Just to be safe, you should press Ctrl-C at the DOS prompt after swapping USB sticks. This forces DOS to re-read the disk's file allocation table, instead of relying upon the copy it may have in RAM. Pressing Ctrl-C is an old trick from CP/M, which recommended that you always do it after swapping disks, but even though DOS is supposed to automatically know when you swap disks, it still works in DOS if you want to be on the safe side.
Nice one Kevin. As usual! It feels so much like home having you, Shelby... commenting here. Also, your comments are always insightful and knowledgeable, one keeps learning something from you everytime.
Note that this is 4090 clusters of 16 512 byte sectors, to work with 16 bit sector numbers in the old driver API. DOS 4 upgraded the driver API to go beyond 65536 sectors / partition, as well as adding the FAT16 format.
I seem to recall encountering an issue with drives bigger than 2GB at some point along the way. Even though the file system supported it, the BIOS wouldn't properly recognize the drive, and I needed to install a driver to make it work, or maybe a firmware for the drive? Its so long ago now I can't remember for sure. But there was an extra step that I needed to take to get my 5.25" 2GB quantum bigfoot hard drive to work in my PC.
Holy Crap! When you were playing the golf game and I heard "looks like you hit the tree Jim" I realized this was the golf game my friend had when I was 12 and have been looking for for years, thank you for helping me find it!
It's fascinating to me to see your video on this thing because this is what I just quickly teased at the start of my FreeDOS video as an upcoming project that made me put the effort in for that. I found it to be amazingly helpful but I only tried it With FreeDOS and only with FAT32 partitions (which was the whole reason I wanted that). It was slow but I thought it was just the 8088 struggling to do FAT32. I'm definitely going to have to do more testing now.
Fascinating timing indeed, I was surprised to see that in your video briefly as well since I'd just finished up editing this one. I look forward to seeing more results of your testing!
Hope this doesn't feel like LGR ganking a smaller tech-tuber :P I guess you'll have a chance to go more in depth, and if nothing else it was very much worth it to see you do that 8088 class FreeDOS install, been wondering lately what the point of using FreeDOS would be on a vintage machine and i guess that's one.
I saw one of these in another video by Retro Erik a few weeks ago. Seems like a neat idea and probably intended to keep old industrial PCs running when the old parallel ATA DOMs have died.
First time I've ever seen Commander Keen count down with his fingers during the loading. I wonder what other games have hidden animations in loadtimes that just go by too fast these days.
I've got the same card and can confirm it just is like this. Tried lots of things to make it go faster, there is just some issue with the firmware/translation logic used by the CH375 device.
The CH375 USB interface chip from WCH-IC (Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics) has an 8-bit host bus, matching the 8-bit ISA bus. Looks like the driver that's provided directly interfaces with this bus. The USB side supports USB 2.0 Full Speed (12 Mbps). I guess the limitation here is probably in this driver they provided. The IC itself seems capable enough, and the ISA bus, even at 8-bit, is sufficiently fast. Perhaps a replacement driver can improve performance here?
I noticed the firmware binary was there on the CD, I smell a community reverse-engineering project! I guess an important question is how much "smart" is in the driver, and how much is in the firmware?
I bet the problem with DOS 3.3 is that it has no support for >32MB volumes. Would be interesting to see if the drive can be partitioned and formatted using DOS utilities.
is it seeing the USB drive or something USB or, is PCB card, doing some sore translation, man in the middle, thing like the PC not seeing a USB drive, with it having bios Boot chip option could the card be a net work card with a hole mini network sever (NAS), internal baked into the card and the USB drive is really just drive on the mini server? that would explain 10kbit a second transfer speed?
Last time I checked, there were still ISA-bus industrial computers (mostly in the PC-104 form factor) being made, so this sort of thing makes sense as some of their peripherals become harder to get.
One could say that industrial machines are old fashioned and obsolete with their ISA slots and PS/2 ports and RS232 and VGA/D-sub, but on the other hand SATA, PCIe, SSDs, etc area also common in modern systems. And those machines are often for a specific task where the old ports are needed.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Some of those systems and connections are preferred in industrial systems because they're more robust than later replacements, or they do something later replacements don't. For instance, USB can have software failures that disable the keyboard and mouse. PS/2 doesn't even have the software layers that do that failing in USB. RS-232 can be used to readily interface to a remote terminal, allowing the local machine to run completely headless. It also easily converts to RS-422 or RS-485, which allows longer-distance transmission and in the later multi-drop circuits. You get similar results with Ethernet, but that requires much more complex software support. That's mostly drop-in libraries these days, but it wasn't always, and you may be dealing with equipment too old for such code. (There's still industrial machines out there that take PAPER TAPE as input.)
Gotta admit, it was refreshing how off the cuff and clear this video was. Nice someone else demonstrated it's more reliable than an old floppy drive... but still no replacement for compactflash for faster speed. Glad you took the time to do that so any of us considering it for our XT projects don't have to. I don't make a lot of UA-cam comments (I probably should) but... I just wanted to say thanks.
It’s been a billion years (literally, like the late 80s) since I used DOS 3.3. Didn’t it have a maximum partition size of 32MB? I remember formatting my extremely large 40MB disk in 2. I guess you know more than me, I guess the driver hacked that somehow.
I recall the same. My PC had a pair of 40MB drives, and if I booted from DOS 3.3 I couldn't read either. I could repartition with FDISK, limited to 32MB.
I'm so glad nowadays the problem is that you can't buy a storage device that's big enough to require multiple partitioning just to use the entire space.
Interesting. I'm sure FAT12 vs FAT16 affected it. May also be how the device is formatted: floppies don't have a partition table, and not all USB sticks do either (by default). That CH375B chip at the heart of it looks interesting, a fairly generic USB host to parallel interface. WCH makes a variety of interesting things of various degrees of magic. On the other hand... Part of me wonders if somebody could use the rpi pico PIO peripheral to do isa interfacing (with appropriate buffers) and maybe do a more specialized/customizable open source certain, since the Pico has USB host capability (though it might need a diode removal or something?)
Aliexpress is absolute gold mine for this things. Think about pretty much any combination of ports or plugs and there's probably someone selling it on Aliexpress.
I dunno why I watch you. Prolly some nostalgic comfort which does wonders in the wartime that's raging here. Just sit with a beer and remember how it was back then, when I tried to figure out crap by myself and asking dad to help me. When I was 6 or something, tinkering with zx spectrum and 386 ibm pc without a soundcard. It's like a portal to a time when everyone was alive and things were simple and the world felt like an amazing united place full of wonders of new technology. The world changed so damn much, but our retro stuff is still united. Unlike now, when everything is destroyed and burning, barbaric war is raging and everyone just tries to survive, the future is grim. It feels like I belong to the world like back then, instead of this failed state. Thank you for your content.
Interesting. Was wondering how DOS was going to use a USB device without drivers. But it looks like the CH375 is basically just a application-specific microcontroller with a USB interface running in host mode and has an integrated filesystem "subprogram" for FAT12/16/32, and the DOS driver just queries the microcontroller over the ISA bus without needing to handle any of the complexities of USB. Looking at the PCB a 1:38, it seems like the CH375 is directly connected to the ISA bus (via some bus decoders or whatever), so i'm guessing they are having the DOS driver communicate with it directly, and I imagine that's why it's painfully slow -- it only seems to have a 64 byte buffer, and can only transfer 8 bits/1 byte at a time.
Yea I was about to say. I was looking in to their PCIe to ISA adaptor chips (CH 368L) and saw this one. If it was a 16-bit isa, you might be slightly better using DMA, but not old style XT DMA:P
Oh that golf game at the end! I played that when i was a kid. Those birds are instantly recognizable. Got those birds in my dreams for a while. AAARRRRGH
Yeah, drives of the time had significant limits on the C/H/S values, and your entire partition has to live inside of the allowed values for DOS. This is before "LBA" translation was even a thing. Thus, even at "2GB" of DOS 6.22, its going to have to be the "right" 2GB of the flash drive.
@@makomk There's also CHS information in the partition table etc. It's unused by modern systems but old DOSes might _only_ use that. The compatibility might be better with something like DOS 7.x or FreeDOS.
I love to see all the things you can do with ISA Based computers because these ISA Cards are so reliable. They were manufactured very good and are resilient, easy to fix and endure for a long time.
This is very similar to the implementation I've seen on a few Thin Clients from HP that have USB, are DOS compatible and will mount any device that is a USB Mass Storage Device (!), but not USB Flash Drive - like most USB sticks I've tested. So also only a few (especially older ones) worked for me, because they can be accessed like HDDs.
The incorrect free space number could be caused by the formatted cluster size. Or there may just be a bug in the 32-bit arithmetic used to display the number.
