I heard back from them and they ended up updating their FAQ and fixing some links on their page.

Basically what they meant was that a standard high output PSU, such as an ATX PSU might cause interference.

In any case, I have a recording project to finish up and then I will work on this some more. I have been thinking about it and have a pretty good idea what may need to be done to get it to work like we want.

I will be setting up an XP machine for initial testing so I have the ability for direct hardware access. That should make it much simpler to get DOSBox set up like it needs to be. Not even sure that a lot will need to be changed in DOSBox to make it work with sound cards but I think it will be easier to get it going that way first.

I did look at the ARSTech code and the enumerator should handle everything just fine. DOSBox just needs to be able to be set up to pass through PCM as well. FM passthrough is already available in some versions... and MIDI passthrough is of course already there.

Should you not be successful with DOSBox, you might want to consider requesting support for this in Dosemu2. The developers of that project are generally quite open to such feature requests. Recently they added support for the OPL2LPT and OPL3LPT devices as well.

Do you think the USB2ISA would work with Voodoo-cards?

Thanks
Nick

nightowl24h wrote on 2023-08-03, 10:58:

Do you think the USB2ISA would work with Voodoo-cards?

Thanks
Nick

I don't see how that could ever work, since Voodoo cards are PCI cards, not ISA cards.

I've posted detailed scans and photographs of the device and power supply:
https://disk.yandex.ru/d/caMV0jL6dK37ZQ
Perhaps someone will be able to make a replica, or it will simply be useful in further development.

I recently bought one of these USB2ISA's specifically to see if I can use these ISA ES1688 and ES1868 cards I've acquired. They load on the enumerator, but their weird fork of DOSBOX doesn't seem to be able to pass through commands to drive the FM audio, no matter what I try (even with loading the TSRs which can 'see' the ports but that's about it). I have looked at making an InpOut32-like wrapper for the Arstech lib SDK thing they have for the usb2isa and while something is 'going through', need some guidance on how to 'initialize' the cards programmatically I guess, for lack of a usable driver of sorts.

Just inquired them about using a Gravis Ultrasound PNP under Windows 98 - not via the DOSBOX-X, but native since I would like to use some 98-supported PCI cards too and what I received as answer was very similar to AI-generated garbage. Absolutely useless customer support.
Looks like LPC2ISA is the way to go when you want 3D acceleration and such. I don't mind VM-s but I wanted to use my Matrox G400, Aureal Vortex II and the GUS under a single system, and DOSBOX-X doesnt support PCI passthrough.