Yes. Any product called a Disappointment instantly feels so familiar and normal to me, I would definitely have to buy it. Seriously though, I would buy one of these if they were for sale.
A note for future experiments: the LPC bus has lately been supplemented with a mostly compatible serial version, and converter chips apparently _do_ exist.
@@lucasRem-ku6eb the support of RS232 and most LPC devices in modern PC are actually PCI MMIO address on SuperIO Chipset that also emulate Legacy IO Port access. It does not need LPC bus to work at all.
Unfortunately the eSPI specification says right up front that the 8237 DMA access is not foreseen. LPC used a bunch of side-channel signals like LDRQ for this, and eSPI abolishes all side-channel signalling except a single alert pin and replaces it with in-band signalling, to reduce pin count. And when they were designing the eSPI protocol, they apparently neglected or chose not to implement DRQ.
The same Intel Sunrise Point chipset generation for 6th generation Skylake processors that added eSPI support is the one that dropped DMA support on the LPC interface, so you lose regardless which one is used on a given board. On AMD Zen CPUs, the LPC/eSPI controller is part of the CPU itself, but I could not find out if any of them still support DMA. The industrial/embedded ComExpress Type 7 standard still specifies LPC bus as part of the interface between carrier and CPU board, and a lot of the reference carrier boards have an LPC/TPM connector on them, so it would be interesting to try whether that supports ISA style DMA using a modern AMD CPU like the Ryzen embedded V2000.
Just so you know: This has opened a lot of opportunities for game conservation for an obscure korean arcade rhythm game. I don't know if this will get submerged by other comments but this is an absolute godsend. You see, ISA has been used by a specific arcade game to plug the I/O board, which controls a bunch of lights, buttons, and encoders. This has been a MAJOR problem for sourcing computers compatible both with the IO card and the software in the modern era, because you always had to get really weird used exotic hardware from chinese vendors so you could run a somewhat power-intensive game on a windows XP install (w98 on older releases) on something with that slot. You can obviously imagine the hassle of finding hardware that doesn't suck power-wise with such requirements. THIS, however. I know people with this cabinet that have had the issue. Working further on compatibility and testing on your design, if i can manage to run a semi-modern motherboard with this as a bridge to the IO card and not have latency issues, it's a breakthrough in conservation of this title, which has always been an issue since a PCI equivalent of the IO does not exist. So, if this works (and even if it doesn't) you can pat yourself on the back because god damn, you just gave us an exit for this issue.
There are more than DOS gamer that could be interested in that. CNC, laboratory and medical equipment came sometimes with custom ISA controllers and DOS software.
Actually my mom had a very old lab equipment that did some data acquisition over and ISA card and then used some DOS program to do the actual measurement. It's now almost impossible to get a board with ISA and the old PC broke. It had some Winchip processor but I guess it's the end of the line for such devices. My mom retired but had she still been working there this could have been useful I guess.
Your so right a lot of old Electronic measuring device need that kind of add on to work again, same for system that can emulate old floppy disc device or old SCSI hard drive or tape data streamer.
Well ISA bus shouldn't be that difficult to emulate with modern hardware. Since it's a very slow I bet that we could make with not a lot of effort an interface card with an inexpensive microcontroller with a lot of pins that converts it to a modern bus such as USB, and on the other end support in a DOS emulator such as DoxBox or a virtualization software that adapter to use a real ISA card.
For any DOSBox devs that're reading, it would be nice if DOSBox had support for ISA bus forwarding, so that instances could be attached to those ISA-over-USB devices. We eventually could have multi-seat DOS gaming running off a single machine.
You must be a troll?!? Considering your other comments and that you really think this is the right place to make a pull request/suggestion ... WOW! And the best: Without wasting any time and searching for this exact topic, what a non malfunctioning human brain would've done ... **facepalm** 10 seconds "wasted" time and first search results: "DOSBox modified to work with USBISA hardware. Experimental.", "Dosbox megabuild 6 help with emulate (redirect) isa serial ..." and big discussions going on at vogons site mentioned in the video. **double-facepalm**
@@juango500 You don't have any skills, ask people that do have skills please. OSI levels are the deal here, you just write a Load, and set a pointer ! If that is Serial or over ISA b nobody cares.
Great idea. Very useful for industrial applications as these days ISA capable boards with "good" CPUs (Pentium 4 and up) are very expensive. (Understandable as companies don't want to throw away a $1mn production line just because an old motherboard died - and pay a lot for these boards). This also means that if you have one of these boards, don't throw it out - not even when it's dead. It will sell quickly and they will be needed until ISA based industrial machinery is too old (which might take another 10 - 20 years)
Another brilliant hit. I anticipate that in a few years, you could have an abomination of a PC having a really fast uncompromising core with ancient parts for everything, running all IBM compatible software from 1981 to 2xxx, the ultimate sleeper PC.
FrankenPCs really tickle my fancy. Around 2010 I was building a PC to act as a networked backups storage server and since it didn't really have any other requirements other than fast network and lots of storage, I just pulled out parts from my junk drawers to get it done as cheaply as possible. It ended up having one of those later still ISA supporting motherboards, so in the end it had an ISA graphics card (Trident TVGA8900), a gigahertz level CPU, gigabit network card, random RAID card and 8 terabytes of storage... spanning parts across almost 20 years of hardware age :P
I'm working on one. It's from the early 2010's, has a monitor and mouse from 2005, no speakers, and a microphone from the 90's. I have a pair of headphones from the 80's that I can plug into it for audio.
this is incredible. i have wanted an isa soundcard in my newer pc for so long for basically this usecase along with getting things like adlib tracker ii to work with real hardware. having it available in linux would also just be absolutely perfect. please keep going. i can't be the only person who would buy this the moment u put them up for sale
Seconded! I was gifted an almost brand-new SB16 with a Turtle Beach Rio wavetable on it last month. Assuming I can get it to work in my Dell Optiplex, this would answer all of my prayers.