Having a way to so comfortably get files exchanged is a treat. That's the reason I searched for a USB and a network card for my retro build. Not having to swap hard drives or flash cards around or having to burn CDs/DVDs is so convenient. And the slow transfer speed is almost appropriate. Imagine having that thing hooked to the Internet and loading stuff of BBS at the day.
I remember back in the day where the system shown in this video cost several thousand $$$$, and it was mind blowing to get such vibrant and sharp colors on IBM PC.
Years ago Clint's AT unboxing video popped up in my recommendations. It brought back memories of my first AT, and how much I paid for it. I've been a fan ever since 😁
That feels like an utterly authentic to the time isa bus installation, for any card that was a teeny bit non standard. Minus the bus conflicts. And the correct information was probably spread through word of mouth rather then electronically.
looks like it is something that you would add to an age old CNC machine that still runs on old hardware but allowing you to use USB drives for easy of transfer
A friend of mine had a CNC mill like that - ran a 286 inside, he had me troubleshoot it - it was a bad RAM chip (not even SIMMS or SIPPS, straight up DIP). It had a CGA card in it too, not sure what that was supposed to go to (no screen, just 7 segment displays)
I was thinking it's for peripherals rather than storage, especially at that slow rate. It's natural enough to think of storage as a hobbyist. But I don't think a single software or firmware update to an old CNC isn't going to require more than a 1.44 MB floppy. Even just a new keyboard of mouse is generally going to need usb (at least without paying a premium from industrial suppliers)
My guess would be that emulated/calculated C/H/S values are too big. The 256MB one works because it is inherently below the classic 504MB BIOS limit (63/16/1024). I've had similar issues with SD→IDE adapters, for 9x era systems, where the default/modern windows MBR partition table was *not* compatible with the old systems, meaning the CHS values were off, causing DOS/old windows to fail accessing it. So one thing you could try is to repartition the 1GB stick on a W98SE system with NUSB, keeping the size/CHS values below the 504MB limit.
That's also the direction that I was thinking. Maybe even try formatting it with fdisk on DOS. If I remember correctly, MS-DOS 3.3 offered a maximum partition size of 32MB, and was the first version to allow multiple partition on a drive. (Which might be why this is the earliest version that is listed as supported) MS-DOS 4.x increased the maximum partition size to 2.1GB (Where it stayed to the end), so that would explain why the 265MB drive works in DOS 6.22 but not in 3.3, and none of the bigger drive don't work at all under DOS.
@@aixtom979 two issues: firstly, there are BIOS hard drive limitations as well as DOS. I thought the original DOS 4.0 only could do a little more than 500MB, contemporary PC BIOS were also around that size (528MB?), but earlier BIOS were limited, and it wasn't uncommon for XTs and ATs to need a BIOS upgrade to use larger drives. Second, I don't imagine LGR is ignorant of DOS limitations, and tried partitioning the larger drives, don't you?
@@squirlmy I don't think it's particularly well known by most people what all limitations exist at various points in hardware, BIOS, DOS, and software. It's A LOT to keep track of. Also, that driver is going to be full of secret sauce to bridge the gap between flash storage, which is inherently LBA addressed, and antique OSes that assume every media has CHS parameters. There's a good chance it's hooking some DOS interrupts and completely bypassing the DOS BIOS functions, and the ROM BIOS functions. But to what level it's emulating is anyone's guess. Is it redirecting all file access to its own internal code? Or providing raw block device access? Is it patching the MBR and BPB tables in real-time, or does it require a partition table and FAT type with CHS addressing to be compatible with DOS? It seems that it isn't emulating _too_ much of the file system itself, since the readme specifically says "Supports all file systems *that the operating system can support.* "
@@squirlmy Well, I gave up reading peoples minds years ago, since it never seemed to work quite right. So I can only go with what is in the video. 😜 A lot would depend on what the card is trying to emulate in what way, but the fdisk /STATUS or /DUMP I was waiting for in the video never appeared...
Oh, seems like my additional comment about the page that had an in-depth analysis of this card got yeeted by spam protection, so here the quote without the link: > Take note that loading CH375DOS.SYS will freeze the system if the USB drive is larger than 512MB, not formatted as FAT16, or contains multiple partitions. Also, only USB thumb drives are expected to work. USB hard disks will most likely not work as intended, unless used with an external power supply.
i have a p-166 with CF installed and had the same problem with 512mb limit because of bios. Used "ontrack disk manager" as a work around and now have a 32gig cf with multiple 2gig partitions. Not pretty but works a treat..🤗
Interesting little chip. According to the datasheet, it also supports USB device mode - which means that in theory, with the right drivers and the right non-standards-approved cabling, you could plug your 286 PC into another more modern PC as a USB peripheral. Not sure what practical application there'd be for that mind.
Data swapping comes to mind, along with quick troubleshooting of programs. There are potentially several other practical applications that I haven't thought of, either.
Doing LapLink without the LapLink cable to connect two PCs. There were a few companies that made cables in the Windows 9x to XP era that had a Type A plug on both ends and a big plastic lump in the middle with the electronics for one way or sometimes two way data transfer. Some even had the transfer software in the cable so you never had to keep a CD-ROM with it.
Those white mini cd's with the blue constipated panda on them are awesome. Like, I wouldn't put them in someone else's computer with a 10 foot pole kind of awesome.
Interesting device, I still find that Zip disks are my goto solution for quickly getting stuff over. Miles faster than floppies and I have a USB zip reader which works with every modern PC I've tried, also you can keep your old PC stock and just plug in the ZIP drive over the LPT port.
The normal zip drive software doesn't run on anything older than (I think) a 286, but there's a third party program called PalmZip which does, and it's absolutely tiny. I use zip drives as mass storage for some of my old machines and it's very successful.
DOS 3.31 is the first version where the FAT BIOS Parameter Block (the first sector in the FAT volume) supported 32-bit sector counts. So, 3.30 is going to be really limited in the disk size it can support. Larger volumes are going to fill the existing 16-bit records with "0" to indicate that this volume uses 32-bit records, which might be why DOS claimed the FAT volume was invalid. Also, that long wait to get the initial directory listing is because: For DOS to know how much free space remains on a volume, it has to walk the entire FAT to count how many cluster entries are marked as "free". It then computes the bytes as (free_clusters * sectors_per_cluster * bytes_per_sector) and arrives at the number of bytes free. Subsequent directory listings are faster because DOS tracks this count in an internal structure so it doesn't have to re-scan the FAT every time. At least until something changes the disk, or the memory used is given up for use by an application. This wasn't so much a problem when the FAT only contained a couple thousand entries (e.g., 2880 for a 1.4MB disk with 512 byte sectors, and 1 sector per cluster.) But, when you have a volume that requires a couple MB dedicated to the file allocation tables, it's a lot to ask of that poor 4.77MHz x 1-byte bus. (EDIT: Whoops.. AT, not XT. Still, not very fast.)
It's interesting that Wch claims the card can get rw speeds up to 200-400 kb/s, and supports FAT32 on DOS 7.x Also the last digit can range between 0-255, 0 is the fastest and 255 is the slowest I think the driver you got there is the newer(or suppose the newest?) version due to the copyright date is 2007, and the last discussion in chinese is roughly 16 years ago The file at ToughDev's blog includes a utility that can format USB drives to FAT16 under XP, and according to documents that's a prerequisite for using bigger USB disks
Part of the compabillity problem could be due to many drives using the GPT partition layout instead of MSDOS. You need to reinitialize the partition table to MSDOS for it to work.
I've not come across that problem for flash drives, in fact the opposite. Unless that's a recent change in industry standards, by default flash drives had MSDOS partitions. I do a lot of Linux distro-hopping, including using dedicated flash drives (MX linux is the best!) and changing flash drives to GPT has been always necessary.
The delay at the end of the first directory listing with larger drives is MSDOS counting the number of clusters in the FAT that are marked as free. The bigger the partition the longer the delay. After the initial free space count, however, MSDOS just uses the original counted value that has been updated on the fly as clusters on the disk are allocated and released. I don't think the actual free cluster count was actually stored on the drive to provide an instant display of bytes available until Windows 95.
