This 8-bit ISA to USB Adapter Card for Vintage PCs

I purchased one of these unbranded CH375 ISA USB interface cards a while back and it finally arrived. So let's test it out with MS-DOS on an IBM PC AT 5170 and try it with a USB flash drive and some DOS games!
I don't have a link to the exact item since it's just a generic thing, but you can find them on places like Aliexpress and eBay by searching "ISA to USB card."
Tech Tangents covered the adapter as well after I made this video and has some really useful tips to make it work even better! Check that out here: • USB to ISA Card Surrou...

[@vwestlife]

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.

[@BilisNegra]

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.

[@maxmuster7003]

thx

[@LGRBlerbs]

Great to know, thanks!

[@michaelblair5566]

I forgot about that. It's been so long since I've used DOS!

[@kajyakuzonik9130]

I did not know that

[@TechTangents]

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.

[@danielg9275]

I thought the same thing, I recognized it but it was not channel I was expecting it on.

[@RisingRevengeance]

I thought the device looked familiar... man my memory sucks

[@jeremiefaucher-goulet3365]

I guess you've been scooped ;)

[@LGRBlerbs]

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!

[@Nukle0n]

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.

[@lnemeth4334]

FAT16 was introduced in MS-DOS 4.0. MS-DOS 3.3 only know FAT12, so the maximum partition size was limited to 32MB.

[@bnoops123]

That's 32mb would be a huge help for some of my elderly cnc equipment. Beats the shit out of floppy emulation

[@johndododoe1411]

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.

[@davidbutton3500]

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.

[@SergeantExtreme]

@@bnoops123 Back then 32mb was the size of most consumer hard drives.

[@intel386DX]

DOS 3.31 can handle 512MB partitions!

[@buddurand8297]

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!

[@dant5464]

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.

[@dant5464]

Orrr not, given the driver requirement. Maybe a bootrom in that socket could let you start up from it.

[@alext3811]

It even is about the same physical size

[@AlphasysNl]

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.

[@ic_trab]

When you have played the game on an XT laptop complete with orange lcd... you definitely see the animation :)

[@Solarnova]

Used to see that all the time on my old 386sx 16, though still much faster than this.

[@cybercat1531]

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.

[@LGRBlerbs]

That's unfortunate, but in a way I'm glad it's not just me

[@evensgrey]

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.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

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.

[@joefish6091]

ISA and PCI backplanes are still being made. 60USD on ebay for a simple one.

[@evensgrey]

@@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.)

[@extendoduck]

Add one of these to a modern ISA computer with stock USB ports for the most useless peripheral ever.

[@computerenthusiast402]

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.

[@gulskjegglive]

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.

[@joefish6091]

Hey, you are describing yesterday today and tomorrow. Take note and be happy that 95% of people are moral decent humans.

[@CuriouserArchive]

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.

[@dh2032]

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?

[@jeffyp2483]

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

[@RetroPCUser]

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.

[@texasrattlesnake31637]

Whoa! This is fantastic brother Clint! Talk about applying a little modernism to a vintage PC, looking forward to more Blerbs like this bro' -

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

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.

[@ocudagledam]

Cool! I'd love to see the reverse - a USB device that provides an ISA interface.

[@Kenobi5001]

I would like something similar: old pci to usb/thunderbolt so i could use vintage graphics card in virtual machines.

[@megan_alnico]

@@Kenobi5001 I was thinking sound cards but that is a fascinating idea.

[@AmEv7fam]

@@Kenobi5001 I mean, PCIe to PCI cards are real.

[@771racing]

They exist, search for the usb2isa-r as an example.

[@AmEv7fam]

@@771racing Hmm. Imagine paring that with a MiSTer

[@NightSprinter]

Love the lighting. Feels very home-like for me.

[@funnylookingfoetus]

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.

[@8draco8]

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.

[@160rpm]

you sometimes want to order one just to see if it actually does anything lol

[@thisoldtech2]

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 KZbin comments (I probably should) but... I just wanted to say thanks.

[@LGRBlerbs]

I appreciate it, glad you found it useful!

[@retropuffer2986]

Neat idea. BTW, thanks for recent IBM AT love!