@@lucasRem-ku6eb he mentions in the video linux includes support for many isa soundcards. among many other things, this could potentially allow the linux version of adlib tracker ii to access an actual adlib card, various new doom source ports to play midi in fm synth, possibly even allow a daw to interface with a soundcard, with some work
@@lucasRem-ku6eb it was to use IE 5.5, back in the day. It was much better than the native Macintosh browsers. Oh and at one point I had a simple MUD running on it when I got a newer PC.
Hey there. I own a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold and I confirm that it's working with Gentoo Linux, with kernel branch 5.15. It's perfectly capable of playing PCM. Your mileage with other distributions may vary, as it has become Linux' recent obsession to join Microsoft and Apple in planned obsolescence by deprecating drivers and platforms left and right. So, go ahead! You're safe to try most ISA sound cards on Linux.
I have actually tried latest Debian 32bit but it doesn't work. I think it's a problem with isapnptools, though - the ports are getting forwarded on the LPC bus no problem
@@TheRasteri I don't know exactly what are you doing on the software side to enable this via LPC, I'll have to research your notes more, but on my board that barely has 1 ISA slot, I didn't need isapnptools at all. I don't even have that installed on Gentoo and I was kinda surprised that a tool like this existed. Supporting devices is the sole job of the kernel. Linux, as in the bare kernel, can initialize the AWE64G I have either via PnP, or if PnP is disabled, via customizable parameters for port, irq, dma8, and dma16. Support for ISA PnP is part of the kernel's general support for the ISA bus, fwiw. Or at least this is what I remember from setting this whole system up a year ago.
@@TheRasteri I can verify that on a PC with an actual ISA slot (pentium3) current-ish Linux works perfectly with my SB16. It would be awesome to get this working too. I'll order boards and parts soon to try it out.
I'm also keen to try this out under Linux (also a Gentoo user), in my case, with an AMD AM3 motherboard since I'm still using an overclocked 8370E for my main PC! I'm particularly interested in getting an ISA floppy controller hooked up for archival purposes. By the way, I have looked into making LPC-ISA adapters in the past but couldn't find a source for suitable bridge chips, so great work there! 👍
Two days ago a woman approached me at the grocery store and struck up a conversation about the weather. I immediately referred her to your TH-cam channel and she fled in mere moments. Thank you keeping her at bay. Also, cool ISA board and video!
This level of skills I am in awe of. The sort of down-the-rabbit-hole engineering that i've craved for years but never pushed myself toward. you are wonderfully talented sir.
After doing some reading online, it's more than likely because the new 5v and 3.3v rails in modern PSUs are rather anemic in comparison to their older counterparts, which is why a shoddy no name brand psu from the early 2000s would probably power the card better
Brilliant project. I'd be interest to see if you get an ISA floppy controller like the Quad-Flop working via it, having a working 5.25" floppy drive on a modern hardware would be great for a retro setup.
@@nalinux I ran linux (2.?) on a 386-sx at 16Mhz with 2MB of ram. Which were the absolute minimum specs. It would have ran fine if it had double the memory. It was more of a "can I do it" challenge. But it was actively used as a dial-in server for which it was *just* fast enough.
This is perfect. I was reading about the LPC bus years ago and thought it could be a way to access the internal ISA bus of the chipset, but after admitedly superficial study of some docs I've found I concluded it's not exposed outside of the chipset. Never knew about the TPM headers. I'll definitely build this and try it out. Thanks!
I'm somewhat sad for all the small local PCB printing businesses that they've destroyed. A small business can't possibly compete with a huge company in China printing stuff for peanuts.
That is so cool, and brings back memories of having a weird-ass modem/SB/CD card I've had and the amount of coaxing it required to work in all the games.
Fantastic work! I remember hunting around for motherboards with an ISA slot, but that was to run a secondary MDA / Hercules card which had some low level development benefits.
I know it's a play on the ISA shortcut, but calling this Project Disappointment isn't the greatest. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. That sounds more like Project Well Done
I liked the scientific rigor of trying several times to fit an ISA card into a PCIe slot, making sure you had repeatable results instead of jumping to the conclusion it doesn't work after the first try! :)
I knew right from the thumbnail that this would be awesome. I've been waiting for this ever since I saw the short! Unfortunatly I don't own a motherboard that has a TPM header, unless maybe my current AM4 motherboard has one. UPDATE: I have checked one of the motherboards again. This time i looked closer on the mb itself rather than the manual and found holes for a TPM1 header. So i will need to solder pins for the TPM first.
you keep amazing us so much! I can't believe how much effort you put in these things, and how amazing they end up being! I TRULY salute you and thank you dearly!!!
The original Xbox has an LPC port in the motherboard, it’s actually where modchips are connected. However since you can flash a mod chip bios directly onto the onboard bios chip on older revisions, that leaves the LPC port open to try and connect this! There would be no point other than to write homebrew that uses a sound blaster or whatever but it would be cool to see it working for no other reason than just to do it haha
awesome! I've been wanting to do something like this so I could get a floppy controller on a reasonably modern system. I'm definitely building one of these!
You actually can get USB working in DOS. My retro rig is a Gateway 2000 Pentium 133 with ISA, SBPro2 card, Mo-Slo, Mscdex and CDROM, USB 1.0. Can mount USB sticks as drives in DOS 6.22. Cool video!
If you have compatible USB controller, there are DOS drivers for USB storage. But, if your motherboard support USB disk booting or USB CD-ROM booting, you don't even need driver - DOS doesn't even have a clue that device is an USB device - BIOS handles it.
When I saw this board it reminded me that the first gen Xbox had a LPC header and had me half curious, ultimate retro setup emulate old bits, hardware retro audio, seems fun if it was practical.
