Usb2isa

[Janne Evers]

SoI stumbled on this product which claims to provide an ISA slot using a modern USB connection. It almost seems too good to be true, but I have my doubts. Here's the link to the product I'm talking about:

-prodshow/usb2isar.html

Their build of dosbox is still available. They also supply the source code so it could be implemented in a newer version of dosbox. They only provide the download link for the regular install when you buy an adapter.... link is on a sticker on the packaging the adapters come in.

-display/ste_uniformdos.html

I would be really curious to read about someone trying with an ISA sound card. Before I got into retro PCs, this theoretically seemed like an ideal solution for retro sound and maybe even video card use with a modern PC . Emulation where needed and authentic hardware audio and video, that would be a nice combo .

Sounds like I need to go ahead and order a power supply then. I actually bought the adapters from somebody. First one came damaged and they sent me another. They didn't come with the power adapters though.

The only thing about DOSBOX is that I am pretty sure only passthrough for OPL3 and I think MIDI so some other coding would need to be done to pass through digital audio though that part may not matter one lick.

Once it arrives, I will test and post back here with results. I will have to verify that the output on this power adapter is correct but from what I could find, it looks like there is a universal pinout for these types of power supplies.

That will also give us a way to reuse old AT or ATX power supplies for this if we want to by just making an adapter. For that matter, it could have the power drawn from the host computer's power supply but that might introduce electrical noise.

What would be nice if one creates a disk oriented board that emulates a PATA interface controller limited up to 8GB out of consideration to socket 5 and 7 boards. Also useable older PCs without custom CHS set up, also when partitioned on the some computers that can only choose one of type number like 340MB and boot DOS, partition then formatted and seen as 340MB. Then plug the usb stick into newer computers and transfer stuff to it then plug this back into classic computer and boot. More practical than SSD or CF, CF is expensive also not all are bootable.

A newly designed/made PCI device that can be seen as a SCSI controller or BUS mastering IDE/SATA controller, has functionality similar to SCSI2SD, emulates optical and removable devices, takes SD cards/USB devices/SATA devices and has DMA support would be even better .

I haven't tried, but I believe simple i/o transfer should work.

So AdLib Music Card, Creative Music System and Covox Soundmaster *could* work. Maybe Tandy 3-Voice and Speech Thing, even.

Sound Blaster 1.0 in non-DMA mode could work, too. And MPU401, perhaps, if IRQ2/9 is supported. Disney Sound Source likely will fail, since it is DMA-based.

Essentially, the 8-Bit ISA bus (aka PC/XT bus) is nothing more than a glorious Centronics-Port on sugar with IRQs and extra status lines.. ?

I'm of the camp of thinking that it will work fine with ISA sound cards. You do have to have the software enumerator running before running DOSBox for it to work with DOSBox and they say it supports DMA so I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I'm a bit concerned about the latency and also the bandwidth of a series of short transfers.

But then again you probably wouldn't hook up a graphics card to this device.

Software-wise, it would obviously rely on sophisticated host-side emulation of the ISA bus.

The bridge thing won't work as there would be no ISA DMA support whatsoever. That part has to be handled in software. You would have to have some sort of special decoder for the ISA slot(s) and have a software enumerator sending the data to that decoder.

The USB to ISA adapter should be fine. ISA max transfer rate at the standard 8.33Mhz is way below what USB 2.0 can do.. plus you are sharing that bandwidth with all the ISA components in the system.

USB2.0 is rated at 480Mb/s.

1. The power adapter I ordered from Mouser is wired correctly for the usb2isa adapter.

2. The documentation is wrong on one of the power selection jumpers. Says it is supposed to be 2-3 (default) to use the external power adapter but it is supposed to be on 1-2. Bleh

3. You have to disable driver signing and to do this you also have to disable secure boot in the BIOS. No mention of having to do this in the manual but it does mention that the driver isn't signed... or rather the installer isn't signed. The driver it uses is a Microsoft one... winusb

I haven't actually tried it with an ISA card yet but it looks like it will auto detect resources... at least on non-pnp cards. I think you may have to manually add the needed resources for pnp cards from the looks of it but not 100% sure.

-prodshow/usb2isar.html

It says it supports DMA and all that jazz, so wouldn't it be able to use a AWE64 Gold or a Soundblaster 16? If it would work for those and other ISA cards, I could see it being worth 150 bucks.

I was wondering if anybody here had experience with this adapter: --usb2isa.html

Like many VOGONS members, I have some old ISA hardware that I still want to be able to use from time to time. The only way to do it is to keep "legacy" system around. If this adapter actually does what it promises then there is an alternative solution -- implement bridge code in DOSBox to forward port/dma/irq to the adapter and use actual hardware with emulated machine. The only issue is that the thing is somewhat on the pricey side. The adapter itself starts around $140 but the worst is SDK at $180. I don't think their "universal layer" is sufficient for what I've described so SDK is a must.

Gameport devices are among the simplest so if this thing works with anything it will work with joystick card. Many of those had just a single port and required polling. I suspect Thrustmaster cards actually used IRQ as well but that is still covered by USB2ISA feature list. Well, if you read that list, everything should work!

I had some experience, but I never fully installed the software for the device. I was using legacy ISA cards in a Windows XP system that did not support the cards. These were the famed LAPC-I and SCC-1 cards.

However, I think I may have found a use for these devices after all. Someone on here posted an OPL Passthrough patch, which sends the data from DOSBox from the program to a real CMS or FM/OPL chip on an ISA Sound Blaster/Adlib or the like. A program called porttalk is required on Win XP systems to talk directly to the hardware, as these cards do not have drivers for them. It may work, but it would be an expensive failure.

That's the point, it is not gameport to USB adapter. It works on the lower level -- you still have exactly the same gameport adapter, it's just controlled through different bus. Latency may or may not be an issue.

I have a big pile of other sound and video cards. Occasionally I use some of them to compare functionality against emulation. Of course, I can use the legacy system I have but the USB adapter, if it works, would be much easier to handle. Besides, those are industrial-grade adapters. Some companies use them because they need that particular old hardware to work. Modified DOSBox capable of talking to any real ISA card would be quite useful to those shops.

It is hard to tell how the drivers for this adapter work. I suspect that "universal layer" is just a hack. It would require porttalk and, as a result, you will have every access to the hardware translated twice. Some of those accesses may not be favored by OS. I wonder if SDK allows finer and more direct control.

A little update. I've contacted ArsTech and got some interesting information from them. They already have a customized version of DOSBox working with their hardware. It's not public yet but they are going to release it really soon. It should not require SDK, and they already have working Windows and Linux builds. They had some issues building OSX version though, and they can use some help in that area. They think that USB2ISA should work in most cases but with some cards there may be some timing issues -- there is a new line of adapters coming that use custom host controller (something called SSI2), it should be more suitable for timing sensitive hardware.

I am going to order one card and give it a try. A few days ago I've got a big bag of old hardware, practically intercepted it on its way to recyclers ? SCC-1, AWE64Gold, TB Tahiti with SSDB, and a few lesser cards joined my already decent collection. I think I can get that piece of hardware good testing.

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