[@jmugurr994]

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

[@kleioscope]

WTF !!!!!! :D ISA was a 'almost direct CPU' interface. This thing to USB is a marvelous teaching tool !!!!! thanks for this !

[@orchid9]

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.

[@arcadesunday4592]

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!

[@madfinntech]

Loved that golf thing at the end! Made the video.

[@blinddog1212]

"Expect the suckage and find the use case." This defines so many of tech purchases past and present. :)

[@MayaPosch]

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?

[@AmstradExin]

Well, it depends on the CPU. But in theory, 10x the speed should be doable.

[@RetroSwim]

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?

[@BrickTamlandOfficial]

I was thinking the device usb port was not wired correctly to be backward compatible but i could be wrong.

[@brunof1996]

I am pretty sure that USB 1.0 (And 1.1) is 12 Mbps and USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps

[@MayaPosch]

@@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.

[@belzebub16]

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.

[@francesconicoletti2547]

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.

[@HebaruSan]

Thank you for explaining what the empty socket is for. I always wonder when I see that, and it isn't always mentioned.

[@lordpurchase9189]

Well it works thats the main thing. having USB drives in DOS is a very useful thing no matter how slow things are because it can be a pain if you need to transfer a file that isn't going to fit on a floppy disk.

[@rpavlik1]

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?)

[@paulphoenix8699]

I kind of need this now.

[@lemagreengreen]

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.

[@chrissymonds4136]

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..🤗

[@kenkobra]

Love it..."taking a dump or something" was just too funny.

[@Fastwinstondoom]

Have you considered doing an episode on the computer chronicles? Been rewatching them lately, such nostalgia goodness :D

[@markstradling6907]

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.

[@Wythaneye]

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.

[@unRealityFPV]

Indeed, 32MB partition limits, and the first support for 3.5" floppys

[@bland9876]

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.

[@SiD3WiNDR]

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.

[@jeff15]

Fantastic. Very promising. Thanks 😊

[@nrnoble]

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.

[@billsinkins361]

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 😁

[@TheAmazingAdventuresOfMiles]

Yep, and they cost even more now!

[@nrnoble]

@@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.

[@PacAnimal]

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.

[@JVHShack]

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!

[@RETROCENGO]

Am I the only one that enjoys blerb videos more than the normal lgr ones?

[@Dave5281968]

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.

[@Merylstreep1949]

Thanks to LGR Blerbs I wanna get into retro computing and tech ....otherwise known as getting back to what I grew up with!

[@dwaynezilla]

All things given, this is pretty neat!

[@sonjas.606]

interesting find, thanks for sharing

[@brianmcgovern6119]

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]

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.

[@kFY514]

@@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.

[@ronch550]

ISA LIVES!!!

[@DaveVelociraptor]

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!

[@jakedelmastro]

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.

[@hjalfi]

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.

[@philtkaswahl2124]

These forward compatibility modifications for old hardware I always find both amusing and impressive.

[@tigheklory]

Oh! I need one of these to put in my Mega Touch!

[@GalileoAV]

I don't even have a computer with a slot older than PCI and still want one, it just seems so useful lol

OMY! Amazing! i need this !

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

That's actually pretty cool

[@StigDesign]

Really nice for Backuping,etc :D

[@Dave5281968]

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.

[@Daniel-be6cj]

Man, this would actually be perfect for me, I have a hard time moving games over to my DOS machines

[@LadyLexyStarwatcher]

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.

[@LukeZalvino]

Life motto, "If this just works, that would be nice."

[@MobCat_]

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.

[@yellowcrescent]

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.

[@warlockd]

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

[@mawardiramli]

Usbaspi1.sys di1000dd.sys - Novac ASPI Mass Storage Device Driver (Motto Hairu USB Mass storage Driver)

[@TheJaguar1983]

"Looks like he... hit the tree, Jim" That brings back memories.

[@chelsona2574]

ahh cool I wanted to get one of these!

[@AndreDeLimburger]

Cool! I wasn't aware they were for sale.

[@TheTurnipKing]

When your usb adaptor has more CPU power than the computer you're plugging it into something has gone terribly right.