I have read and bookmarked a Tweet about the TPM header being essentially an ISA pinout about a decade ago and I fucking LOVE that you put it together! It always lingered in my mind how cool it would be to add a fucking Sound Blaster 2.0 to a 16-core rig.
Even 10 years ago a friend of mine was having to source boards with ISA for their lab. They had a multimillion dollar Electron Microscope that relied on an ISA control card.
Oh, You have given me hope. I came across my old Ultrasound recently and day-dreamed of sharing it's ground breaking deference to its contemporaries with my children. Will be looking for the next video on this.
That's a heroic effort, and to be honest, having an ISA slot available in a very modern motherboard really ignites the retro PC nerd's imagination. Hercules, you say? Please do make that work!
I've got a s939 HP OEM board equipped with a lpc header so they do exist. Labeled as "factory test connector" so I guess they only meant to use it for bios recovery since it does boot from the header if you memory map a device at the correct address.
Why you needed that, need more boot options ? Wished HP kept supporting native devices longer, CD ROM support in MS DOS 6.22 etc, native serial port and parallel cable link support. If you needed that, you needed to build clone PC servers. DELL the same ....
@@Tegelane5 IIRC, the most recent board to have a floppy connector is the ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional. Unfortunately, it does not have support for 5.25", just 3.5". Am pretty curious if any of those boards from '08-'09 have support for 5.25" floppies. 🤔
@@empyrical I thought signalling was the same just cable had to have connector for 5,25 floppy (like those floppy cables from 90ies) . But this mobo had never even 3,5" fitted.
I have a motherboard with a floppy controller just sitting around, no ISA though. And unknown if it can run a 5.25 though I do not see why it couldnt as long as one had the right cable.
you want an albatron atop. they were rare when they were new almost 20 years ago and they haven't gotten any more common. I've had an ebay alert set up for one for years and not gotten a good hit. compatibility isn't great on them by the way, only a handful of late agp cards from nvidia work
Just yesterday I was wracking my brain trying to think of ways to take advantage of the almost brand-new Sound Blaster 16 with a Turtle Beach Rio Wavetable I got last month. 16 hours later after I'd put it away and gone to bed, this wonderful bit of hardware hackery gets posted. Excited to see where this project goes!
Waveboard interface, is Max WIn 98 SE on PCi sound cards. All you need is a better soundcard that has wavetable interface ! Here, Stuck on some old Aurial 3D monster card here, PCI 775 board.
@@lucasRem-ku6eb The Aureal Vortex's Adlib and Sound Blaster emulation is miserable to the point it's become a bad meme. The use of a wavetable card just switches out the generated Midi sounds of the SB16 for samples, the SB16 itself still provides the adlib, midi, and Sound Blaster support, all at the same time iirc.
Awesome is an understatement. My eyes were glued so hard to the screen that I was afraid of ripping my cornea off when it's done. Congratulations! BTW, at minute ~13:49, where you show the Vogons post, there's a typo referencing a "Socket 755" motherboard; I thing that it should be Socket 771 or 775.
I will certainly be getting a dISAppointment board just to see if I can manage to get an old 8 port Modem card working in a new system. Thank you for your hard work in figuring this all out!
8:12: I chuckled upon seeing how this motherboard says "All Japanese Capacitors" - you just know they silkscreened that on there in the wake of the capacitor plague.
@@simontay4851 It's not about the country really. It's about a specific incident and industry-wide quality-control issue that occurred as a result. I'm perfectly happy to use quality Chinese capacitors - emphasis on quality. Though granted, for that you have to know your supplier pretty well, and I realise many people still to this day use brand and even country names as a shortcut, since everyone got burned so bad, basically for race-to-the-bottom reasons. If I were a quality capacitor maker outside of traditional high-rep countries, I'd try to join competitors in establishing a rigorous verification programme and vigorously protected quality mark.
@@simontay4851 Chinese capacitors weren't a thing back then, the Plague was Taiwanese capacitors of certain brands. And yet nobody ever complained about Taicon!
2:52 _"...the PC's I/O memory space"_ Am I being too pedantic when I point out that should be, "the PC's I/O _address_ space"? But more seriously, this is brilliant. I have been _so_ missing my good old I/O port and IRQ conflicts on all these new modern machines.
I always wondered about this and wanted to do it. You're so cool for actually going through with it on multiple machines. instant subscribe. i want to help lol
Cool project! Regarding the TPM header, one thing to bear in mind that the 8 & 9 series Intel chipsets allow a TPM to connected to either LPC or SPI. Hopefully motherboard manufacturers make that clear in their datasheets
Just randomly found this video, love what your doing here. I'm very much not a hw guy but I love learning and seeing low level stuff (like Ben Eater). Thanks for sharing your findings!
If you told me you could connect a DOS sound card to a TPM header, I would have thought you were nuts. And you are, but that didn't stop it from working!
That was just amazing, mate. I was playing around trying to bring back my good old Pentium 4 with a PCI VGA, and this video just popped out to me. + 1 sub, greetings from Brazil.
ISA still has its place when it comes to older lab equipment. Those often came with ISA interface cards (a bunch of D/A and A/D converters, usually requires something like +/-15V symmetrical power supply), and DOS software. No idea where they currently get their replacement parts from, but mainboards with ISA slots can be expensive.
Amazing! this is awesome. I wanted to get a floppy controller working on a modern machine a while back and after some research found out about the LPC BUS but then left it at that, didn't think it was actually do-able! Dunno how a floppy card would work tho cos there's no BIOS setup option for it.
Amazing work, can’t wait to see where you go with this. It is so expensive to find decent motherboards with isa slots now, so this has a lot of promise.
