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Link to help with in identifying your isa cards

stason.org is well known within this forum but maybe we need a sticky somewhere so those new to this forum won't have to each "discover" the site on their own?
 
If your laptop takes USB memory sticks, they would work just as well as dragging the CD-ROM with you. :)

Anyway, those expansion cards not in TH99 surely are more fun. Those you might find something roughly similar or need to analyze individual chips. