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More mystery ISA cards *Warning, uber sided pics*

NeXT

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Oct 22, 2008
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It's not often that I can't find a card in the archive but here are two plus another one I need some light shed onto.

Card 1:

P7192857.jpg

P7192860.jpg


It Looks like some sort of decoder card with a security dongle.
That loose ribbon cable also looks like it might plug into the early VESA connector on a regular video card.
This one I have the least idea what it's for.

Card 2:
P7192858.jpg

P7192859.jpg


An afterthought on this one is that it might be some sort of multiport serial card but without drivers, pinouts for the jacks or possibly software it's useless. Still, funky to see a VLSI chip on it.

Card 3:
P7192861.jpg

P7192862.jpg


This one I'm positive it's a video card but can someone shed more light on it? The daughter card seems to not have anything special on it.
 
that 8-port dealy is extremely weird, man. as far as the video card, that daughter board is probably a memory upgrade. i would say that first card is actually a video capture board that uses a weird dongle that goes to the actual video source that probably had RCA jack(s) on it. just a guess, but it's because of the early brooktree chip. the BT473 was an old 8-bit truecolor RAMDAC chip.
 
I'm thinking that VSLI chip is equivalent to 8 16C550's. If you're really lucky it might be register compatible. I'm assuming they have some sort of interrupt encoder deal on there, You might have trouble tracking how that works (otherwise the thing would need 8 IRQ's)

Depending on what the chips are near the ports, it might be RS-232, 485, 422...
 
The last time I saw a card with a number of those ports, it was a multi-RS232 card and the cables that are supposed to be with it had Ethernet sized connectors on the card end and DB-25 connectors on the other end.

If it had RJ-11 jacks on it and a bunch of 1488/89 transceivers on it, it would have been one of the few multiple modems on a card.
 
The digithurst microeye is a video frame grabber card (there are a few varieties).

Awesome! :D
You got any more resources (EG software and drivers?) for it or possibly even a pinout so I can make a breakout cable?

Also, I looked at that other card again and you can see that the ground plate and other layers are clearly separated. It seems that the ground plates are connected with zero ohm resistors.
On the side closes to the connectors ther are six MC145406P chips, four 74LS251N's and two 74LS373N chips.
A quick of AOH finds it is indeed some sort of daisychainable serial I/O card unfortunately no pinouts are specified. So now I have two 8-port serial adapters and neither have the proper cables. :(
 
If you have a multimeter, you can track RX & TX from the connectors back to the driver ICs. Should be all those DIP ICs near the connectors.
there was several types of drivers/receivers. Some are 4 drivers in an IC, some are 4 receivers in an IC. Others had all the drivers/receivers you need for one modem in a single IC, eg. GD75232N:
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet2/7/0yrz8a3okday7dpoutuoags8g0ky.pdf

If there is only one 'driver' pin per port, it's pretty straight forward that that is TX. If there are the other modem control signals it might be more of a pain to track.

You'll still have to trial and error which port is which in the OS, though (just join rx&tx, characters will echo)

well, report back what the ICs near the ports are.
 
Awesome! :D
You got any more resources (EG software and drivers?) for it or possibly even a pinout so I can make a breakout cable?

I think that company died out in the middle 1990's so it will be hard to find anything online.
 
For the video card, have a look at this InfoWorld article starting page 51. The Renaissance Rendition II seems to be a later variation of the same board - look on page 60. There is also an article on the page 39 about a merger.

In fact the entire magazine is fascinating ... thank you Google Books.

In the late 80's AutoCAD and CadKey running under DOS supported around 60 models of video card, Renaissance having at least one or two entries.
 
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So it looks like I have no way to use the capture card? well damn, I was going to toss together an awesome 286 box and put it in there...
Hold on a second.
I might actually still have the software and drivers.
Out of the same cardboard box I pulled these cards and the 286 motherboard there was also an ST-251 with it's accompanying full-length controller card. It's a long shot but I bet you the data might still be there.
 
There is always a way to find things, it just takes time and digging. I collect capture cards and I tend to find software for all of them sooner or later.
 
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