I got the following results of the new driver on a 386SX-25 where I overclocked the CPU (not by much because the Headland chipset doesn´t like it) and the ISA BUS. Also downclocked the CPU using the turbo button before boot and that gave me the same CPU and ISA speeds. The USB Flash Drive is just a generic 2GB AliExpress one, maybe better results can be had with a better model: CPU 25 MHz/ ISA BUS 8 MHz 356,8 KB/s 392,3 KB/s 46,1 IOPS 83,4 IOPS CPU 27,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 8 MHz 367,4 KB/s 403,2 KB/s 42,4 IOPS 76,4 IOPS CPU 25 MHz/ ISA BUS 12,5 MHz 416,7 KB/s 446,7 KB/s 41,6 IOPS 95,2 IOPS CPU 27,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 12,5 MHz 428,5 KB/s 454,6 KB/s 49,0 IOPS 89,8 IOPS CPU 25 MHz/ ISA BUS 13,75 MHz 428,5 KB/s 452,1 KB/s 46,6 IOPS 95,2 IOPS CPU 27,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 13,75 MHz 440,9 KB/s 466,5 KB/s 49,6 IOPS 93,1 IOPS CPU 8 MHz/ ISA BUS 8 MHz 235,9 KB/s 239,0 KB/s 24,5 IOPS 42,7 IOPS CPU 12,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 12,5 MHz 317,3 KB/s 343,6 KB/s 31,1 IOPS 59,8 IOPS CPU 13,75 MHz/ ISA BUS 13,75 MHz 350,4 KB/s 367,4 KB/s 36,2 IOPS 68,6 IOPS
0:52 "think it is just 1.1": yes, what else 🙂? ISA is slow, very slow. And getting 10mb/s+ in DOS device is more than unlikely 🙂. But thanks for having us and showing the existence of such a cool device 🙂.
“It Kind of Sucks” personally I think this thing is amazing as a FDD replacement. Commander Keen loaded like I’d expect on a floppy or what a C64 would with a floppy drive. No more disks.
Very interesting little card. I guess that there are some old PCs still out there running in industrial applications. This is actually a great solution certain circumstances!
Got to say, my jam is old tech reimagined. Like, making an ISA card for usb drives or sound blaster 3, or wifi card for comodor. I think it comes from my love of steam punk which is old tech reimagined in of its self.
Got one, just had a difficult time finding that CH375 driver. I used it to backup my 84 meg physical hard drive to a USB Drive. Then removed the HD to put in a bootable Compact Flash Drive. Then put my files back. I'm running a Tandy 1000 TX with a 512 Meg Compact Flash drive. Go to E-Bay for these cards, just look for who has USA stock. Takes about 3-5 days and you have one.
I was hoping for a blurb today, and actually thinking about this concept while torturing myself on a 2.0 USB LiveCD for a modern PC. I always wondered why USB devices never popped up since they are probably the most prevalent and cheapest. Interesting that no one has made a good engineering effort yet for this, although I assume it must be easier or more sensible to use CF or SD since those are plentiful as old PC storage options.
It should be possible to kludge together a parallel port to SD card converter relatively easily, though it probably wouldn't be fast since you'd be using the basic SPI mode and bit-banging. Also I've completely forgotten the name of the manufacturer that made bridge modules to enable 8 bit microcontrollers to access USB mass storage devices, but they've been around a while.
This is like when I was testing flashdrives for a Wii. It's mostly the USB drive firmware that determines if it'll work. The cheap MicroCenter brand USB drives worked instantly. No idea why, but I have a few of them and they just always work. I'm guessing they don't have anything fancy built into the controller/firmware.
U0 1 2 3 states maybe, fully on to suspended, Also there were hybrid USB devices in the past that did some form of bus mastering to supply a driver to Windows then switched out of the firmware state. U1 USB devices ! ? I Remember there is software to disable that auto mode of. the USB device.
I bet using DOS 7 from Win 9x would enable using larger USB drives with FAT32. I'd also try different speed parameters to see if it can transfer faster. "Fast" QIC tape drives that used the floppy interface could do 500K per second on 8 bit ISA with a 2.88M compatible floppy controller. Lacking such a controller in the PC, most of them had a "high speed" ISA controller card option.
Oh my god this is actually very neat. Yes, there are better options, like networking, serial, parallel, but, if you haven't really dealt with/experienced the older PCs, and you don't have access to other machines, where you can write floppy disks, or you don't have CF cards, and you don't want to deal with bulky things like other drives etc. etc., this is a pretty nifty alternative. The USB support is iffy, but maybe they wanted to keep the supported storage sizes down because it's emulating something and you don't need GIGABYTES on a 5170 anyway? So 256 MB is pretty sufficient. But other than that, yeah, it's slow, but very convenient.
I bought a ISA USB card to install in an older PC (yeah, I do the retro building too)... but I bought it like 10 years ago, from a local store (Fry's Electronics... sadly they're gone now). It's nice to see that people are still making hardware to support "older" hardware. Now... if we could get someone to make some good ol' 101-keyboards (WITHOUT the Windows keys), with "manual-switching" XT/AT mode, and in black, not just beige... THAT would be something!!! BTW... you should try soldering-in some header pins on the USB card you have there. You might find out you have a "second" USB port, that you can could bring to the front of your computer case (or install a card reader and plug it into that header)!
@@kornaros96 I wasn't sure why you said "Unicomp" until I Googled it (next time, post the URL, so people don't have to "search" for it). Anyway... you didn't get the "reason" for wanting a XT/AT switchable keyboard: It needs to be an "actual" XT/AT keyboard, with a 5-pin DIN plug. USB isn't going to work on an older computer that doesn't have or ever supported USB ports!
I got an update from the man himself: He's been extremely busy lately and hasn't had time for Blerb videos due to his move and working through his backlog of content to be made.
It's fine for what it is. Especially as it has a ROM socket on it. You don't need an xtide card, you can just use a boot run in this. My 386 has an ISA network card with an xtide ROM, so this would be a direct swap and I'd use USB rather than network for file transfer. Neat!
For those who have one and get a IRQ timeout error (there seems to be a couple of different boards), I used these settings: Device=C:\USB\CH375DOS.SYS @260 #0 %1 The location directory will be wherever you installed the sys file. Remember, the USB drive has to be installed. I partitioned & formatted to 512mb FAT16 (FAT). Some claim you can use large hard drives, I haven’t tried drives larger than 512mb.
Sure it's slow but the convenience of being able to move files from a modern machine to an old one without an external floppy drive or networking shenanigans is pretty compelling. I don't have a machine old enough to benefit from that but it's still pretty neat.
I bought a generic USB 1.1 hard rive enclosure back in the late 90s that a,lowed me to transfer files to and from a Parallel ATA hard drive at a whopping 12 Mbps speed. It was pretty slow for the time compared to the max hard drive speed in then current PATA drives was 33 MB/s. Of course at the time just being able to connect an external hard drive easily via USB to a Win98 laptop even if it took forever to transfer data was useful t me. I can recall transferring files between two computers via a null serial connection and later via two Ethernet 10\100 ports using a crossover cable (needed back before Ethernet ports that autodetected PC to PC Ethernet connections were standard) and those where slow too but still better then trying to transfer large amounts of data via floppy or buying expensive external storage options like Bernoulli and Syquest removable cartridge drives (this was before Zip disks and CD-R/RW existed). Even after the advent of Zip, a direct connection via 100m/bs Ethernet meant you could transfer many hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes overnight without needing to swap disks so long as time was not of the essence. So sometimes putting up with slow transfer rates are better then the alternatives if you can do the complete transfer unattended and at a reasonable cost. For an old IBM PC, this should be faster then even a 1.44MB floppy or at least as fast as then most common hard drive transfer speeds via an 8bit ISA slot.
Hi Clint, your size issue is because of the AT BIOS. You can put an XTIDE BIOS EEPROM in that socket and large devices should start to work (up to 8gb with 6.22 or 32GB with Win98/FAT32). Go read up on the XTIDE BIOS page, it explains all this better than I can. In summary, DOS has limits (of course), but those limits are related to the FAT file system capabilities of the specific DOS version. Like 3.30 could go up to 32MB, but version 3.31 supports up to 512 MB (thanks to Compaq). 4.0 is where true “BIGDOS” or FAT16 arrived. Previously disks used FAT12, the same version of FAT used on floppies. The odd free disk space you see is due to the integer overrun that’s happening from the measly 12-bits used to track disk allocations. Be careful writing to your device in this state- it likely will get corrupted! DOS runs with the confines of the BIOS, and there you either need something like XTIDE to overlay the BIOS in the machine, or software “Drive Overlay” like that from OnTrack Software. That’s the stuff that came with disks larger than 540MB back in the day, it’d install itself in the MBR (like a virus) and overlay the BIOS before DOS loaded. Hope this helps, I’ll stop typing now before this message becomes it’s own “blurb!”
Back in the day (1989), after trying to install my 40mb wd-file card into my xt clone. I discovered that dos 3.3 can’t mount a volume larger than 32mb.
I don't see the card at fault here - rather dos and the driver - and mostly the crap that modern windows bloats onto it with modern partitioning have you tried to partition the thumbdrives on one of your 9x machines or even with linux?
