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Cloning a Rare ISA Card to Use a Rare CD Drive [video]
- RALaBarge 4y agoI saw this video yesterday -- cool to see it pop up here today. 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 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.
- jve 4y ago> 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?
- poleguy 4y agoEE here. Not really about admin/IT. But I do wonder sometimes if I should have done software as a career. Mostly it's a grass is greener feeling when I hear about the high end of the salaries. But I do very well financially, the jobs are stable, and I write cool software to solve my own problems, rather than grinding on someone else's Jira tasks. I do lots of IT and computer admin stuff too, but also on my own terms. Setting up simulation clusters, remote hardware automation, development environments, storage, etc... so much so that our department hired a guy to take on some of that work.
- Tangurena2 4y agoAnother EE here. I suspect that there is a lot of "greener grass" going on (oh look! I spy with my little eye, grass beginning with G). I've been doing software dev for most of the past quarter century. My current hobby is Eurorack synthesis and I build/solder about half of the items from DIY kits. The ones that I'm mostly into are built around STM32 microcontrollers (I threw out all my C/C++ books about 15 years ago - oops!).
- orangepurple 4y ago> (I threw out all my C/C++ books about 15 years ago - oops!). The future is here for STM32: https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs https://github.com/stm32-rs/stm32-rs
- pkaye 4y agoI was a firmware engineer (now doing web development) and knew plenty of ASIC designers who wished they did software. They were good at what they did but felt the pay and opportunities were better in software development.
- _Microft 4y agoThe projects I mention here are not clones themselves but ever cheaper PCB prototypes and microcontrollers make it a fantastic time to create hardware for old systems (e.g. ISA). Enjoy these examples: 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 https://github.com/polpo/picogus [1] https://www.yyzkevin.com/pcmcia-pico-w-card/ https://www.yyzkevin.com/pcmcia-pico-w-card/ [2] https://twitter.com/0xCats/status/1524708654913662977 https://twitter.com/0xCats/status/1524708654913662977 [3] https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker
- doublerabbit 4y agoSame thought I have. 15 years of SysAdmin and wanting to move on to something else. What boggles my mind in this video as example. Do the DOS drivers as an example actually communicate with the chips on the PCB, or are there firmware/data burnt on to the chips? 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.
- _Microft 4y agoThe card for the CD drive actually uses only stock logic chips but no microcontrollers at all and therefore need no ROM dump of an existing card to work. You can find the list on the Github page of the project: https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro
- xani_ 4y agoISA bus is basically just quasi-memory bus with some extras. You get address, you either get data or send data, done. 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).
- mmastrac 4y agoIn this case it is effectively a fancy serial port, which means all the chips do all the work for you, no programming needed.
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoThe ISA bus is basically connected directly to the CPU. See its pinout - site is in German but there is a nice diagram. https://de-academic.com/dic.nsf/dewiki/643647 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.
- nullc 4y agoGotta love that he felt the need to abort his wolfenstein play before the nazi flags became too visible and triggered content detection.
- netsharc 4y agoLove, or hate? 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?
- noasaservice 4y agoThat's what religion and their threats to companies does. 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
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> there was even a subreddit "watchpeopledie" 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.
- noasaservice 4y agoAnd for "this is the reason we have OSHA" in that context, I would say it's essential to show those videos. 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'.
- ck2 4y agoplease tell me the pile of 20 year old ISA cards I refused to throw out all these years are my path to retirement lol
- quercusa 4y agoJust a couple more years...
- pdw 4y agoIf you have a stack of Adlib Gold cards, that might be true.
- ck2 4y agohad to google it - wow they sell for thousands?! 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.
- Lammy 4y agoThe "Gold" cards are rare because Creative paid off Yamaha to delay the release of the Gold's OPL chip for long enough to make Ad Lib Inc go bankrupt, so very very few Gold cards saw the light of day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Lib,_Inc.#AdLib_Gold_1000_(1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Lib,_Inc.#AdLib_Gold_1000_(...
- acuozzo 4y agoCheck out vogons.org to see which ones are valuable, if any.
- chem83 4y agoLet's see: I kept a Diamond Multimedia 16 bit ISA card (meh!), an 8-bit SBPro 2 on the original packaging (this one is somewhat valuable) and, I think, an SBLive! Value (this one is PCI). Might have kept a 3Com 56K modem and some assorted LAN cards (also meh). I wish I had kept my SB AWE64. I also have an original P5 Pentium 60 with the FDIV bug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_processors#P5_based_Pentiums https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_processo...) and a Samsung 5.25 floppy which may be useful to get a file from a disk some day.
- a2tech 4y agoThe ISA bus was really a very approachable way to add hardware to a system. I worked at a place where a couple of electrical engineers wanted to build a bridge from a PC to a specialized industrial control network. So, with very little knowledge of computer programming (they were low level guys) or bus technologies they banged out an ISA card and an application to throw bytes out onto the network. Since ISA cards basically just showed up in memory space you just told the application they wrote which chunk of memory it was using and the application wrote to a specific offset to write data to the network and read from another offset to see what came back in. 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.
- Dwedit 4y agoIn Windows NT, you'd need a kernel mode program to do this. Then your device gets exposed as a special kind of file.
- TMWNN 4y ago>So, with very little knowledge of computer programming (they were low level guys) or bus technologies they banged out an ISA card and an application to throw bytes out onto the network. IBM's PC technical reference manual was so detailed that it was possible to design a card without ever having seen the actual hardware.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoThis video is DOS drivers in a nutshell. They never just worked, and it was always a driver problem and not a hardware problem. It could take days of troubleshooting to get a new device working.
- Stamp01 4y ago[spoilers] The moment it worked, you could see he was almost in tears. I was almost in tears with him, and I didn't even spend over a month tediously reverse engineering this ISA card. 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!
- AshamedCaptain 4y agoWhat an amazing world? 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoDrilling and plating vias is the hard part they were skipping.
- Stamp01 4y agoYou guys are getting your vias plated? /meme We had to stick a big blob of solder in the hole.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AshamedCaptain 4y agoTBH, I never had any vias plated. I would always use solder and consider soldering overall the most difficult task of the entire process without any doubt, much more annoying and difficult than drilling.
- chriscjcj 4y agoProviding one had enough knowledge of the protocol the drive was using, would it have been possible to not recreate the ISA card and make the drive functional using software emulation? (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?
- gattilorenz 4y agoSure, if you have the documentation you could connect it to a parallel port (assuming it’s quick enough and level compatible) and write a device driver compatible with MSCDEX, but that’s also no easy task
- UltraViolence 4y agoI'm pretty shocked and thrilled at the same time that someone would waste their talent getting an obsolete CD-ROM drive to work. I mean, there's a plethora of ways to read a CD-ROM still.