VOGONS


First post, by maxtherabbit

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Yo dog I heard you like ISA cards

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Ever noticed how certain ISA cards have a 62-pin header (or footprint for one) right above the ISA edge connector for no apparent reason? The clone FDC that came in my 5150 was such a card and I decided to put it to use.

Piggybacked the lo-tech EMS card I assembled onto the FDC by way of an adapter PCB I designed and a 62-pin card slot to make the world's first "6 slot" 5150. Everything works wonderfully and my PC now has 2 massive megabytes of EMS at its disposal. 😎

Reply 3 of 14, by Anonymous Coward

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Very nice. I should put one of those in my 5150 too...then I can finally have both NIC and SB 2.0 at the same time. I have an AST RAMpage in mine, so I'm pretty sure it has that same header. What the hell were those headers designed for anyway? I've seen them on other cards too.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 4 of 14, by HanJammer

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

What the hell were those headers designed for anyway? I've seen them on other cards too.

I'm pretty sure they were designed for this exact purpose. Many cards simply didn't had any external ports and in this case mounting them in the on-board slot was a bit of a waste.
AST and other third party companies built their whole business strategy based on the small number of ISA slots (and basically lack of on-board devices) in the 5150... I believe ability to extend ISA bus with additional slot (without buying expansion unit from IBM) could be a major feature in their products...

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Reply 5 of 14, by Anonymous Coward

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That would make sense for a 5150 which only has 5 slots...but I've also seen this on 16 bit cards like the Rampage AT.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 7 of 14, by rmay635703

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

That would make sense for a 5150 which only has 5 slots...but I've also seen this on 16 bit cards like the Rampage AT.

Consider yourself lucky My 1000Rlx only has one slot

Would need 2 such cards to get xtide, sound blaster + nic

Reply 8 of 14, by HanJammer

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

That would make sense for a 5150 which only has 5 slots...but I've also seen this on 16 bit cards like the Rampage AT.

Yeah, but those cards probably can be used in clones as well (not only in 5170) can't they? And number of ISA slots in close vary (ie Commodore PC-40 only has 4 isa slots, 3 of which are 16 bit).

I'm not sure about debugging hypothesis as well - there were specialized card for this and those AST cards were intended for consumer/prosumer market after all...

I guess it's time to google for some old AST catalogues / marketing brochures 😁

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Reply 10 of 14, by HanJammer

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maxtherabbit wrote:

Could also have been used for a bed of nail test fixture?

True, could have been used for bench testing in the factory...
When I will find some time I will read http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/AST%2 … mber%201986.pdf - if it doesn't mention it, then this header was probably never intended for consumer use...

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Reply 11 of 14, by FAMICOMASTER

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A lot of multifunction cards have this header to "future-proof" the card. AST advertised this heavily on a lot of their cards.

See: http://minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/AST_Advan … sers_Manual.pdf

They even show the header on the front cover of the manual.

Reply 12 of 14, by Oil

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Six slots? Cute. 😀

How about seven? 😈
I put this together for my 5150 in summer 2015. In it I have a lo-tech 1MB RAM card and lo-tech IDE card.
The key to using the ribbon cable was the foil tape, not sure what length is possible.
Had the PCBs printed by I forget what company in china or somewhere. I used cut down ISA slots scavenged from a scrap board(what a hassle) and a cut down edge connector bought from digikey.

I do like your solution for being compact, and it would not be too hard to extend your board with a rubber block for support underneath for an extra card.

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