I have a little USB / Floppy stick with a little toggle switch to turn off the floppy and another for write protect. 32MB Came with the ASUS P4P-BP P4 mobo.
Looks like another part has just been added to the list for my XT clone project (a Vendex Headstart Plus). Thanks for the video, Clint. I'll definitely refer to it when I get my USB-ISA card!
I got an update from the man himself: He's been extremely busy lately and hasn't had time for Blerb videos due to his move and working through his backlog of content to be made.
As other commenters have mentioned, it seems like the controller chip itself would be capable of decent speeds (at least, as far as ISA goes), have you tried this in a more modern Windows-capable machine running 95/98 so as to circumvent what I would assume is a driver bottleneck? Maybe your Socket 7 PC?
Are you ever gonna cover "modern" ISA motherboards? You can get LGA775 and newer boards with both PCI Express and ISA. The use case might be a bit limited outside of specific industrial applications..
Very cool. You can get a bunch of 512mb USB 2.0 thumb drives in all different colors off of ebay for close to nothing. A cool way to store dos software in the new age. =)
The fact that it's reading the drive as 500 megs indicates to me that something is not right. Maybe a defective card, or simply a driver issue, but it may be why it's running so slow as well...
It'd be interesting to probe the DOS version floor. I'd guess it's one of the OEM (famously Compaq IIRC?) DOS 3.3x's that adds FAT16. Retail MS-DOS 3.3 only does FAT12, I don't think Windows can format FAT12. Rubbish documentation, in any case. :)
@@RetroSwim And the reason we needed to introduce BIGFAT was *not* due to some restriction in the FAT filesystem that has been listed in DOS 4 (and COMPAQ DOS 3.31), but instead due to a restriction in the MSDOS "partition access" interface. In MS-DOS, the layering of the storage works like this for BIOS-supported drives: 1. The BIOS provides INT13, and without extensions, you get a soft limit at 504MB for simple IDE implementation, and a hard limit at 8GB due to the INT13 interface design. 2. A driver integrated in the DOS kernel uses INT13, scans for partition, and exposes each partition with a supported partition type in the partition table is exposed as a different "block device". 3. Block devices are exposed using the INT25/INT26 interface. This interface receives a drive letter and a sector number. The INT26 interface is unaware of the concept of clusters. 4. The FAT driver (the only filesystem driver in DOS) uses INT25/INT26 to read/write sectors, and manages clusters, files and directories. CHKDSK also uses INT25/INT26 to get raw partition access. the DOS 3.3 limit is caused by the INT25/INT26 interface: It takes the sector number in a single 16-bit register, limiting the number of *sectors* on a partition to 65535. At the standard sector size of 0.5KB, this results in a partition size limit of 32MB. Starting with COMPAQ DOS 3.31, INT25/INT26 got extended to a new 32-bit interface, enabling the file system driver to access partitions bigger than 32MB. This limit is not related to the number of bits in the cluster number (FAT12 vs. FAT16), the cluster size (I guess even DOS 3.3 would support 32KB cluster size), or some CHS stuff (as the 504 and 8GB limits).
Oh, Windows can definitely format in FAT12. But probably only for floppies. ;-) The actual delineation is the number of data clusters in the volume. Up to 4,084 clusters, FAT12. From 4,085 to 65,524 clusters, FAT16. From 65,525 through 268,425,446 clusters, FAT32. You get some leeway in absolute volume size by sliding the sectors-per-cluster multiplier one way or the other, but DOS and Windows use a table of sector count thresholds to make the determination which version to use, and thus which multiplier to set to ensure the cluster count falls within the right range.
The hot swap capability would be nice but else it seems worse then the USB ports of my 233 MMX with one of the first ATX boards using a DOS USB drivers. You have to reboot but the speed seems better and I can also use bigger SD cards and sticks. A 64GB MicroSD card was recognised as 8033MB and partitioned and formatted easily into 2GB (or multiple 2GB partitions). The 14MB DOOM II WAD was copied in 25s.
Needs to have a faster transfer rate for it to be practical for my retro rig, gonna keep using floppies. Also, need an older version of FAT file system to display disk sizes properly for DOS 3.3
It could be dependent on the partition size and type. Also, not all USB sticks are compatible with USB 1.1 these days.The drives would probably work better when fdisked on that machine so that you know the number of cylinders and heads that the computer's bios needs.
I was also wondering if the smaller drive was partitioned or just a raw filesystem. It would be interesting to dd the drive contents onto a larger drive to see if that works.
Okay that's pretty cool, I have a amd 586 system and it has 3 pci slots two of which are taken up by a voodoo 2 and s3 virge the last slot is used by a usb card for flash drives. I don't really use isa much aside from the sound card so this would be cool to free up a slot for a pci ethernet card or a ide controller
Old(er) BIOSes and versions of DOS do limit the maximum harddisk size, so that's most likely the problem with the flash drives not being recognized. The IBM probably uses cylinder/head/sector addressing, so that limits you to 528MB. And partitioning the flash drive doesn't change the geometry. You might create a single 256MB partition on a 1GB flash drive, but when queried the flash drive will still report itself as being 1GB, something the BIOS and/or operating system doesn't support/recognize. Realistically I think the biggest flash drive you could use with this particular setup is 512MB.
Just to be safe, you should press Ctrl-C at the DOS prompt after swapping USB sticks. This forces DOS to re-read the disk's file allocation table, instead of relying upon the copy it may have in RAM. Pressing Ctrl-C is an old trick from CP/M, which recommended that you always do it after swapping disks, but even though DOS is supposed to automatically know when you swap disks, it still works in DOS if you want to be on the safe side.
Nice one Kevin. As usual! It feels so much like home having you, Shelby... commenting here. Also, your comments are always insightful and knowledgeable, one keeps learning something from you everytime.
thx
Great to know, thanks!
I forgot about that. It's been so long since I've used DOS!
I did not know that
FAT16 was introduced in MS-DOS 4.0.
MS-DOS 3.3 only know FAT12, so the maximum partition size was limited to 32MB.
That's 32mb would be a huge help for some of my elderly cnc equipment. Beats the shit out of floppy emulation
Note that this is 4090 clusters of 16 512 byte sectors, to work with 16 bit sector numbers in the old driver API. DOS 4 upgraded the driver API to go beyond 65536 sectors / partition, as well as adding the FAT16 format.
I seem to recall encountering an issue with drives bigger than 2GB at some point along the way. Even though the file system supported it, the BIOS wouldn't properly recognize the drive, and I needed to install a driver to make it work, or maybe a firmware for the drive? Its so long ago now I can't remember for sure. But there was an extra step that I needed to take to get my 5.25" 2GB quantum bigfoot hard drive to work in my PC.
@@bnoops123 Back then 32mb was the size of most consumer hard drives.
DOS 3.31 can handle 512MB partitions!
Holy Crap! When you were playing the golf game and I heard "looks like you hit the tree Jim" I realized this was the golf game my friend had when I was 12 and have been looking for for years, thank you for helping me find it!
It's fascinating to me to see your video on this thing because this is what I just quickly teased at the start of my FreeDOS video as an upcoming project that made me put the effort in for that. I found it to be amazingly helpful but I only tried it With FreeDOS and only with FAT32 partitions (which was the whole reason I wanted that). It was slow but I thought it was just the 8088 struggling to do FAT32. I'm definitely going to have to do more testing now.
I thought the same thing, I recognized it but it was not channel I was expecting it on.
I thought the device looked familiar... man my memory sucks
I guess you've been scooped ;)
Fascinating timing indeed, I was surprised to see that in your video briefly as well since I'd just finished up editing this one. I look forward to seeing more results of your testing!
Hope this doesn't feel like LGR ganking a smaller tech-tuber :P I guess you'll have a chance to go more in depth, and if nothing else it was very much worth it to see you do that 8088 class FreeDOS install, been wondering lately what the point of using FreeDOS would be on a vintage machine and i guess that's one.
I saw one of these in another video by Retro Erik a few weeks ago. Seems like a neat idea and probably intended to keep old industrial PCs running when the old parallel ATA DOMs have died.
Orrr not, given the driver requirement. Maybe a bootrom in that socket could let you start up from it.
It even is about the same physical size
First time I've ever seen Commander Keen count down with his fingers during the loading. I wonder what other games have hidden animations in loadtimes that just go by too fast these days.
When you have played the game on an XT laptop complete with orange lcd... you definitely see the animation :)
Used to see that all the time on my old 386sx 16, though still much faster than this.
I've got the same card and can confirm it just is like this.
Tried lots of things to make it go faster, there is just some issue with the firmware/translation logic used by the CH375 device.
