Hack a Day » isa

XT IDE controller

Mike Szczys — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:10:19 +0000

[Geordy] wanted to use some IDE devices but he didn’t have an interface card for his XT system, which can’t handle 16-bit IDE. He looked around for 8-bit ISA controllers but they were hard to find and quite expensive. Lucky for him there’s an open source project that makes a solution to this problem. The XTIDE project brought together a group of vintage computing enthusiasts to design this ISA card. [Geordy] was even able to order a professional PCB from one of the forum members. He ordered the parts an soldered it together, costing about $30 total. He had a friend help him burn the code to the EEPROM but that’s easy enough to do with an Arduino, Bus Pirate, or one of several other methods. Now his grand plans at installing DOS 6.22 have been realized.

Filed under: news

Resurrecting ISA hardware

Mike Szczys — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:09:10 +0000

[Alex] had an old FM radio tuner card come his way. It used an ISA connector, a standard that went the way of the dodo in the mid-nineties. With the challenge of implementing an ISA-bus to configure the card he set out on his mission. What he came up with is a working radio using the ISA card and driven by a PIC 16F877. Join us after the break for schematic, code, and a few details.

The card is based on an LM7000 PLL synthesizer paired with a LC7534 tone/volume controller. With a bit of datasheet study [Alex] figured out where the data pins for the chips map to the ISA bus. Working with a prototyping board, the hardest part turned out to be finding the addresses for the chips. He ended up testing all 256 possibilities and watching for the data to be latched from the ISA bus. Alex says the hardware is capable of tuning from about 60MHz up to 125MHz.

We asked him if he’d share his code and schematic. He came through with both, and kudos to him for such a clean hand-drawn schematic. Nice work [Alex]!

Source Code (Tarball)

Filed under: classic hacks

Visual hardware identification guide

Eliot — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:51:14 +0000

Check out this visual hardware guide from deviantART member [Sonic840]. It has everything from memory modules, to bus sockets, to power connectors, to an entire array of CPU sockets that have been used over the years. You’re bound to see something in there you didn’t know existed.

[via Gizmodo]

Posted in pcs hacks, tool hacks

Name that Ware

Eliot — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Last month we mentioned [bunnie]‘s Name that Ware competition where participants try to guess the functionality of a random bit of hardware. We thought you might want to see another example; pictured above is the June 2008 ware provided by [xobs]. You can see a high res version here and an image of the daughter card as well. Be forewarned that someone has already posted the solution in the comments. At first glance there are quite a few interesting bits: board is copyright 1991, the 8-bit ISA connector doesn’t have any data lines connected, just power, and it’s got a lot of analog circuitry. Take a guess and then check out the comments on [bunnie]‘s site to see the solution.