Yes, extra boards can't be designed to flop around lose or at best only be slip tied to something. I don't know why board inventors don't consider this. It should be made to fit in a x4 slot and it could get it power from there.
What good would it do like that? Where is the height for ISA card going to come from? You have consumed some distance from PCIe slot, offsetting the ISA card slot into the PC, now what? Low profile ISA cards only? That's going to be quite a hunt. It's conceivable to have this mount in a full ATX case below the uATX mainboard using extra standoffs.
@@SianaGearz Sure, if the ISA card has a bracket with external connectors of its own, you still have a mechanical issue. Maybe it could take a form similar to that of those PCIe riser cards with a cable which is sometimes used for graphics cards.
Things are really getting good on this front now. We have a hardware solution and software solutions like SBEmu. Great work on this by the way, using the TPM header is genius.
This would be valuable for capturing game audio from Gravis Ultrasound cards. Because some DOS-era games were written for Ultrasound first, the best sound available from them. All of these games also supported SoundBlaster, but with lesser quality. Recovering and archiving the superior audio versions (mostly music) would be a niche project.
The systems starting from 2009 may have issues (hangs) running DOS. And no, "the latest is the fastest" didn't work in case of DOS. No cache size and it's performance matters, it's more related to VGA/LFB write path. Phil's VGA benchmark stopped at 3770k not by the means they have no data later on, but no improvements. And the fastest platform is Intel's P45/X38/X48 w overclocked
I dearly miss the old FDC controllers. Sounds are sounds, and pixels and pixels, but lots of software was written in the 90s that used tricks on the old FDCs to read various floppy formats from DOS, which USB floppy drives can not do at all.
Just a note. SPI has largely replaced LPC at this point and some of the latest stuff from Intel no longer technically supports the LPC even though it's physically there. Since it is muxed with other possible signals, it by default isn't accessible on reference designs. So it'd only be present if the OEM chose to enable and use it anyway.
"Forwarded to the disappointment". The story of my life. Amazing work.
Yes. Any product called a Disappointment instantly feels so familiar and normal to me, I would definitely have to buy it. Seriously though, I would buy one of these if they were for sale.
@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles maybe some day we'll be able to buy it premade. for now, we'll just have to build it ourselves.
A note for future experiments: the LPC bus has lately been supplemented with a mostly compatible serial version, and converter chips apparently _do_ exist.
So eSPI can be used as LPC or is it not compatible?
RS 232 is still supported on all systems, where you use that for ?
@@lucasRem-ku6eb the support of RS232 and most LPC devices in modern PC are actually PCI MMIO address on SuperIO Chipset that also emulate Legacy IO Port access. It does not need LPC bus to work at all.
Unfortunately the eSPI specification says right up front that the 8237 DMA access is not foreseen. LPC used a bunch of side-channel signals like LDRQ for this, and eSPI abolishes all side-channel signalling except a single alert pin and replaces it with in-band signalling, to reduce pin count. And when they were designing the eSPI protocol, they apparently neglected or chose not to implement DRQ.
The same Intel Sunrise Point chipset generation for 6th generation Skylake processors that added eSPI support is the one that dropped DMA support on the LPC interface, so you lose regardless which one is used on a given board. On AMD Zen CPUs, the LPC/eSPI controller is part of the CPU itself, but I could not find out if any of them still support DMA.
The industrial/embedded ComExpress Type 7 standard still specifies LPC bus as part of the interface between carrier and CPU board, and a lot of the reference carrier boards have an LPC/TPM connector on them, so it would be interesting to try whether that supports ISA style DMA using a modern AMD CPU like the Ryzen embedded V2000.
Just so you know: This has opened a lot of opportunities for game conservation for an obscure korean arcade rhythm game.
I don't know if this will get submerged by other comments but this is an absolute godsend. You see, ISA has been used by a specific arcade game to plug the I/O board, which controls a bunch of lights, buttons, and encoders. This has been a MAJOR problem for sourcing computers compatible both with the IO card and the software in the modern era, because you always had to get really weird used exotic hardware from chinese vendors so you could run a somewhat power-intensive game on a windows XP install (w98 on older releases) on something with that slot. You can obviously imagine the hassle of finding hardware that doesn't suck power-wise with such requirements.
THIS, however.
I know people with this cabinet that have had the issue. Working further on compatibility and testing on your design, if i can manage to run a semi-modern motherboard with this as a bridge to the IO card and not have latency issues, it's a breakthrough in conservation of this title, which has always been an issue since a PCI equivalent of the IO does not exist.
So, if this works (and even if it doesn't) you can pat yourself on the back because god damn, you just gave us an exit for this issue.
What game?
@@mekafinchi ez2dj
@@mekafinchi for some reason my reply seems like it wasn't posted so i'll post it again: game is ez2dj/ez2ac, a korean arcade rhythm game
That is awesome glad its helped make things a bit easier.
@@_arkhea Wow that is obscure ^^
There are more than DOS gamer that could be interested in that. CNC, laboratory and medical equipment came sometimes with custom ISA controllers and DOS software.
Now I sort of wish that I'd held on to one of those ISA-GPIB cards instead of handing them out t😄anybody that asked for one.
Actually my mom had a very old lab equipment that did some data acquisition over and ISA card and then used some DOS program to do the actual measurement. It's now almost impossible to get a board with ISA and the old PC broke. It had some Winchip processor but I guess it's the end of the line for such devices.
My mom retired but had she still been working there this could have been useful I guess.
😂😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Your so right a lot of old Electronic measuring device need that kind of add on to work again, same for system that can emulate old floppy disc device or old SCSI hard drive or tape data streamer.
Well ISA bus shouldn't be that difficult to emulate with modern hardware. Since it's a very slow I bet that we could make with not a lot of effort an interface card with an inexpensive microcontroller with a lot of pins that converts it to a modern bus such as USB, and on the other end support in a DOS emulator such as DoxBox or a virtualization software that adapter to use a real ISA card.