That's unfortunate, but in a way I'm glad it's not just me
The CH375 USB interface chip from WCH-IC (Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics) has an 8-bit host bus, matching the 8-bit ISA bus. Looks like the driver that's provided directly interfaces with this bus. The USB side supports USB 2.0 Full Speed (12 Mbps).
I guess the limitation here is probably in this driver they provided. The IC itself seems capable enough, and the ISA bus, even at 8-bit, is sufficiently fast.
Perhaps a replacement driver can improve performance here?
Well, it depends on the CPU. But in theory, 10x the speed should be doable.
I noticed the firmware binary was there on the CD, I smell a community reverse-engineering project! I guess an important question is how much "smart" is in the driver, and how much is in the firmware?
I was thinking the device usb port was not wired correctly to be backward compatible but i could be wrong.
I am pretty sure that USB 1.0 (And 1.1) is 12 Mbps and USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps
@@brunof1996 USB 2.0 FS mode is 12 Mbps. 480 Mbit is High Speed. USB 3 (5 Gbit/s) is Super Speed.
Yes, USB naming is terrible and confuses everyone.
I bet the problem with DOS 3.3 is that it has no support for >32MB volumes. Would be interesting to see if the drive can be partitioned and formatted using DOS utilities.
is it seeing the USB drive or something USB or, is PCB card, doing some sore translation, man in the middle, thing like the PC not seeing a USB drive, with it having bios Boot chip option could the card be a net work card with a hole mini network sever (NAS), internal baked into the card and the USB drive is really just drive on the mini server? that would explain 10kbit a second transfer speed?
i doubt it can be manipulated with fdisk. but i suspect if it were partitioned with a volume of 30 megs or less it would work. also avoid dos 4.xx
DOS 3.3 has a limit to 32MB (FAT12), which you are correct on the money. Learnt the hard way on my Portable 286 that has the DOS 3.3 diskettes.
Last time I checked, there were still ISA-bus industrial computers (mostly in the PC-104 form factor) being made, so this sort of thing makes sense as some of their peripherals become harder to get.
One could say that industrial machines are old fashioned and obsolete with their ISA slots and PS/2 ports and RS232 and VGA/D-sub, but on the other hand SATA, PCIe, SSDs, etc area also common in modern systems.
And those machines are often for a specific task where the old ports are needed.
ISA and PCI backplanes are still being made. 60USD on ebay for a simple one.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Some of those systems and connections are preferred in industrial systems because they're more robust than later replacements, or they do something later replacements don't.
For instance, USB can have software failures that disable the keyboard and mouse. PS/2 doesn't even have the software layers that do that failing in USB.
RS-232 can be used to readily interface to a remote terminal, allowing the local machine to run completely headless. It also easily converts to RS-422 or RS-485, which allows longer-distance transmission and in the later multi-drop circuits. You get similar results with Ethernet, but that requires much more complex software support. That's mostly drop-in libraries these days, but it wasn't always, and you may be dealing with equipment too old for such code. (There's still industrial machines out there that take PAPER TAPE as input.)
Add one of these to a modern ISA computer with stock USB ports for the most useless peripheral ever.
In a time or war, inflation, corruption, and evil, I can always sit down and watch an LGR video to unplug from the madness for a little while.
Hey, you are describing yesterday today and tomorrow.
Take note and be happy that 95% of people are moral decent humans.
Gotta admit, it was refreshing how off the cuff and clear this video was. Nice someone else demonstrated it's more reliable than an old floppy drive... but still no replacement for compactflash for faster speed. Glad you took the time to do that so any of us considering it for our XT projects don't have to. I don't make a lot of UA-cam comments (I probably should) but... I just wanted to say thanks.
I appreciate it, glad you found it useful!
It’s been a billion years (literally, like the late 80s) since I used DOS 3.3. Didn’t it have a maximum partition size of 32MB? I remember formatting my extremely large 40MB disk in 2. I guess you know more than me, I guess the driver hacked that somehow.
I recall the same. My PC had a pair of 40MB drives, and if I booted from DOS 3.3 I couldn't read either. I could repartition with FDISK, limited to 32MB.
Indeed, 32MB partition limits, and the first support for 3.5" floppys
I'm so glad nowadays the problem is that you can't buy a storage device that's big enough to require multiple partitioning just to use the entire space.
I had Compaq DOS 3.31 on a 60MB drive in my 386 laptop... So either it's the 0.01 difference or a Compaq patch, but at least it was >32MB.
Cool! I'd love to see the reverse - a USB device that provides an ISA interface.
I would like something similar: old pci to usb/thunderbolt so i could use vintage graphics card in virtual machines.
@@Kenobi5001 I was thinking sound cards but that is a fascinating idea.
@@Kenobi5001 I mean, PCIe to PCI cards are real.
They exist, search for the usb2isa-r as an example.
@@771racing Hmm. Imagine paring that with a MiSTer
Interesting. I'm sure FAT12 vs FAT16 affected it. May also be how the device is formatted: floppies don't have a partition table, and not all USB sticks do either (by default). That CH375B chip at the heart of it looks interesting, a fairly generic USB host to parallel interface. WCH makes a variety of interesting things of various degrees of magic. On the other hand... Part of me wonders if somebody could use the rpi pico PIO peripheral to do isa interfacing (with appropriate buffers) and maybe do a more specialized/customizable open source certain, since the Pico has USB host capability (though it might need a diode removal or something?)
Aliexpress is absolute gold mine for this things. Think about pretty much any combination of ports or plugs and there's probably someone selling it on Aliexpress.
you sometimes want to order one just to see if it actually does anything lol
I dunno why I watch you. Prolly some nostalgic comfort which does wonders in the wartime that's raging here. Just sit with a beer and remember how it was back then, when I tried to figure out crap by myself and asking dad to help me. When I was 6 or something, tinkering with zx spectrum and 386 ibm pc without a soundcard. It's like a portal to a time when everyone was alive and things were simple and the world felt like an amazing united place full of wonders of new technology. The world changed so damn much, but our retro stuff is still united. Unlike now, when everything is destroyed and burning, barbaric war is raging and everyone just tries to survive, the future is grim. It feels like I belong to the world like back then, instead of this failed state. Thank you for your content.
Interesting. Was wondering how DOS was going to use a USB device without drivers. But it looks like the CH375 is basically just a application-specific microcontroller with a USB interface running in host mode and has an integrated filesystem "subprogram" for FAT12/16/32, and the DOS driver just queries the microcontroller over the ISA bus without needing to handle any of the complexities of USB. Looking at the PCB a 1:38, it seems like the CH375 is directly connected to the ISA bus (via some bus decoders or whatever), so i'm guessing they are having the DOS driver communicate with it directly, and I imagine that's why it's painfully slow -- it only seems to have a 64 byte buffer, and can only transfer 8 bits/1 byte at a time.
Yea I was about to say. I was looking in to their PCIe to ISA adaptor chips (CH 368L) and saw this one. If it was a 16-bit isa, you might be slightly better using DMA, but not old style XT DMA:P
Usbaspi1.sys
di1000dd.sys - Novac ASPI Mass Storage Device Driver (Motto Hairu USB Mass storage Driver)
Oh that golf game at the end! I played that when i was a kid. Those birds are instantly recognizable. Got those birds in my dreams for a while. AAARRRRGH
Yeah, drives of the time had significant limits on the C/H/S values, and your entire partition has to live inside of the allowed values for DOS. This is before "LBA" translation was even a thing. Thus, even at "2GB" of DOS 6.22, its going to have to be the "right" 2GB of the flash drive.
Any C/H/S emulation is likely to be in the drivers - the actual chip on this seems to be LBA mode only, I've had a look at the datasheet.
@@makomk There's also CHS information in the partition table etc. It's unused by modern systems but old DOSes might _only_ use that. The compatibility might be better with something like DOS 7.x or FreeDOS.
I love to see all the things you can do with ISA Based computers because these ISA Cards are so reliable. They were manufactured very good and are resilient, easy to fix and endure for a long time.
This is very similar to the implementation I've seen on a few Thin Clients from HP that have USB, are DOS compatible and will mount any device that is a USB Mass Storage Device (!), but not USB Flash Drive - like most USB sticks I've tested.
So also only a few (especially older ones) worked for me, because they can be accessed like HDDs.
WTF !!!!!! :D ISA was a 'almost direct CPU' interface. This thing to USB is a marvelous teaching tool !!!!!
thanks for this !
The incorrect free space number could be caused by the formatted cluster size. Or there may just be a bug in the 32-bit arithmetic used to display the number.
Having a way to so comfortably get files exchanged is a treat.
That's the reason I searched for a USB and a network card for my retro build.
Not having to swap hard drives or flash cards around or having to burn CDs/DVDs is so convenient.
