This series just gets better. What I tried to fiddle with xt-ide ages ago. I somehow got the impression that you still have insert some values into bios, fooling flash card to sectors etc.
For anyone interested, I have a video where I demonstrate how to modify the XTIDE ROM to boot from PnP card. I have demonstrated this with CT4380 which is SB AWE64 PnP. It's a bit of a hack, but not too difficult to do.
This looks like so much fun to play around, pity I didn't go hardware hunting 10, 15 years ago when 386 were cheap... Today prices are extremely skyrocketing because there are not many usable machines left...
You can also solder a pin headder to the back of a multi io and build a custom reversed IDE cable and connect a slave. I did this with a DOM and a CF card.
I have gotten Master/slave CF cards to work on my Tandy 1000 HX, which is an XT. Not all CF cards will accept having an extra card on the bus, but it can be done. Which I/O port it uses is dependant on how the XT-IDE ROM is setup when it's flashed, but you can set it to other I/O's.
I remember my first ISA VLB IDE controller, it was provided with a TSR to enhance the transfer speed, obviously using VLB. Unfortunately this driver was so crappy it changed the geometry of the drive, rendering it unreadable after loading the TSR. I then bought a beefy Tekram VLB controller with 4 MB on board cache. My 486DX2-66 was blazing !
VLB IDE controllers were a waste of money. They can only do IDE and only run on 486s with a VLB. SCSI controllers are far more useful. A SCSI controller relieves the CPU and copies the data from one SCSI device to another itself. The CPU only has to tell the SCSI controller what to copy. The data transmission does not run over the slow ISA bus or faster VLB, but remains within the SCSI world. The CPU therefore has to do next to nothing. The ISA bus is only involved when data needs to be loaded into RAM. Another advantage of SCSI was that in the SCSI world there was no LBA problem and you could connect up to 8 devices, of which the controller itself was one. SCSI understood many completely different devices, not only hard disks, but also scanners, CD-ROM drives and CD burners. Since SCSI relieved the CPU, there was usually no buffer overflow when writing CD-Rs. The data medium to be booted from could also be set and freely selected via SCSI BIOS. So you didn't have to worry about what went where first like with IDE. With IDE in early computers, the master drive was always C: and the slave drive D:. This was a problem for DOS as it could only boot from C:. If you wanted to change that, you had to connect the drives differently. In the SCSI world, you just changed the Boot order of the SCSI devices.
Hi! I have one of those MAD16 Pro cards often underrated from users of retro-foruns, I love them, really nice to be able to boot from sound card. Need to burn one image of XT-IDE to play with. Nice video!
Yeah, I also think, that MAD16 is a good sound card. However, from the whole pile of sound cards I have, MAD16 is the one, which I couldn't convince to boot. Unfortunately, this is one of the sound cards, which doesn't have any jumpers for IDE settings. You need a driver in DOS to activate the IDE port :(
I remember having Linux on my old DOS PC and that would detect the soundcard IDE port as an IDE controller... in addition to the two on the motherboard.
Yes, Linux has integrated drivers for all kind of controllers and it detects the sound card automatically and load the right kernel module for the IDE controller. It works on Windows/DOS basically in the same way, except you have to install the driver separately. When it comes to booting from the IDE device connected to the sound card, neither Linux nor Windows or DOS will make a difference. Because the controller has to be addressed first before an operation system can be booted from it. It doesn't work, if the driver is loaded by the operation system later. It's a chicken-egg problem, which you can solve using XT-IDE, since it is possible to access the IDE controller on the sound card using it, before the operation system even got started.
There is nothing special about it. Just the address is usually set to be secondary controller. Not a problem for XTIDE at all, since you can setup any address you like.
thank you for posting. might one find a sound card w/ an ide header, address jumpers, AND an empty socket for the ide rom ? please take care & stay safe.
I never saw a sound card with a ROM socket yet. There were some SCSI/Sound combos for PCI and the Asus Media Extension slot, but I don't know about any ISA sound cards with IDE controller and ROM. If you know such thing, I'm curious about it.
@@necro_ware but form software perspective it is two separate address spaces. Access to mem space using mov instructions family and access port number via in/out instructions.
@@adrian_sp6def That's true, but that is not the point. What I mean is I/O port and I/O address is the same thing. But you are right, I probably had to be more explicit. This video is very old, but I probably thought, that it is clear in this case, that I'm talking about I/O devices and not memory.
CD-ROM, but for me it was also just marketing and I'd prefer, if back then the companies would make a better quality sound cards, instead of adding features, like IDE
Many ISA I/O controller cards only had one IDE channel so it was a way of connecting a CD-ROM without having to have it as a secondary device on the same channel as the hard drive, which could cripple performance.
Its fun to see someone actually test some of odd ideas which could work but i never bother to actually try to do.
This series just gets better. What I tried to fiddle with xt-ide ages ago. I somehow got the impression that you still have insert some values into bios, fooling flash card to sectors etc.
For anyone interested, I have a video where I demonstrate how to modify the XTIDE ROM to boot from PnP card. I have demonstrated this with CT4380 which is SB AWE64 PnP. It's a bit of a hack, but not too difficult to do.
