Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Anyone else got idea on what computer related items that should exist that could be convenient for you?

System Boards that plug in to PCI Express and contain a complete 486/Pentium class machine with BIOS/RAM etc, that can be run through a software portal on the host system.
It's basically DOSBox but better 😎 (not sure how to handle things like a soundcard tho, maybe slap some chips on there too, like OPL, etc)
🤣

At that point it might as well be a single board computer (hint, hint 🙄 )

yeah but can you plug those into a modern PC and run them in a window? idk about this stuff really

(think like Virtual Machine/ bare metal)

Yea that SATA issue with VIA is a real pain 🤣

My dream gadget is a CD/DVD drive emulator, like a GOTEK.

Connect to IDE, takes a 2.5" SATA drive, little LCD display at the front displaying the ISO / BIN-CUE image and some buttons to cycle through the images.

You know how the older via chipsets had problems with drives over sata150, yea at lot of the western digital drives have jumpers or you could use a worn down sata1 drive, but it would be really cool if there was a little chip that plugs into the drive and then the sata connector to make it sata1 compliant so any drive can be used like SSD's

If I recall correctly (I use them for long term backup), my 3 year old Nexstar 3.5-inch E-SATA/USB 2.0 enclosures actually force a SATA 1 (150) link even when used on with aSATA 2 or 3 capable host and controller.

Apparently, according to reviews, this StarTech enclosure has the same "issue" :
https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-2-5in-Black … e/dp/B002NY9K1Q

E-SATA to SATA capables being cheap and plentiful (I have used some successfully on a few occasions, but never tried one on any Via SATA controller), it would be worth trying one of these enclosures on an affected via controller .

My guess as to why this happens is that a SATA to SATA bridge is used internally when in E-SATA mode is used and that this bridge is limited SATA 1 .

Another thing to try would be to cascade a SATA to IDE (ATA) converter and an IDE (ATA) to SATA converter between the drive and controller, since such converters are, AFAIK, limited to SATA 1 anyway .

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Yea that SATA issue with VIA is a real pain 🤣

My dream gadget is a CD/DVD drive emulator, like a GOTEK.

Connect to IDE, takes a 2.5" SATA drive, little LCD display at the front displaying the ISO / BIN-CUE image and some buttons to cycle through the images.

That would be cool for a start-up disk like 98, 2000, xp or linux, but for anything else you would just use software to emulate a virtual drive.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Yea that SATA issue with VIA is a real pain 🤣

My dream gadget is a CD/DVD drive emulator, like a GOTEK.

Connect to IDE, takes a 2.5" SATA drive, little LCD display at the front displaying the ISO / BIN-CUE image and some buttons to cycle through the images.

That would be cool for a start-up disk like 98, 2000, xp or linux, but for anything else you would just use software to emulate a virtual drive.

It does have advantages like being able to use a large drive to store a bunch more images on machines that can't accommodate modern large disks, and it also works under DOS, OS/2, SCO Unix and other such systems that don't explicitly support mounting of ISO images or have 3rd party software available to do that. It could, in theory, also do various sorts of format translations to let older OSes work with DVD/BluRay data images, translate newer ISO9660 variants into older ones, etc, depending on what the firmware is coded to do. You could also have a multi-interface CD emulator: ATA, SCSI, Wide SCSI, USB, Firewire, as desired.

Also, it means you don't have to manually fart around with mounting images every time you want to play a game that insists on having the CD inserted.

I'd pay decent money for such a device, to be sure.

^^^True, I forgot about DOS.

Think the best you're going to get right now for a system that doesn't support USB boot would be Plop boot manager with the Zalman ZM-VE external enclosure.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/rom.html
https://www.plop.at/en/plopkexec/full.html
http://www.zalman.com/contents/products/view.html?no=212

Neco wrote:

System Boards that plug in to PCI Express and contain a complete 486/Pentium class machine with BIOS/RAM etc, that can be run […]
Show full quote

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Anyone else got idea on what computer related items that should exist that could be convenient for you?