For any DOSBox devs that're reading, it would be nice if DOSBox had support for ISA bus forwarding, so that instances could be attached to those ISA-over-USB devices. We eventually could have multi-seat DOS gaming running off a single machine.
You must be a troll?!? Considering your other comments and that you really think this is the right place to make a pull request/suggestion ... WOW! And the best: Without wasting any time and searching for this exact topic, what a non malfunctioning human brain would've done ...
**facepalm**
10 seconds "wasted" time and first search results: "DOSBox modified to work with USBISA hardware. Experimental.", "Dosbox megabuild 6 help with emulate (redirect) isa serial ..." and big discussions going on at vogons site mentioned in the video.
**double-facepalm**
@@dieSpinnt you have never, ever, worked in customer support, have you?
That's the dream
@@juango500 You don't have any skills, ask people that do have skills please. OSI levels are the deal here, you just write a Load, and set a pointer ! If that is Serial or over ISA b nobody cares.
@@LoneWanderer905 you are not a skilled cores, lol. Why you need support ?
Great idea. Very useful for industrial applications as these days ISA capable boards with "good" CPUs (Pentium 4 and up) are very expensive. (Understandable as companies don't want to throw away a $1mn production line just because an old motherboard died - and pay a lot for these boards).
This also means that if you have one of these boards, don't throw it out - not even when it's dead. It will sell quickly and they will be needed until ISA based industrial machinery is too old (which might take another 10 - 20 years)
Wow .. I have so much old crap lying around I could probably retire lol
Another brilliant hit. I anticipate that in a few years, you could have an abomination of a PC having a really fast uncompromising core with ancient parts for everything, running all IBM compatible software from 1981 to 2xxx, the ultimate sleeper PC.
1970's had some fun PC100 things that I wouldn't be surprised to see as well, given time.
FrankenPCs really tickle my fancy. Around 2010 I was building a PC to act as a networked backups storage server and since it didn't really have any other requirements other than fast network and lots of storage, I just pulled out parts from my junk drawers to get it done as cheaply as possible. It ended up having one of those later still ISA supporting motherboards, so in the end it had an ISA graphics card (Trident TVGA8900), a gigahertz level CPU, gigabit network card, random RAID card and 8 terabytes of storage... spanning parts across almost 20 years of hardware age :P
I'm working on one. It's from the early 2010's, has a monitor and mouse from 2005, no speakers, and a microphone from the 90's. I have a pair of headphones from the 80's that I can plug into it for audio.
this is incredible. i have wanted an isa soundcard in my newer pc for so long for basically this usecase along with getting things like adlib tracker ii to work with real hardware. having it available in linux would also just be absolutely perfect. please keep going. i can't be the only person who would buy this the moment u put them up for sale
Seconded! I was gifted an almost brand-new SB16 with a Turtle Beach Rio wavetable on it last month. Assuming I can get it to work in my Dell Optiplex, this would answer all of my prayers.
I have a few salvaged Soundblaster 16 compatable from very sorry looking PCs. They work pretty good. Go through home PCs, not old office ones.
why you need UNIX ? sound card support under UNIX ?
@@lucasRem-ku6eb he mentions in the video linux includes support for many isa soundcards. among many other things, this could potentially allow the linux version of adlib tracker ii to access an actual adlib card, various new doom source ports to play midi in fm synth, possibly even allow a daw to interface with a soundcard, with some work
@@lucasRem-ku6eb it was to use IE 5.5, back in the day. It was much better than the native Macintosh browsers. Oh and at one point I had a simple MUD running on it when I got a newer PC.
Hey there. I own a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold and I confirm that it's working with Gentoo Linux, with kernel branch 5.15. It's perfectly capable of playing PCM. Your mileage with other distributions may vary, as it has become Linux' recent obsession to join Microsoft and Apple in planned obsolescence by deprecating drivers and platforms left and right.
So, go ahead! You're safe to try most ISA sound cards on Linux.
I have actually tried latest Debian 32bit but it doesn't work. I think it's a problem with isapnptools, though - the ports are getting forwarded on the LPC bus no problem
@@TheRasteri I don't know exactly what are you doing on the software side to enable this via LPC, I'll have to research your notes more, but on my board that barely has 1 ISA slot, I didn't need isapnptools at all. I don't even have that installed on Gentoo and I was kinda surprised that a tool like this existed. Supporting devices is the sole job of the kernel. Linux, as in the bare kernel, can initialize the AWE64G I have either via PnP, or if PnP is disabled, via customizable parameters for port, irq, dma8, and dma16. Support for ISA PnP is part of the kernel's general support for the ISA bus, fwiw. Or at least this is what I remember from setting this whole system up a year ago.
@@TheRasteri I can verify that on a PC with an actual ISA slot (pentium3) current-ish Linux works perfectly with my SB16. It would be awesome to get this working too. I'll order boards and parts soon to try it out.
I'm also keen to try this out under Linux (also a Gentoo user), in my case, with an AMD AM3 motherboard since I'm still using an overclocked 8370E for my main PC! I'm particularly interested in getting an ISA floppy controller hooked up for archival purposes.
By the way, I have looked into making LPC-ISA adapters in the past but couldn't find a source for suitable bridge chips, so great work there! 👍
Can't find AWE 64 PCi ?
If you need it badly, i can send it ! If you need it for a machine, reason ?
Unix support on AWE, why that ????
Two days ago a woman approached me at the grocery store and struck up a conversation about the weather. I immediately referred her to your TH-cam channel and she fled in mere moments. Thank you keeping her at bay. Also, cool ISA board and video!
This level of skills I am in awe of. The sort of down-the-rabbit-hole engineering that i've craved for years but never pushed myself toward. you are wonderfully talented sir.