And the slow transfer speed is almost appropriate. Imagine having that thing hooked to the Internet and loading stuff of BBS at the day.
"Expect the suckage and find the use case." This defines so many of tech purchases past and present. :)
I remember back in the day where the system shown in this video cost several thousand $$$$, and it was mind blowing to get such vibrant and sharp colors on IBM PC.
Years ago Clint's AT unboxing video popped up in my recommendations. It brought back memories of my first AT, and how much I paid for it. I've been a fan ever since 😁
Yep, and they cost even more now!
@@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles It is like the Ford Model T of the PC line of computers. If you have one, it is worth a lot of money.
That feels like an utterly authentic to the time isa bus installation, for any card that was a teeny bit non standard. Minus the bus conflicts. And the correct information was probably spread through word of mouth rather then electronically.
looks like it is something that you would add to an age old CNC machine that still runs on old hardware but allowing you to use USB drives for easy of transfer
A friend of mine had a CNC mill like that - ran a 286 inside, he had me troubleshoot it - it was a bad RAM chip (not even SIMMS or SIPPS, straight up DIP).
It had a CGA card in it too, not sure what that was supposed to go to (no screen, just 7 segment displays)
I was thinking it's for peripherals rather than storage, especially at that slow rate. It's natural enough to think of storage as a hobbyist. But I don't think a single software or firmware update to an old CNC isn't going to require more than a 1.44 MB floppy. Even just a new keyboard of mouse is generally going to need usb (at least without paying a premium from industrial suppliers)
Am I the only one that enjoys blerb videos more than the normal lgr ones?
My guess would be that emulated/calculated C/H/S values are too big. The 256MB one works because it is inherently below the classic 504MB BIOS limit (63/16/1024). I've had similar issues with SD→IDE adapters, for 9x era systems, where the default/modern windows MBR partition table was *not* compatible with the old systems, meaning the CHS values were off, causing DOS/old windows to fail accessing it.
So one thing you could try is to repartition the 1GB stick on a W98SE system with NUSB, keeping the size/CHS values below the 504MB limit.
That's also the direction that I was thinking. Maybe even try formatting it with fdisk on DOS.
If I remember correctly, MS-DOS 3.3 offered a maximum partition size of 32MB, and was the first version to allow multiple partition on a drive. (Which might be why this is the earliest version that is listed as supported) MS-DOS 4.x increased the maximum partition size to 2.1GB (Where it stayed to the end), so that would explain why the 265MB drive works in DOS 6.22 but not in 3.3, and none of the bigger drive don't work at all under DOS.
@@aixtom979 two issues: firstly, there are BIOS hard drive limitations as well as DOS. I thought the original DOS 4.0 only could do a little more than 500MB, contemporary PC BIOS were also around that size (528MB?), but earlier BIOS were limited, and it wasn't uncommon for XTs and ATs to need a BIOS upgrade to use larger drives. Second, I don't imagine LGR is ignorant of DOS limitations, and tried partitioning the larger drives, don't you?
@@squirlmy I don't think it's particularly well known by most people what all limitations exist at various points in hardware, BIOS, DOS, and software. It's A LOT to keep track of. Also, that driver is going to be full of secret sauce to bridge the gap between flash storage, which is inherently LBA addressed, and antique OSes that assume every media has CHS parameters. There's a good chance it's hooking some DOS interrupts and completely bypassing the DOS BIOS functions, and the ROM BIOS functions. But to what level it's emulating is anyone's guess. Is it redirecting all file access to its own internal code? Or providing raw block device access? Is it patching the MBR and BPB tables in real-time, or does it require a partition table and FAT type with CHS addressing to be compatible with DOS?
It seems that it isn't emulating _too_ much of the file system itself, since the readme specifically says "Supports all file systems *that the operating system can support.* "
@@squirlmy Well, I gave up reading peoples minds years ago, since it never seemed to work quite right. So I can only go with what is in the video. 😜
A lot would depend on what the card is trying to emulate in what way, but the fdisk /STATUS or /DUMP I was waiting for in the video never appeared...
Oh, seems like my additional comment about the page that had an in-depth analysis of this card got yeeted by spam protection, so here the quote without the link:
> Take note that loading CH375DOS.SYS will freeze the system if the USB drive is larger than 512MB, not formatted as FAT16, or contains multiple partitions. Also, only USB thumb drives are expected to work. USB hard disks will most likely not work as intended, unless used with an external power supply.
Thank you for explaining what the empty socket is for. I always wonder when I see that, and it isn't always mentioned.
i have a p-166 with CF installed and had the same problem with 512mb limit because of bios. Used "ontrack disk manager" as a work around and now have a 32gig cf with multiple 2gig partitions. Not pretty but works a treat..🤗
Love it..."taking a dump or something" was just too funny.
omgggg World Class Leader Board. Played that so much. I was in awe of the digital effects via speaker back when I was a wee lad.
Interesting little chip. According to the datasheet, it also supports USB device mode - which means that in theory, with the right drivers and the right non-standards-approved cabling, you could plug your 286 PC into another more modern PC as a USB peripheral. Not sure what practical application there'd be for that mind.
Data swapping comes to mind, along with quick troubleshooting of programs. There are potentially several other practical applications that I haven't thought of, either.
Doing LapLink without the LapLink cable to connect two PCs. There were a few companies that made cables in the Windows 9x to XP era that had a Type A plug on both ends and a big plastic lump in the middle with the electronics for one way or sometimes two way data transfer. Some even had the transfer software in the cable so you never had to keep a CD-ROM with it.
It comes with drivers so you can link usb to usb with the newer computers, it was made so people can use older hardware with newer hardware,
Love the lighting. Feels very home-like for me.
Those white mini cd's with the blue constipated panda on them are awesome.
Like, I wouldn't put them in someone else's computer with a 10 foot pole kind of awesome.
Interesting device, I still find that Zip disks are my goto solution for quickly getting stuff over. Miles faster than floppies and I have a USB zip reader which works with every modern PC I've tried, also you can keep your old PC stock and just plug in the ZIP drive over the LPT port.
The normal zip drive software doesn't run on anything older than (I think) a 286, but there's a third party program called PalmZip which does, and it's absolutely tiny. I use zip drives as mass storage for some of my old machines and it's very successful.
DOS 3.31 is the first version where the FAT BIOS Parameter Block (the first sector in the FAT volume) supported 32-bit sector counts. So, 3.30 is going to be really limited in the disk size it can support. Larger volumes are going to fill the existing 16-bit records with "0" to indicate that this volume uses 32-bit records, which might be why DOS claimed the FAT volume was invalid.
Also, that long wait to get the initial directory listing is because: For DOS to know how much free space remains on a volume, it has to walk the entire FAT to count how many cluster entries are marked as "free". It then computes the bytes as (free_clusters * sectors_per_cluster * bytes_per_sector) and arrives at the number of bytes free. Subsequent directory listings are faster because DOS tracks this count in an internal structure so it doesn't have to re-scan the FAT every time. At least until something changes the disk, or the memory used is given up for use by an application.
This wasn't so much a problem when the FAT only contained a couple thousand entries (e.g., 2880 for a 1.4MB disk with 512 byte sectors, and 1 sector per cluster.) But, when you have a volume that requires a couple MB dedicated to the file allocation tables, it's a lot to ask of that poor 4.77MHz x 1-byte bus. (EDIT: Whoops.. AT, not XT. Still, not very fast.)
It's interesting that Wch claims the card can get rw speeds up to 200-400 kb/s, and supports FAT32 on DOS 7.x
Also the last digit can range between 0-255, 0 is the fastest and 255 is the slowest
I think the driver you got there is the newer(or suppose the newest?) version due to the copyright date is 2007, and the last discussion in chinese is roughly 16 years ago
The file at ToughDev's blog includes a utility that can format USB drives to FAT16 under XP, and according to documents that's a prerequisite for using bigger USB disks
Part of the compabillity problem could be due to many drives using the GPT partition layout instead of MSDOS. You need to reinitialize the partition table to MSDOS for it to work.
I've not come across that problem for flash drives, in fact the opposite. Unless that's a recent change in industry standards, by default flash drives had MSDOS partitions. I do a lot of Linux distro-hopping, including using dedicated flash drives (MX linux is the best!) and changing flash drives to GPT has been always necessary.
@@squirlmy What's MX? I've only used a couple of Ubuntu distros on virtual machines.
The delay at the end of the first directory listing with larger drives is MSDOS counting the number of clusters in the FAT that are marked as free. The bigger the partition the longer the delay. After the initial free space count, however, MSDOS just uses the original counted value that has been updated on the fly as clusters on the disk are allocated and released. I don't think the actual free cluster count was actually stored on the drive to provide an instant display of bytes available until Windows 95.