System Boards that plug in to PCI Express and contain a complete 486/Pentium class machine with BIOS/RAM etc, that can be run through a software portal on the host system.
It's basically DOSBox but better 😎 (not sure how to handle things like a soundcard tho, maybe slap some chips on there too, like OPL, etc)
🤣

There did used to be old Macs that you could buy an expansion card which had basically a full 486 system on the card but it could share memory with the host system and run off HD images on the local drive. It was really cool but with emulation where it's at most companies aren't going to see any profit in doing anything similar today.

A 486 ATX board with AGP slot that's electronically a PCI slot.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

My dream gadget is a CD/DVD drive emulator, like a GOTEK.

Connect to IDE, takes a 2.5" SATA drive, little LCD display at the front displaying the ISO / BIN-CUE image and some buttons to cycle through the images.

This is actually a fantastic idea! 😁

Would also be helpful for stuff like testing msbatch-ed and NLited install media on real hardware!

Rhuwyn wrote:

Neco wrote:

System Boards that plug in to PCI Express and contain a complete 486/Pentium class machine with BIOS/RAM etc, that can be run […]
Show full quote

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Anyone else got idea on what computer related items that should exist that could be convenient for you?

System Boards that plug in to PCI Express and contain a complete 486/Pentium class machine with BIOS/RAM etc, that can be run through a software portal on the host system.
It's basically DOSBox but better 😎 (not sure how to handle things like a soundcard tho, maybe slap some chips on there too, like OPL, etc)
🤣

There did used to be old Macs that you could buy an expansion card which had basically a full 486 system on the card but it could share memory with the host system and run off HD images on the local drive. It was really cool but with emulation where it's at most companies aren't going to see any profit in doing anything similar today.

There was even one called SunPCi for Sun workstations. The latest version had an Athlon CPU and I think the same ATI graphics chip that Sun was putting on their workstations at the time (Radeon 7500, IIRC).

The advantage such a thing would have over emulation is basically being bug-for-bug compatible with the real hardware, but I doubt there'd be a lot of commercial interest in that unless non-AMD64 workstations were to suddenly come back into vogue. ARMs, I suppose, might create such a niche: emulating x86/AMD64 on an ARM is not exactly a zoomy experience, so one might be better off with a real-deal Atom or notebook Core chip on a card.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Yea that SATA issue with VIA is a real pain 🤣

My dream gadget is a CD/DVD drive emulator, like a GOTEK.

Connect to IDE, takes a 2.5" SATA drive, little LCD display at the front displaying the ISO / BIN-CUE image and some buttons to cycle through the images.

That would certainly be a space saver big time, swapping disks bleh 😵

NAS and some kind of a virtual CD/DVD drive works just fine... no need for such thing. 😊

havli wrote:

NAS and some kind of a virtual CD/DVD drive works just fine... no need for such thing. 😊

That works great for Windows 98, but not so much in DOS.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

My dream gadget is a CD/DVD drive emulator, like a GOTEK.

Connect to IDE, takes a 2.5" SATA drive, little LCD display at the front displaying the ISO / BIN-CUE image and some buttons to cycle through the images.

Plus an analog audio out for audio tracks.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Anyone else got idea on what computer related items that should exist that could be convenient for you?

A modern PCIe motherboard with ISA slots and Windows 9x support.

A modern video card (Radeon, GeForce, whatever) which provides full 3dfx backward compatibility. Ie you can boot in pure DOS, then run DOS GLide games on it, and the games would recognize the card as Voodoo1 card --only faster and you can maximize FSAA with it (special environment variables, whatever).

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

My dream gadget is a CD/DVD drive emulator, like a GOTEK.

Connect to IDE, takes a 2.5" SATA drive, little LCD display at the front displaying the ISO / BIN-CUE image and some buttons to cycle through the images.

We have a thread about this somewhere.

Enclosures with this feature already somewhat exist and work alright in Windows.
http://www.zalman.com/contents/products/view.html?no=212

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Anyone else got idea on what computer related items that should exist that could be convenient for you?

There's a thread like this somewhere too, perhaps in Marvin, so if it gets found don't get offended if this gets merged later. 😀