The Quake thing may be a PSU issue, most modern ones don't provide -5v and I heard that's problematic for older sound cards
Voltage Blaster by Phils Computer Lab!
The SB16 does not use -5 volt.
@@r.d.7698 and also, high-end PSUs and some cheaper ones usually do still provide -5V.
@@r.d.7698 well its my best guess
After doing some reading online, it's more than likely because the new 5v and 3.3v rails in modern PSUs are rather anemic in comparison to their older counterparts, which is why a shoddy no name brand psu from the early 2000s would probably power the card better
Brilliant project. I'd be interest to see if you get an ISA floppy controller like the Quad-Flop working via it, having a working 5.25" floppy drive on a modern hardware would be great for a retro setup.
That's why I clicked on this!
👍 .. or booting with hercules card
This is what I care about, running 5.25 floppies on a modern motherboard.
@@Intelwinsbigly usb to shugart adaptor
@@joefish6091 Does it allow the os to directly access the floppy disc like a vintage system can?
So this means I can maybe install a TPM module on my 386.
Great idea.
Why you need 386 in 2023, running what ?
@@lucasRem-ku6eb I have read Linux works on a 386, and want to try it.
Similarly, the advent of virtual memory means you can have a really large RAM disk
@@JaimieVandenbergh How you adress extended memory on an expanded memory card in DOS ?
@@nalinux I ran linux (2.?) on a 386-sx at 16Mhz with 2MB of ram. Which were the absolute minimum specs. It would have ran fine if it had double the memory. It was more of a "can I do it" challenge. But it was actively used as a dial-in server for which it was *just* fast enough.
I always wondered if an ISA card could run off the LPC bus but never found any way of doing it. Great that you've got it working!
LSMI#, you need to dress IRQ, or LPCPD#, DMA request ?
Who you need that ? Why wonder ?
This is perfect. I was reading about the LPC bus years ago and thought it could be a way to access the internal ISA bus of the chipset, but after admitedly superficial study of some docs I've found I concluded it's not exposed outside of the chipset. Never knew about the TPM headers. I'll definitely build this and try it out. Thanks!
Seriously love how pcbway is supporting channels like this one action retro. I’ve used their service before and it’s seriously great
These Chinese manufacturers will support almost any social media exposure, because they need constant influx of orders.
I'm somewhat sad for all the small local PCB printing businesses that they've destroyed. A small business can't possibly compete with a huge company in China printing stuff for peanuts.
This is unbelievable! My hat is off to you! Your level of skill and expertise is truly inspiring!
That is so cool, and brings back memories of having a weird-ass modem/SB/CD card I've had and the amount of coaxing it required to work in all the games.
Very nice and elegant way of stretching sound card support for ISA to modern platforms!
Fantastic work! I remember hunting around for motherboards with an ISA slot, but that was to run a secondary MDA / Hercules card which had some low level development benefits.
LPCPD# DMA for Hercules.
What monitor u use ?
I know it's a play on the ISA shortcut, but calling this Project Disappointment isn't the greatest. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. That sounds more like Project Well Done
Project ISAlive could be a nice name
I think it's funny because the project is awesome.
The name is a dISAppointment. There self fulfilling prophecy satisfied.
Sorry for the necro but it needed to be addressed.
Nah it's just you
@@lorenzoporciani can we rename the Silkscreen to say ISAlive?
This is mind blowing, that the potential interface for ISA is sitting dormant on so many motherboards right now.
I liked the scientific rigor of trying several times to fit an ISA card into a PCIe slot, making sure you had repeatable results instead of jumping to the conclusion it doesn't work after the first try! :)
IEEE-488 interface card shown at 13:17. Amazing project, cheers!
I knew right from the thumbnail that this would be awesome. I've been waiting for this ever since I saw the short! Unfortunatly I don't own a motherboard that has a TPM header, unless maybe my current AM4 motherboard has one.
UPDATE: I have checked one of the motherboards again. This time i looked closer on the mb itself rather than the manual and found holes for a TPM1 header. So i will need to solder pins for the TPM first.
you keep amazing us so much! I can't believe how much effort you put in these things, and how amazing they end up being! I TRULY salute you and thank you dearly!!!
The original Xbox has an LPC port in the motherboard, it’s actually where modchips are connected. However since you can flash a mod chip bios directly onto the onboard bios chip on older revisions, that leaves the LPC port open to try and connect this! There would be no point other than to write homebrew that uses a sound blaster or whatever but it would be cool to see it working for no other reason than just to do it haha
Homebrew that runs off a floppy.
@@Intelwinsbigly with the floppy drive connected to an ISA floppy controller card as well!
Been looking forward to this! Not dISAppointed. Amazing work! 😎
You're a hero. This is magic.
awesome! I've been wanting to do something like this so I could get a floppy controller on a reasonably modern system. I'm definitely building one of these!
You actually can get USB working in DOS. My retro rig is a Gateway 2000 Pentium 133 with ISA, SBPro2 card, Mo-Slo, Mscdex and CDROM, USB 1.0. Can mount USB sticks as drives in DOS 6.22. Cool video!
If you have compatible USB controller, there are DOS drivers for USB storage. But, if your motherboard support USB disk booting or USB CD-ROM booting, you don't even need driver - DOS doesn't even have a clue that device is an USB device - BIOS handles it.
Thank you for being this crazy. What a great project!
I know that nobody cares, but, you brought back many childhood memories, when I tried every isa card I found at 7 years old.
thank you
When I saw this board it reminded me that the first gen Xbox had a LPC header and had me half curious, ultimate retro setup emulate old bits, hardware retro audio, seems fun if it was practical.
lol I had the same idea, unfortunately the Xbox LPC header doesn't have DMA. It may be possible to dig it out elsewhere on the board though...
