Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-19, 08:14:For LPT I have commonly used a parallel port CF card reader as a flash drive of sorts for older systems. It seems like most of t […]
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For LPT I have commonly used a parallel port CF card reader as a flash drive of sorts for older systems. It seems like most of the systems I end up using this on tend to be on the very slow end because they are so old. I think the EGA+Printer card I use in my IBM 5150 is limited to SPP, but the card is from the mid to late 80s so it's not all that surprising.
2.88MB floppy support is something I hadn't considered, but that's a great point!
You'll have to excuse my lack of knowledge on this subject, but by far the most common serial port device I would ever use (and I imagine a lot of VOGONS users are in this same boat) would be a serial mouse. Is there any difference in performance (smoothness\responsiveness) or compatibility between the various types of serial ports that may be available on a multi I/O card?
Also, was there a point in time where every ISA multi IO card was basically guaranteed to have a certain "good enough for any retro PC" level of serial or parallel capabilities? Like, most PCs haven't had USB 1.1 ports in ~20 years and have all had at least USB 2.0 on every port... so at what point were basically all multi-IO cards equipped with an ECP parallel interface and the fastest UART model that makes sense for a retro PC? Or were companies still dumping out some garbage multi-IO cards in the mid 90s with capabilities more in line with ones from the 80s?
16bit Multi IO FDD / HDD controllers had matured by 1994. There wasn't any improvement after that because 1) the devices had moved into the motherboard chipset for new systems and the market for Multi/IO cards became about low end replacements rather than shiny new features 2) the market for 2.88 floppies failed and no one was retrofitting old systems with them and perhaps most importantly 3) USB was grabbing all the news that year which stopped all enhancements to legacy Multi-IO.
Serial mice? Those were almost all 1200 baud. Maybe there were a few faster ones before PS/2 & USB took over but serial mice were limited by the lowest common denominator, the 8250 UAT. So faster serial mice were few and far between and if you are lucky enough to find one, you had to tweak the driver with extra parameters that were not always documented. Now I certainly remember fretting about my UART on a 386 system when I got a 9600 baud modem. That unbuffered UART was going to make multi-tasking during downloads impossible. But that became a foot note of my "I remember modems" stories, which later turned into a foot note of "I remember copper telephone lines". It's not a part of retro computing that's easy to recreate today. Or widely desired for that matter. Although I think the entire reason I had a summer job in 1990 was because I could make modems work. And I'll always remember the contradiction that Com3 defaults to IRQ4 and Com4 defaults to IRQ3, and so as corollary to that, I can now see that Com1 must go to IRQ4 and thus it turns out that the Com2 modem should be on IRQ3! If you want to set up serial storage with XTIDE Universal BIOS, you might care about your serial port UART if you feel like you need high speeds. I think that's about it.
Parallel port peripherals were a touchy lot. You had your Zip drives, tape drives, portable hard drives, the rare sound card and yes, maybe even a printer. I guess if reading that mysterious backup tape is important to you, or playing Christmas music on your dot matrix printer impressed your children, maybe you start to think about your LPT ports. But really, if it was a task you really want to accomplish, it might be easier to do that stuff on a slightly newer, more reliable computer. And getting DOS drivers to work for LPT storage was often more of a work of art than a science. I was thinking about hooking up my old LPT hard drive once. I decided it was easier to pop it out of the case and read it on an IDE port. Two foot notes here: 1) It wasn't that much easier to do it on a newer system because I was to discover that really old IDE devices don't like USB adapters built after 2005 or newer IDE controllers. The new devices default to LBA and if you try to force an old CHS only drive to talk LBA, it will clang alarmingly like it is in great distress 2) The drive had Prince of Persia & CIV I on it! I hear the PC speaker music in my head any time I just mentioned those games. Anyway, LPT ports were a pain. Like modems, few wish to revisit that experience.
2.88 floppies are one thing that I wish I had but they require BIOS support if you want to boot from them and getting that support is more work than the value it provides, IMHO. Maybe if they were 120MB floppies. Oh wait, that's its own story of incompatibilities.
And IDE drives? Outside of a few winged unicorns that are caching controllers, and the legendary DMA Flying Dutchman that disappeared into the Bermuda triangle during a mad storm, ISA IDE controllers are little more that adapters that connect the IDE signals directly to the ISA bus. There's not a lot going on there. If you are wondering if your IDE hard drive works on a 20Mhz ISA bus, it turns out that it's more of discussion about of your hard drive and your motherboard than it is your IDE controller.