This looks like so much fun to play around, pity I didn't go hardware hunting 10, 15 years ago when 386 were cheap... Today prices are extremely skyrocketing because there are not many usable machines left...
This is the content I always wanted
Im totally blown away by this video series
You can also solder a pin headder to the back of a multi io and build a custom reversed IDE cable and connect a slave. I did this with a DOM and a CF card.
Absolutely interesting. Good to know.
I have gotten Master/slave CF cards to work on my Tandy 1000 HX, which is an XT. Not all CF cards will accept having an extra card on the bus, but it can be done.
Which I/O port it uses is dependant on how the XT-IDE ROM is setup when it's flashed, but you can set it to other I/O's.
I remember my first ISA VLB IDE controller, it was provided with a TSR to enhance the transfer speed, obviously using VLB. Unfortunately this driver was so crappy it changed the geometry of the drive, rendering it unreadable after loading the TSR. I then bought a beefy Tekram VLB controller with 4 MB on board cache. My 486DX2-66 was blazing !
VLB IDE controllers were a waste of money. They can only do IDE and only run on 486s with a VLB. SCSI controllers are far more useful. A SCSI controller relieves the CPU and copies the data from one SCSI device to another itself. The CPU only has to tell the SCSI controller what to copy. The data transmission does not run over the slow ISA bus or faster VLB, but remains within the SCSI world. The CPU therefore has to do next to nothing.
The ISA bus is only involved when data needs to be loaded into RAM.
Another advantage of SCSI was that in the SCSI world there was no LBA problem and you could connect up to 8 devices, of which the controller itself was one. SCSI understood many completely different devices, not only hard disks, but also scanners, CD-ROM drives and CD burners. Since SCSI relieved the CPU, there was usually no buffer overflow when writing CD-Rs.
The data medium to be booted from could also be set and freely selected via SCSI BIOS.
So you didn't have to worry about what went where first like with IDE. With IDE in early computers, the master drive was always C: and the slave drive D:. This was a problem for DOS as it could only boot from C:. If you wanted to change that, you had to connect the drives differently. In the SCSI world, you just changed the Boot order of the SCSI devices.
Hi! I have one of those MAD16 Pro cards often underrated from users of retro-foruns, I love them, really nice to be able to boot from sound card. Need to burn one image of XT-IDE to play with. Nice video!
Yeah, I also think, that MAD16 is a good sound card. However, from the whole pile of sound cards I have, MAD16 is the one, which I couldn't convince to boot. Unfortunately, this is one of the sound cards, which doesn't have any jumpers for IDE settings. You need a driver in DOS to activate the IDE port :(
Fascinating :O
There is FreeDOS in the wild!
I remember having Linux on my old DOS PC and that would detect the soundcard IDE port as an IDE controller... in addition to the two on the motherboard.
Yes, Linux has integrated drivers for all kind of controllers and it detects the sound card automatically and load the right kernel module for the IDE controller. It works on Windows/DOS basically in the same way, except you have to install the driver separately. When it comes to booting from the IDE device connected to the sound card, neither Linux nor Windows or DOS will make a difference. Because the controller has to be addressed first before an operation system can be booted from it. It doesn't work, if the driver is loaded by the operation system later. It's a chicken-egg problem, which you can solve using XT-IDE, since it is possible to access the IDE controller on the sound card using it, before the operation system even got started.
Interesting
Soundcard IDE is designed mainly for CD drive.
There is nothing special about it. Just the address is usually set to be secondary controller. Not a problem for XTIDE at all, since you can setup any address you like.
Wow can you make a video about this tiny IDE CD card? What are the chips? Is it possible to make a replica?
thank you for posting. might one find a sound card w/ an ide header, address jumpers, AND an empty socket for the ide rom ? please take care & stay safe.
I never saw a sound card with a ROM socket yet. There were some SCSI/Sound combos for PCI and the Asus Media Extension slot, but I don't know about any ISA sound cards with IDE controller and ROM. If you know such thing, I'm curious about it.
please make one video cfast industrial card to usb how to transfer bootable iso image
0:53 oh is that a cmd640 controller? it triggers my ptsd lol
Yes, sorry for disturbing your ptsd ;)
1:28 You talk about address or port? because for me this looks like port number instead of address
It's basically the same, since an I/O port is usually used as a technical term for a specific address on the x86's IO bus.
@@necro_ware but form software perspective it is two separate address spaces. Access to mem space using mov instructions family and access port number via in/out instructions.
@@adrian_sp6def That's true, but that is not the point. What I mean is I/O port and I/O address is the same thing. But you are right, I probably had to be more explicit. This video is very old, but I probably thought, that it is clear in this case, that I'm talking about I/O devices and not memory.
For 20+ yrs I don't know what's the point on having ide on sound cards.
CD-ROM, but for me it was also just marketing and I'd prefer, if back then the companies would make a better quality sound cards, instead of adding features, like IDE
@@necro_ware I don't remember if I have seen any retrochannel demonstrating connecting CD-ROMs to sound cards as well. Good work!
@@lazibayer No problem, I can do that as well
Many ISA I/O controller cards only had one IDE channel so it was a way of connecting a CD-ROM without having to have it as a secondary device on the same channel as the hard drive, which could cripple performance.