I have read and bookmarked a Tweet about the TPM header being essentially an ISA pinout about a decade ago and I fucking LOVE that you put it together! It always lingered in my mind how cool it would be to add a fucking Sound Blaster 2.0 to a 16-core rig.
Not sure how i got here but "Project Disappointment" sounds like the sumtotal of my lifes work so i figure I'm in the right spot.
- this guy is an absolute legend
"Forgot to connect a mouse for Doom"
- how dare you !
Even 10 years ago a friend of mine was having to source boards with ISA for their lab. They had a multimillion dollar Electron Microscope that relied on an ISA control card.
Oh, You have given me hope. I came across my old Ultrasound recently and day-dreamed of sharing it's ground breaking deference to its contemporaries with my children. Will be looking for the next video on this.
That's a heroic effort, and to be honest, having an ISA slot available in a very modern motherboard really ignites the retro PC nerd's imagination.
Hercules, you say? Please do make that work!
I've got a s939 HP OEM board equipped with a lpc header so they do exist. Labeled as "factory test connector" so I guess they only meant to use it for bios recovery since it does boot from the header if you memory map a device at the correct address.
Why you needed that, need more boot options ?
Wished HP kept supporting native devices longer, CD ROM support in MS DOS 6.22 etc, native serial port and parallel cable link support.
If you needed that, you needed to build clone PC servers. DELL the same ....
how cool is that! thanks for sharing.
I want to see it work with a floppy controller. Seeing a 5.25" drive in a modern PC would be amazing!
Floppy connector was dropped much later than ISA, Gigabyte mobo for AMD Phenom II still had it in 09.
@@Tegelane5 IIRC, the most recent board to have a floppy connector is the ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional. Unfortunately, it does not have support for 5.25", just 3.5". Am pretty curious if any of those boards from '08-'09 have support for 5.25" floppies. 🤔
@@empyrical I thought signalling was the same just cable had to have connector for 5,25 floppy (like those floppy cables from 90ies) . But this mobo had never even 3,5" fitted.
I have a motherboard with a floppy controller just sitting around, no ISA though. And unknown if it can run a 5.25 though I do not see why it couldnt as long as one had the right cable.
There do exist USB floppy controllers that work with a 5.25, I've got a few.
Why don't AGP?
AGP was dropped in Windows 10 in one of the feature updates
@@MaximNightFurythis is running on DOS, not Win10
you want an albatron atop. they were rare when they were new almost 20 years ago and they haven't gotten any more common. I've had an ebay alert set up for one for years and not gotten a good hit.
compatibility isn't great on them by the way, only a handful of late agp cards from nvidia work
Too good for S-bus or VL-bus?
😂
@@butre. You know they sell agp to pci-e adapter cards other than that brand, right?
Just yesterday I was wracking my brain trying to think of ways to take advantage of the almost brand-new Sound Blaster 16 with a Turtle Beach Rio Wavetable I got last month. 16 hours later after I'd put it away and gone to bed, this wonderful bit of hardware hackery gets posted. Excited to see where this project goes!
Waveboard interface, is Max WIn 98 SE on PCi sound cards.
All you need is a better soundcard that has wavetable interface ! Here, Stuck on some old Aurial 3D monster card here, PCI 775 board.
@@lucasRem-ku6eb The Aureal Vortex's Adlib and Sound Blaster emulation is miserable to the point it's become a bad meme. The use of a wavetable card just switches out the generated Midi sounds of the SB16 for samples, the SB16 itself still provides the adlib, midi, and Sound Blaster support, all at the same time iirc.
Awesome is an understatement. My eyes were glued so hard to the screen that I was afraid of ripping my cornea off when it's done. Congratulations!
BTW, at minute ~13:49, where you show the Vogons post, there's a typo referencing a "Socket 755" motherboard; I thing that it should be Socket 771 or 775.
OMG ! someone actually did it !
But i was expecting PCI to ISA bridge. This one is even cooler !
Wow! TPM ISA module - hard to believe, but it works! I'll check my old motherboard to see if the TPM is present.
Yes! My old Gigabyte H67MA have exactly same TPM pinout like yours - Thank you! Now is time to order ISA convertor board
I will certainly be getting a dISAppointment board just to see if I can manage to get an old 8 port Modem card working in a new system. Thank you for your hard work in figuring this all out!
8:12: I chuckled upon seeing how this motherboard says "All Japanese Capacitors" - you just know they silkscreened that on there in the wake of the capacitor plague.
Well of course. Don't want any shitty chinese crapacitors on my motherboard. When recapping old electronics, i always use Panasonic FR series.
@@simontay4851 It's not about the country really. It's about a specific incident and industry-wide quality-control issue that occurred as a result. I'm perfectly happy to use quality Chinese capacitors - emphasis on quality. Though granted, for that you have to know your supplier pretty well, and I realise many people still to this day use brand and even country names as a shortcut, since everyone got burned so bad, basically for race-to-the-bottom reasons. If I were a quality capacitor maker outside of traditional high-rep countries, I'd try to join competitors in establishing a rigorous verification programme and vigorously protected quality mark.
@@simontay4851 Chinese capacitors weren't a thing back then, the Plague was Taiwanese capacitors of certain brands. And yet nobody ever complained about Taicon!
@@SianaGearz Taiwanese capacitors are Chinese capacitors.
2:52 _"...the PC's I/O memory space"_
Am I being too pedantic when I point out that should be, "the PC's I/O _address_ space"?
But more seriously, this is brilliant. I have been _so_ missing my good old I/O port and IRQ conflicts on all these new modern machines.