I got the following results of the new driver on a 386SX-25 where I overclocked the CPU (not by much because the Headland chipset doesn´t like it) and the ISA BUS. Also downclocked the CPU using the turbo button before boot and that gave me the same CPU and ISA speeds. The USB Flash Drive is just a generic 2GB AliExpress one, maybe better results can be had with a better model:
CPU 25 MHz/ ISA BUS 8 MHz
356,8 KB/s
392,3 KB/s
46,1 IOPS
83,4 IOPS
CPU 27,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 8 MHz
367,4 KB/s
403,2 KB/s
42,4 IOPS
76,4 IOPS
CPU 25 MHz/ ISA BUS 12,5 MHz
416,7 KB/s
446,7 KB/s
41,6 IOPS
95,2 IOPS
CPU 27,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 12,5 MHz
428,5 KB/s
454,6 KB/s
49,0 IOPS
89,8 IOPS
CPU 25 MHz/ ISA BUS 13,75 MHz
428,5 KB/s
452,1 KB/s
46,6 IOPS
95,2 IOPS
CPU 27,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 13,75 MHz
440,9 KB/s
466,5 KB/s
49,6 IOPS
93,1 IOPS
CPU 8 MHz/ ISA BUS 8 MHz
235,9 KB/s
239,0 KB/s
24,5 IOPS
42,7 IOPS
CPU 12,5 MHz/ ISA BUS 12,5 MHz
317,3 KB/s
343,6 KB/s
31,1 IOPS
59,8 IOPS
CPU 13,75 MHz/ ISA BUS 13,75 MHz
350,4 KB/s
367,4 KB/s
36,2 IOPS
68,6 IOPS
0:52 "think it is just 1.1": yes, what else 🙂? ISA is slow, very slow. And getting 10mb/s+ in DOS device is more than unlikely 🙂. But thanks for having us and showing the existence of such a cool device 🙂.
“It Kind of Sucks” personally I think this thing is amazing as a FDD replacement. Commander Keen loaded like I’d expect on a floppy or what a C64 would with a floppy drive. No more disks.
Probably Shelby's (Tech Tangents) video. He mentioned it quickly in the free dos video and I think was planning to do a video on it at some point.
These forward compatibility modifications for old hardware I always find both amusing and impressive.
Neat idea. BTW, thanks for recent IBM AT love!
Life motto, "If this just works, that would be nice."
Well, this works in exactly the opposite way to what I thought it would when I read the description.
A pretty interesting contraption though.
Theres a .C file in that folder you showed on the disk. Is that the source of the driver?
Have you considered doing an episode on the computer chronicles? Been rewatching them lately, such nostalgia goodness :D
Loved that golf thing at the end! Made the video.
I don't even have a computer with a slot older than PCI and still want one, it just seems so useful lol
Whoa! This is fantastic brother Clint! Talk about applying a little modernism to a vintage PC, looking forward to more Blerbs like this bro' -
Very interesting little card. I guess that there are some old PCs still out there running in industrial applications. This is actually a great solution certain circumstances!
Really nice for Backuping,etc :D
Got to say, my jam is old tech reimagined. Like, making an ISA card for usb drives or sound blaster 3, or wifi card for comodor. I think it comes from my love of steam punk which is old tech reimagined in of its self.
Got one, just had a difficult time finding that CH375 driver. I used it to backup my 84 meg physical hard drive to a USB Drive. Then removed the HD to put in a bootable Compact Flash Drive. Then put my files back. I'm running a Tandy 1000 TX with a 512 Meg Compact Flash drive. Go to E-Bay for these cards, just look for who has USA stock. Takes about 3-5 days and you have one.
I was hoping for a blurb today, and actually thinking about this concept while torturing myself on a 2.0 USB LiveCD for a modern PC. I always wondered why USB devices never popped up since they are probably the most prevalent and cheapest. Interesting that no one has made a good engineering effort yet for this, although I assume it must be easier or more sensible to use CF or SD since those are plentiful as old PC storage options.
It should be possible to kludge together a parallel port to SD card converter relatively easily, though it probably wouldn't be fast since you'd be using the basic SPI mode and bit-banging.
Also I've completely forgotten the name of the manufacturer that made bridge modules to enable 8 bit microcontrollers to access USB mass storage devices, but they've been around a while.
This is like when I was testing flashdrives for a Wii. It's mostly the USB drive firmware that determines if it'll work.
The cheap MicroCenter brand USB drives worked instantly. No idea why, but I have a few of them and they just always work. I'm guessing they don't have anything fancy built into the controller/firmware.
U0 1 2 3 states maybe, fully on to suspended,
Also there were hybrid USB devices in the past that did some form of bus mastering to supply a driver to Windows then switched out of the firmware state.
U1 USB devices ! ?
I Remember there is software to disable that auto mode of. the USB device.
I bet using DOS 7 from Win 9x would enable using larger USB drives with FAT32. I'd also try different speed parameters to see if it can transfer faster. "Fast" QIC tape drives that used the floppy interface could do 500K per second on 8 bit ISA with a 2.88M compatible floppy controller. Lacking such a controller in the PC, most of them had a "high speed" ISA controller card option.
Noticed the device driver starting in your DOS e-book video and was intrigued by mention of USB on a PC-AT... had no idea these existed.
Oh my god this is actually very neat. Yes, there are better options, like networking, serial, parallel, but, if you haven't really dealt with/experienced the older PCs, and you don't have access to other machines, where you can write floppy disks, or you don't have CF cards, and you don't want to deal with bulky things like other drives etc. etc., this is a pretty nifty alternative.
The USB support is iffy, but maybe they wanted to keep the supported storage sizes down because it's emulating something and you don't need GIGABYTES on a 5170 anyway? So 256 MB is pretty sufficient. But other than that, yeah, it's slow, but very convenient.
"Looks like he... hit the tree, Jim" That brings back memories.
Thanks to LGR Blerbs I wanna get into retro computing and tech ....otherwise known as getting back to what I grew up with!
I bought a ISA USB card to install in an older PC (yeah, I do the retro building too)... but I bought it like 10 years ago, from a local store (Fry's Electronics... sadly they're gone now). It's nice to see that people are still making hardware to support "older" hardware. Now... if we could get someone to make some good ol' 101-keyboards (WITHOUT the Windows keys), with "manual-switching" XT/AT mode, and in black, not just beige... THAT would be something!!!
BTW... you should try soldering-in some header pins on the USB card you have there. You might find out you have a "second" USB port, that you can could bring to the front of your computer case (or install a card reader and plug it into that header)!
Unicomp?
@@kornaros96 I wasn't sure why you said "Unicomp" until I Googled it (next time, post the URL, so people don't have to "search" for it). Anyway... you didn't get the "reason" for wanting a XT/AT switchable keyboard: It needs to be an "actual" XT/AT keyboard, with a 5-pin DIN plug. USB isn't going to work on an older computer that doesn't have or ever supported USB ports!
when's the next blurbs? i watch this channel more than the main one, i prefer the laid-back off-the-cuff style
I want to know too!
I got an update from the man himself:
He's been extremely busy lately and hasn't had time for Blerb videos due to his move and working through his backlog of content to be made.
@@solarstrike33 that's fair
It's fine for what it is. Especially as it has a ROM socket on it. You don't need an xtide card, you can just use a boot run in this. My 386 has an ISA network card with an xtide ROM, so this would be a direct swap and I'd use USB rather than network for file transfer. Neat!
Kinda neat. Better than dealing with a mountain of floppies I would think...
For those who have one and get a IRQ timeout error (there seems to be a couple of different boards), I used these settings:
Device=C:\USB\CH375DOS.SYS @260 #0 %1
The location directory will be wherever you installed the sys file. Remember, the USB drive has to be installed. I partitioned & formatted to 512mb FAT16 (FAT). Some claim you can use large hard drives, I haven’t tried drives larger than 512mb.
0:34
Clint: "...It's just like a generic little thing."
My brain: "A generical thing."
Sure it's slow but the convenience of being able to move files from a modern machine to an old one without an external floppy drive or networking shenanigans is pretty compelling. I don't have a machine old enough to benefit from that but it's still pretty neat.
indeed. Even if you had to copy 40 Mb, the size of an old HD, that seems doable, just let it run.... and come back a few hours alter
I bought a generic USB 1.1 hard rive enclosure back in the late 90s that a,lowed me to transfer files to and from a Parallel ATA hard drive at a whopping 12 Mbps speed. It was pretty slow for the time compared to the max hard drive speed in then current PATA drives was 33 MB/s. Of course at the time just being able to connect an external hard drive easily via USB to a Win98 laptop even if it took forever to transfer data was useful t me. I can recall transferring files between two computers via a null serial connection and later via two Ethernet 10\100 ports using a crossover cable (needed back before Ethernet ports that autodetected PC to PC Ethernet connections were standard) and those where slow too but still better then trying to transfer large amounts of data via floppy or buying expensive external storage options like Bernoulli and Syquest removable cartridge drives (this was before Zip disks and CD-R/RW existed). Even after the advent of Zip, a direct connection via 100m/bs Ethernet meant you could transfer many hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes overnight without needing to swap disks so long as time was not of the essence.
