Cloning a Rare ISA Card to Use a Rare CD Drive [video]
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They had a pretty successful little business from that idea. And those cards were STILL selling pretty well into the early 00's--I think they sold them until 2008. Of course the application was never updated and you couldn't just write to random memory locations post Windows 95...so thats the only OS (and DOS) that I ever saw that card run on.
IBM's PC technical reference manual was so detailed that it was possible to design a card without ever having seen the actual hardware.
I also watched this Defcon breakdown on hardware hacking where the presenter goes over the specialized tools to both mount the chips as well as the software to pull firmware at rest to reverse engineer it. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxvpbu9STU4
YouTube channels like My Mate Vince, Northridge Fix, Necroware, and others show folks without any electronics degrees troubleshooting and fixing hardware and I just can't help but want to watch them and think about how fun it would be to get involved...unfortunately I already am at a limit to my hobbies.
The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about EE topics and wondering where I would be today if I would have found out more about this discipline vs going a more traditional administration/IT route.
I wonder if the EE folks wonder other way around?
The future is here for STM32: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs
there is PicoGUS [0], a Gravis Ultrasound emulation, a Raspi Pico based PCMCIA WLAN card [1], EDO/FPM RAM modules [2], "Snark Barker", a soundblaster 1.0 clone [3]...
If you want more electronics stuff, I suggest you follow the creators of these on Twitter.
[0] https://github.com/polpo/picogus
[1] https://www.yyzkevin.com/pcmcia-pico-w-card/
I'm confused in that what it looks like is all you need to do is design a schematic and place chips down on to a PCB and then write software drivers. I thought chips had to be coded too.
You can find the list on the Github page of the project:
You just set an address and write/read data to it.
All you need to do simple input/output on it is to
* wait for "right" address on bus and "right" pins to light up * either latch the data, or output the data * bang the right control bit.
It is entirely doable using basic logic chips, because back then any kind of programmable logic was super expensive.
Compare it to usb-c where you need tens of thousands of lines of code to even negotiate some power stuff (or use specialized chips... that have those tens of thousands of lines of code baked in).
See its pinout - site is in German but there is a nice diagram. https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/643647
The lines marked Addr are address lines, and Data are data lines. Things that appear readable/writeable to the CPU as RAM manipulate the MEMW/MEMR lines, and things that appear readable/writeable to the CPU using its "I/O port" instructions manipulate the IOW/IOR lines. I don't know the low level protocols used there but there is definitely one and why some simple logic chips had to often be added I guess (74SNxxxxx chips very common).
RAM basically does the same thing, as well as anything built in like the clock chip, keyboard controller, serial ports, floppy controller, etc.
One big disadvantage of ISA is that the bus when it was introduced had to run at the same speed as the CPU. When CPUs started getting faster than 8Mhz something was done to keep the ISA bus as 8Mhz, but not sure what.
The other big disadvantage is that this was intimately tied to the 8088 Intel CPU signal lines. PCI (and other things like NuBus and MCA) were CPU independent and required a chipset or other controller to interface, and that's where the complexity started to take off.
What an amazing world we live in where we can design PCBs and get them professionally produced for a pittance. When I was in high school, we were taught how to make PCBs using the old masking and acid etching method. We drew our traces by hand and drilled our own vias. And that was only ~15 years ago! What a magical world we live in!
15 years ago, there was a shop down the corner that would print me PCBs for a pittance. The only thing I had to do was to drill the vias by hand, something which I would do with a simple mount for an off-the-shelf drill.
Today, that shop has been replaced by some brand clothes store of which there are other 17 quasi-identical ones in town.
If anything, it is harder today to get this done than it was 15 years ago.
We had to stick a big blob of solder in the hole.
If you want to know what's possible today at which prices, check out these prototyping services for example: https://jlcpcb.com, https://www.pcbway.com, https://oshpark.com
(Obviously, one would need some kind of hardware interface to the drive.) BUt would it have been possible to use a more modern hardware interface and then do the rest in software?
I know I have an adlib card in there somewhere but not sure if "gold" model
I knew to save the name brand ones vs cheap clones
Some massive scsi controllers that were hundreds of dollars, just can't put them into a landfill.
I damage my brain by scrolling Instagram reels (which are just TikTok reels) too much, and when people caption their stuff, they already censor or change words, like "seggs" instead of "sex". Fucking hell, what world did we end up in where people now act like fifth graders in a Catholic school?
But violence? We're cool with torture porn and hard violence. Up to a few years ago, there was even a subreddit "watchpeopledie". There's plenty more subreddits and shock sites that focus on hyperviolence. It's normal and expected.
Violence, dismemberment, and torture are cool. Sex, or even a female (not a male) nipple just destroys lives.... /cringe
And it was the simplest way to show a bunch of people what would happen if they decided to skip some safety steps, especially on those high torque lathes.
But, "watching people die" was an entertainment subreddit, not a "this is the horrible thing that happened due to lack of safety and how to prevent". At the base of it, it was a torture porn subreddit ala Saw or the 1990's VHS series 'Many Faces of Death'.
It was, but because it was on Reddit => karma generating content => abused to hell. Compare it to r/OSHA.
I'm not sure there is a way to have the content like this and somehow prevent/discourage the abuse. Though a simple disablement of post/comment karma in subreddits like this would had an immense effect, I've seen that numerous times in phpBB/derived forums in the literal "Flame" section. Disabling comments would somewhat work too, but not for the old Reddit.
> 1990's VHS series 'Many Faces of Death'
Yeah, fun times.
If enough of the population (well, not the human population but the financial population, where everyone is inherently not born equal) agrees that a particular thing is morally wrong then it makes sense as a business to follow the tide.
To end this practice, non-religious people would need to form a bank that can facilitate electronic payments on the scope of VISA or Mastercard. That is the kind of undertaking that would need a Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to pull off, and both of them are under the current electronic payment systems thumb.
If you knew someone like Carlos Slim and they were willing to risk being blacklisted by VISA and Mastercard and having their names dragged through the mud for it while putting up the several tens of billions of dollars to try to create a successful alternative payments system then you might have a chance of creating a rival to the big 4 that websites that host fringe content could rely on for processing payments.
Otherwise, you could try to crowdsource is but organizing enough people who were willing to front the money for likely vaporware would be a task difficulty on par with organizing enough people to be elected president of the united states without participating in the two major political extremist parties.
Of course, I dunno if it actually would detect and punish the content-- but that's the situation we've created: Where no one can know what the rules are and you're always policing yourself to reduce the risk of unexplained content removal or worse-- an unappealable de-platforming.