I always wondered about this and wanted to do it. You're so cool for actually going through with it on multiple machines. instant subscribe. i want to help lol
Cool project! Regarding the TPM header, one thing to bear in mind that the 8 & 9 series Intel chipsets allow a TPM to connected to either LPC or SPI. Hopefully motherboard manufacturers make that clear in their datasheets
Just randomly found this video, love what your doing here. I'm very much not a hw guy but I love learning and seeing low level stuff (like Ben Eater). Thanks for sharing your findings!
Not something I'm interested in doing for myself but great to watch. Lots of respect for the skills it takes to do this kind of hardware hacking.
If you told me you could connect a DOS sound card to a TPM header, I would have thought you were nuts. And you are, but that didn't stop it from working!
Some people like to deep dive into hardware, some people like to solve things through software. Both are good, do whatever you find more interesting.
That was just amazing, mate. I was playing around trying to bring back my good old Pentium 4 with a PCI VGA, and this video just popped out to me.
+ 1 sub, greetings from Brazil.
5:53 "now the first thing to do is get a hold of a disappointment"
Cool! *grabs self*
ISA still has its place when it comes to older lab equipment. Those often came with ISA interface cards (a bunch of D/A and A/D converters, usually requires something like +/-15V symmetrical power supply), and DOS software.
No idea where they currently get their replacement parts from, but mainboards with ISA slots can be expensive.
Amazing! this is awesome. I wanted to get a floppy controller working on a modern machine a while back and after some research found out about the LPC BUS but then left it at that, didn't think it was actually do-able! Dunno how a floppy card would work tho cos there's no BIOS setup option for it.
I remember those Sound Blaster ISA cards. It was the only thing the ISA slot was used for.
Amazing work, can’t wait to see where you go with this. It is so expensive to find decent motherboards with isa slots now, so this has a lot of promise.
I was fucking floored when you said you used the tpm header for this project. Good work man this is amazing
Very cool! Subbed!
its nice to see someone so deep is tech (know how) wish school had more coding when i was young etc.
Refreshing to see a tech video that isn't a sook session about GPUS.
5:53 "Now, the first thing to do is get ahold of a disappointment."
Me: *_holds myself_*
This is super cool. I have dedicated DOS machines, but I'd still probably buy one of these!
That's an interesting project. I'd suggest a version with a bracket so you can mount it in a case, possibly also stick it in a PCI/PCIe slot.
Yes, extra boards can't be designed to flop around lose or at best only be slip tied to something. I don't know why board inventors don't consider this. It should be made to fit in a x4 slot and it could get it power from there.
What good would it do like that? Where is the height for ISA card going to come from? You have consumed some distance from PCIe slot, offsetting the ISA card slot into the PC, now what? Low profile ISA cards only? That's going to be quite a hunt.
It's conceivable to have this mount in a full ATX case below the uATX mainboard using extra standoffs.
@@SianaGearz Sure, if the ISA card has a bracket with external connectors of its own, you still have a mechanical issue.
Maybe it could take a form similar to that of those PCIe riser cards with a cable which is sometimes used for graphics cards.
pci and isa slots have different lateral offsets to the metal bracket. They don't fit and a better solution is necessary anyway
@@cristianstoica4544 mhmm MSI or ASRock should just sneak one ISA slot below the lowest other slot, sharing the bracket. Just like they used to.
that's hilarious, love that the answer is to use the TPM header of all things.
wow, this TPM shit can actually be used for something useful!
Didn’t get to say this when the news broke, but seriously - good job! 🎉😮
I love how you cut to the clip of trying to jam that old ISA card into a PCI Express slot so many times
Things are really getting good on this front now. We have a hardware solution and software solutions like SBEmu. Great work on this by the way, using the TPM header is genius.
This was awesome! Incredible work. And great video. Thanks!
This is an awesome project. I'll be sure to keep up on it!
You're doing God's work, you know that? 😁
Also, nice thumbnail.
i love you man, got me an audiophile 24/96 with rca inputs and outputs, but its a ruddy isa card.
WOW!! I never thought that an ISA slot for modern PC would be available!!
Incredible! I'll need to build one of these for myself!
Hey, nice.
So TPM is finally useful for something.
I love how many times you tried to just jam that ISA card into that modern motherboard. Valiant effort.
You have NO idea how much I've always wanted native OPL in my modern rig.
This would be valuable for capturing game audio from Gravis Ultrasound cards.
Because some DOS-era games were written for Ultrasound first, the best sound available from them.
All of these games also supported SoundBlaster, but with lesser quality.
Recovering and archiving the superior audio versions (mostly music) would be a niche project.
You absolute madman. I love it. :D
Thanks!
Bro... inspiring intro to your channel. Nicely done all around!
you are my brother from another motherboard, amazing work
i love crazy people implementing crazy things into modern hardware
Always a good day when you post a video. You deserve way more subs.
Great job, keep it up. Nothing like having a 5800X3D with a sound blaster playing Doom.
The systems starting from 2009 may have issues (hangs) running DOS. And no, "the latest is the fastest" didn't work in case of DOS. No cache size and it's performance matters, it's more related to VGA/LFB write path. Phil's VGA benchmark stopped at 3770k not by the means they have no data later on, but no improvements. And the fastest platform is Intel's P45/X38/X48 w overclocked
Awesome video, very insightful!
A great find. Thank you for your hard work 🎉
what a perfect name for this adapter. Love it.
I dearly miss the old FDC controllers. Sounds are sounds, and pixels and pixels, but lots of software was written in the 90s that used tricks on the old FDCs to read various floppy formats from DOS, which USB floppy drives can not do at all.
Just a note. SPI has largely replaced LPC at this point and some of the latest stuff from Intel no longer technically supports the LPC even though it's physically there. Since it is muxed with other possible signals, it by default isn't accessible on reference designs. So it'd only be present if the OEM chose to enable and use it anyway.
Wow what a project! Looking forward to seeing updates on this
Amazing, I never thought this could be possible.
Wow! Fantastic work! Brilliant 👏