[@TheTurnipKing]

2:19 option ROM socket

[@TheTurnipKing]

Windows formatter often isn't very good, I find, for anything other than straight fat32/NTFS. I'll usually use something on Linux to prepare old DOS media... Or something on the system, like dos3.3 fdisk

[@squirlmy]

​@@TheTurnipKing Yes. Do you have experience formatting CF cards for XT-IDE? Old FDISK doesn't seem too good for that. I think linux, specifically GPARTED, might be better. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by preparing "old DOS media", if you just mean floppies.

[@TheTurnipKing]

@@squirlmy SD cards for use with old machines with SD2ide style adaptors predominantly

[@joefish6091]

Just ignore the beast on the ISA cars, consider it just magic.

[@googleaccount1860]

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]

Unicomp?

[@googleaccount1860]

@@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!

[@nickwallette6201]

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.)

[@kelvin1316]

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

[@the_kombinator]

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)

[@squirlmy]

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)

[@domenicmitri]

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.

[@oliverbroad4433]

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.

[@FightingForceSoulless]

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.

[@coleshores]

“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.

[@stan.rarick8556]

Definitely increases the quality of the storage medium (over floppies)

[@rubyvolt]

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.

[@erikberg7891]

I was just randomly wondering this morning if anyone had built something like this!

[@Even-Steven]

Kinda neat. Better than dealing with a mountain of floppies I would think...

[@davidbrenneman4038]

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.

[@Twintania]

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

[@IRWPD]

That is an interesting device.

[@makomk]

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.

[@Chaos89P]

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.

[@greggv8]

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.

[@Thrakus]

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,

[@TechCellfish]

Interresting. I've not had great success with the USB headers on my socket7 board running msdos6.22.

[@Zayfod]

Well, this works in exactly the opposite way to what I thought it would when I read the description. A pretty interesting contraption though.

[@chswin]

It is the geometry presented in the table

[@definitelycasualpcs8789]

I need to pick up one of these... this would make an amazing little bit of tech to pop in any of my machines....but I'm thinking my xt clone would get the most use

[@mccrh7737]

I like it ;) Would come in handy in many retro Projects with a 512 mb Flash Drive :)

[@eckomind]

Clint you should do a video on Doom with ray tracing. It's really cool and it would make for an entertaining video. Thanks!

[@stranger.granger]

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. =)

[@erim84]

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.

[@squirlmy]

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.

[@Chaos89P]

@@squirlmy What's MX? I've only used a couple of Ubuntu distros on virtual machines.

[@greggv8]

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.

[@420anonymous]

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.

[@joefish6091]

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.

[@bleeedthebrakes]

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

[@tonybossaller4074]

One thing I was thinking this could be useful for would be having a boot disk to basically reformat/reload the hard drive. Aka ghost the drive but leave everything connected, just add the command to mount the drive/driver or remove it to be normal. As for the 512m drive, I’m trying to recall but it is probably emulating a hard drive and since DOS manages things like sector size and such, it could be that it is also hitting the 220meg limit in the file system too. (I dunno. Just a thought. Would be interesting to see if other systems could see, like a 386 with Win 3.1. Not a suggestion just talking aloud.)

[@BaguetesGarage]

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

[@moomah5929]

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.

[@seritools]

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.

[@aixtom979]

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.

[@squirlmy]

@@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?

[@nickwallette6201]

@@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.* "

[@aixtom979]

@@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...

[@seritools]

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.

[@Hiraghm]

One of my "modern" computers has a dual xeon motherboard, with only usb 2.0. I got an external usb HD to do backups... but when I tried using it, I was getting terribly transfer speeds. Then after I had to re-install the OS, and had to check the bios to set the boot order, I saw where the USB 2.0 ports were set to 480k (USB 1.1 speeds?) and I reset it to 12mb and transfer speeds are now what I expect. But 480K would be pretty fast for an AT I would think.

[@erinwiebe7026]

I wonder if a 16-bit version would be a bit quicker? Still very useful!

[@LoftBits]

I envy you this 5154! 😉

[@ronny332]

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 🙂.

[@bzmgames1308]

nice project isa to usb 2.0