I've wanted to do an ISA bus PC project for awhile... just no good ideas yet. I have a couple ISA protoboards and have poked around a bit, but have done nothing interesting so far.
Same here. I have an ISA protoboard from Radio Shack circa 1992. It's been in my parts collection for 30 years now and I still don't have any ideas of what to do with it. Of course the downside is I don't have any ISA bus computers any longer so I'd have to build me a PC with the ISA bus and that would probably cost me a lot of money now that the retro computing/gaming trend has driven vintage part costs way up and supplies way down.
The only idea I ever had for it was to build a GPIO interface card (built on the Motorola 6821 PIA) that I could use to control whatever I wanted, but the current microcontroller revolution makes that completely unnecessary these days. Why go retro computing to do something that I can accomplish in a few minutes with USB/WIFI/Bluetooth/UART connectivity and no worries with isolating the bus from dangerous external signals and voltages? For less than $10 I can control whatever I want and do it wirelessly if I so choose. Hardly worth spending $500 building a vintage PC to get only GPIO when an Arduino/rPI Pico/ESP32 could do it better and for practically no cost. I guess I'll just keep that ISA protoboard for nostalgia purposes.
Right, a GPIO interface would be more of an exercise in old digital stuff, given that the same result could be achieved on a single uC.
Long time ago I though of doing a YM2151 FM synth chip card, like the Adlib, but then someone else already got to it; it's on the texelec website. So I just built a microcontroller board around that synth chip instead, to play VGM files from an SD card.
Got somewhat lucky growing up, my parents never made me completely throw away old PC stuff from the 90's. I had lots of hand-me-down computer stuff from the 80's and early 90's. They even let me store it there during most of my 20's years. Things in life started to settle down by the time I was hitting 30, so I lugged all that old computer stuff over to my own place. Then things kind of got out of control from there... really got into old computers... last I counted 17 CRT monitors.
Long time ago I though of doing a YM2151 FM synth chip card
Wow, you just jogged my memory about another project I wanted to do as a PC add-on card. I recovered an Ensoniq "Q" chip from an Apple IIgs motherboard that I picked up a repair shop salvage in the late 80s. The Q chip is the main sound device from the Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer and I think it was also used in the Ensoniq Mirage DSK-8 sampling keyboard.
The Q chip was a very powerful sound chip for the time and was designed by the same guy who did the SID chip in the Commodore 64. I struggled to get a datasheet for the Q chip to build a sound card/synth on a PC card project so I held onto the Q chip. I still have it and data is now available for it. That might make an interesting project, but I would probably just use a microcontroller or rPI to avoid having to write convoluted drivers in X86 assembly.
Maybe I'll look at that idea again since I still have the chip. I already have some Ensoniq synthesizers (SD-1 and SQ-80) so maybe it's not really worth it but it could be fun and frustrating to try.
(post is archived)