[HN Gopher] Cloning a Rare ISA Card to Use a Rare CD Drive [video]
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Cloning a Rare ISA Card to Use a Rare CD Drive [video]
Author : fortran77
Score : 145 points
Date : 2022-10-01 03:14 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| This 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.
| RALaBarge wrote:
| I 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
|
| 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Same 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.
| xani_ wrote:
| ISA 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 wrote:
| In this case it is effectively a fancy serial port, which
| means all the chips do all the work for you, no programming
| needed.
| _Microft wrote:
| The 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
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| The 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
|
| 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.
| jve wrote:
| > 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?
| pkaye wrote:
| I 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.
| poleguy wrote:
| EE 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 wrote:
| Another 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 wrote:
| > (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
| _Microft wrote:
| The 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
|
| [1] https://www.yyzkevin.com/pcmcia-pico-w-card/
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/0xCats/status/1524708654913662977
|
| [3] https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker
| a2tech wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| In Windows NT, you'd need a kernel mode program to do this.
| Then your device gets exposed as a special kind of file.
| chriscjcj wrote:
| Providing 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 wrote:
| Sure, 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
| ck2 wrote:
| please tell me the pile of 20 year old ISA cards I refused to
| throw out all these years are my path to retirement lol
| pdw wrote:
| If you have a stack of Adlib Gold cards, that might be true.
| ck2 wrote:
| had 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 wrote:
| The "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_(...
| acuozzo wrote:
| Check out vogons.org to see which ones are valuable, if any.
| chem83 wrote:
| Let'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_processo...) and a Samsung 5.25
| floppy which may be useful to get a file from a disk some day.
| quercusa wrote:
| Just a couple more years...
| nullc wrote:
| Gotta love that he felt the need to abort his wolfenstein play
| before the nazi flags became too visible and triggered content
| detection.
| netsharc wrote:
| Love, 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| And 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'.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > "watching people die" was an entertainment subreddit
|
| 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.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| To a certain degree I get it.
|
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| Indeed. Killing no problem, but if the things you were
| killing were nazis the automation (might) hates you...
|
| 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.
| Stamp01 wrote:
| [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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| Drilling and plating vias is the hard part they were
| skipping.
| Stamp01 wrote:
| You guys are getting your vias plated? /meme
|
| We had to stick a big blob of solder in the hole.
| [deleted]
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| TBH, 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| That doesn't scale if you're doing a design that needs
| lots of vias. Particularly so when stitching together
| ground puddles on 2-layer boards. Soldering jumpers into
| hundreds of holes isn't practical.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Yes but... what is the point? We are talking about
| hobbist things.
| _Microft wrote:
| Having a shop in town for rapid iterations of a design sounds
| awesome.
|
| 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
| Stamp01 wrote:
| If you gave a hacker space in town, maybe at your local
| library, and they have a decent CNC router, you can probably
| still get PCBs made locally. I don't know how the price would
| compare to the big bois like PCBway. They wouldn't end up
| looking quite as "professional", but it all depends on the
| price you can get and how much same-day and shopping locally
| matters to you.
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