driver does not actually use file-based access, so it could also use the old command "disk_init" (in fact the AI has generated calls to disk_init too, no idea why, but it just fallbacks to it ).

This kind of confirms my suspicion ... ch375 commands work in ch376, ch376 is a superset of ch375.
The new features in ch376 are related to file-based access (file read, file write, etc.) instead of sector-based, but these are not used at all by a DOS block driver, only a network redirector or something else could benefit from those (and thus be able to e.g. read FAT32 partitions on non-FAT32 DOS).

Attached minimal patch for ch376dos.asm which made it work on my ch375. I am rather curious if the driver still works on your CH376 after you apply this patch.

I see that Aliexpress is selling variants of this card with 2 USB ports and an included EEPROM chip (presumably containing some BIOS). Does anyone have experience with these?

feipoa wrote on Yesterday, 21:51:

I see that Aliexpress is selling variants of this card with 2 USB ports and an included EEPROM chip (presumably containing some BIOS). Does anyone have experience with these?

Oh cool!

Wonder how long till we have a fully functional 4 port isa card

Muhahahah

“Laughs maniacally”

Whatcha think is on the eeprom? Xt-ide?

Edit:

Okay, so here’s what I found,

The rom is for stuff like “ HakFoo's standalone USB BIOS code”

And the extra port is not a data port, it’s a power input port for giving the primary port (and maybe the system also? Not that it amounts to much) more stable 5v power (it’s a power input port into the card)

javispedro1 wrote on 2026-10-11, 17:42:

But the data0 and data commands are the same except for something about locking which I think is irrelevant for disk mode, and t […]
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But the data0 and data commands are the same except for something about locking which I think is irrelevant for disk mode, and the SET_DISK_LUN command is not actually called by anyone (seems to be missing from the datasheet, but I think it's still there anyway).

In fact, since I still have the suspicion that the CH376 is a strict superset of the CH375...
I was able to get your AI's ch376usb.sys to work on my ch375 just by commenting the parts that are definitely new to the ch376:
- The "busy" bit in the status word (not sure why it should be used in ISA/parallel mode? this seems to be for SPI access which ch375 doesn't have. and we also wait for the interrupt anyway).
- The "disk_connect" and "disk_mount" which are the new commands for file based access, which do not exist in the ch375. But this driver does not actually use file-based access, so it could also use the old command "disk_init" (in fact the AI has generated calls to disk_init too, no idea why, but it just fallbacks to it ).

This kind of confirms my suspicion ... ch375 commands work in ch376, ch376 is a superset of ch375.
The new features in ch376 are related to file-based access (file read, file write, etc.) instead of sector-based, but these are not used at all by a DOS block driver, only a network redirector or something else could benefit from those (and thus be able to e.g. read FAT32 partitions on non-FAT32 DOS).

Attached minimal patch for ch376dos.asm which made it work on my ch375. I am rather curious if the driver still works on your CH376 after you apply this patch.

I tested your patched driver and the computer just hung while booting. No text about loading the driver was put on the screen prior to hanging. I tested it with and without the CH376 card installed. I also re-tested the previous driver you had patched to make sure I didn't mess up testing of that one and it behaved the same as last time, no errors while loading, but would give me errors when I tried to access the drive "Not ready reading drive D, abort, retry, fail?". Before and after testing, I used my CH376DOS driver and confirmed that it was working

However, I also tested both of these patched drivers with my CH375 card installed and they behaved (failed) the same way as they did when I had the ch376 card installed. But then I also tried my CH375 card with the stock ch375 driver and it didn't work either although in a different way. With the stock CH375 driver and CH375 card, it just hangs up while trying to read the usb drive, either during boot after loading the driver or if I try to switch to that drive after boot, without any errors. This is the same CH375 card I have used in the past, so either something has gone wrong with the card's HW or it doesn't like the thumbdrives I am trying to use. I know I have used this same thumb drive with both the CH375 and CH376 cards in the past, but I have reformatted them in different ways multiple times trying different settings so maybe the current way the thumbdrive is formatted is incompatible the ch375 card? I don't know. I will have to troubleshoot that.