So sometimes putting up with slow transfer rates are better then the alternatives if you can do the complete transfer unattended and at a reasonable cost. For an old IBM PC, this should be faster then even a 1.44MB floppy or at least as fast as then most common hard drive transfer speeds via an 8bit ISA slot.
Hi Clint, your size issue is because of the AT BIOS. You can put an XTIDE BIOS EEPROM in that socket and large devices should start to work (up to 8gb with 6.22 or 32GB with Win98/FAT32). Go read up on the XTIDE BIOS page, it explains all this better than I can.
In summary, DOS has limits (of course), but those limits are related to the FAT file system capabilities of the specific DOS version. Like 3.30 could go up to 32MB, but version 3.31 supports up to 512 MB (thanks to Compaq). 4.0 is where true “BIGDOS” or FAT16 arrived. Previously disks used FAT12, the same version of FAT used on floppies.
The odd free disk space you see is due to the integer overrun that’s happening from the measly 12-bits used to track disk allocations. Be careful writing to your device in this state- it likely will get corrupted!
DOS runs with the confines of the BIOS, and there you either need something like XTIDE to overlay the BIOS in the machine, or software “Drive Overlay” like that from OnTrack Software. That’s the stuff that came with disks larger than 540MB back in the day, it’d install itself in the MBR (like a virus) and overlay the BIOS before DOS loaded.
Hope this helps, I’ll stop typing now before this message becomes it’s own “blurb!”
Back in the day (1989), after trying to install my 40mb wd-file card into my xt clone. I discovered that dos 3.3 can’t mount a volume larger than 32mb.
I don't see the card at fault here - rather dos and the driver - and mostly the crap that modern windows bloats onto it with modern partitioning
have you tried to partition the thumbdrives on one of your 9x machines or even with linux?
I have a little USB / Floppy stick with a little toggle switch to turn off the floppy and another for write protect. 32MB Came with the ASUS P4P-BP P4 mobo.
Looks like another part has just been added to the list for my XT clone project (a Vendex Headstart Plus). Thanks for the video, Clint. I'll definitely refer to it when I get my USB-ISA card!
Man, this would actually be perfect for me, I have a hard time moving games over to my DOS machines
Miss the Blerds. Hope all is well.
I got an update from the man himself:
He's been extremely busy lately and hasn't had time for Blerb videos due to his move and working through his backlog of content to be made.
At last! We can charge our smartphones while tinkering with floppies and commands! Neat!
With 0,5A current provided, the smartphone will be powering the pc...
Definitely increases the quality of the storage medium (over floppies)
The board itself is just the reference design provided by the manufacturer of the CH375 chip (Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics )
All things given, this is pretty neat!
I think that's why the Tech Tangent guy went through the trouble of installing Freedos his IBM AT so he can use FAT32.
Fantastic. Very promising. Thanks 😊
ISA LIVES!!!
Your IBM 5170 ISA BUS clock is either 6mhz(early model) or 8mhz(late model), and usually tied to the CPU clock speed.
I kind of need this now.
As other commenters have mentioned, it seems like the controller chip itself would be capable of decent speeds (at least, as far as ISA goes), have you tried this in a more modern Windows-capable machine running 95/98 so as to circumvent what I would assume is a driver bottleneck? Maybe your Socket 7 PC?
Are you ever gonna cover "modern" ISA motherboards? You can get LGA775 and newer boards with both PCI Express and ISA. The use case might be a bit limited outside of specific industrial applications..
Very cool. You can get a bunch of 512mb USB 2.0 thumb drives in all different colors off of ebay for close to nothing. A cool way to store dos software in the new age. =)
The fact that it's reading the drive as 500 megs indicates to me that something is not right. Maybe a defective card, or simply a driver issue, but it may be why it's running so slow as well...
It'd be interesting to probe the DOS version floor. I'd guess it's one of the OEM (famously Compaq IIRC?) DOS 3.3x's that adds FAT16. Retail MS-DOS 3.3 only does FAT12, I don't think Windows can format FAT12. Rubbish documentation, in any case. :)
3.3 does FAT16 but you probably mean BIGFAT (version of FAT16 that supports partitions larger than 32 MB and supported in Compaq MS-DOS 3.31).
@@fnjesusfreak BIGFAT. That's the one!
@@RetroSwim And the reason we needed to introduce BIGFAT was *not* due to some restriction in the FAT filesystem that has been listed in DOS 4 (and COMPAQ DOS 3.31), but instead due to a restriction in the MSDOS "partition access" interface. In MS-DOS, the layering of the storage works like this for BIOS-supported drives:
1. The BIOS provides INT13, and without extensions, you get a soft limit at 504MB for simple IDE implementation, and a hard limit at 8GB due to the INT13 interface design.
2. A driver integrated in the DOS kernel uses INT13, scans for partition, and exposes each partition with a supported partition type in the partition table is exposed as a different "block device".
3. Block devices are exposed using the INT25/INT26 interface. This interface receives a drive letter and a sector number. The INT26 interface is unaware of the concept of clusters.
4. The FAT driver (the only filesystem driver in DOS) uses INT25/INT26 to read/write sectors, and manages clusters, files and directories. CHKDSK also uses INT25/INT26 to get raw partition access.
the DOS 3.3 limit is caused by the INT25/INT26 interface: It takes the sector number in a single 16-bit register, limiting the number of *sectors* on a partition to 65535. At the standard sector size of 0.5KB, this results in a partition size limit of 32MB. Starting with COMPAQ DOS 3.31, INT25/INT26 got extended to a new 32-bit interface, enabling the file system driver to access partitions bigger than 32MB. This limit is not related to the number of bits in the cluster number (FAT12 vs. FAT16), the cluster size (I guess even DOS 3.3 would support 32KB cluster size), or some CHS stuff (as the 504 and 8GB limits).
Oh, Windows can definitely format in FAT12. But probably only for floppies. ;-)
The actual delineation is the number of data clusters in the volume. Up to 4,084 clusters, FAT12. From 4,085 to 65,524 clusters, FAT16. From 65,525 through 268,425,446 clusters, FAT32. You get some leeway in absolute volume size by sliding the sectors-per-cluster multiplier one way or the other, but DOS and Windows use a table of sector count thresholds to make the determination which version to use, and thus which multiplier to set to ensure the cluster count falls within the right range.
mkfs.vfat on Linux can format to FAT12 if you need that (FAT sizes 12, 16, 32)
The hot swap capability would be nice but else it seems worse then the USB ports of my 233 MMX with one of the first ATX boards using a DOS USB drivers. You have to reboot but the speed seems better and I can also use bigger SD cards and sticks. A 64GB MicroSD card was recognised as 8033MB and partitioned and formatted easily into 2GB (or multiple 2GB partitions). The 14MB DOOM II WAD was copied in 25s.
Needs to have a faster transfer rate for it to be practical for my retro rig, gonna keep using floppies. Also, need an older version of FAT file system to display disk sizes properly for DOS 3.3
It could be dependent on the partition size and type. Also, not all USB sticks are compatible with USB 1.1 these days.The drives would probably work better when fdisked on that machine so that you know the number of cylinders and heads that the computer's bios needs.
I was also wondering if the smaller drive was partitioned or just a raw filesystem. It would be interesting to dd the drive contents onto a larger drive to see if that works.
The DOS .SYS Driver does not use the BIOS at all, it is a direct LBA Access (No CHS)
Okay that's pretty cool, I have a amd 586 system and it has 3 pci slots two of which are taken up by a voodoo 2 and s3 virge the last slot is used by a usb card for flash drives. I don't really use isa much aside from the sound card so this would be cool to free up a slot for a pci ethernet card or a ide controller
Old(er) BIOSes and versions of DOS do limit the maximum harddisk size, so that's most likely the problem with the flash drives not being recognized. The IBM probably uses cylinder/head/sector addressing, so that limits you to 528MB.
And partitioning the flash drive doesn't change the geometry. You might create a single 256MB partition on a 1GB flash drive, but when queried the flash drive will still report itself as being 1GB, something the BIOS and/or operating system doesn't support/recognize. Realistically I think the biggest flash drive you could use with this particular setup is 512MB.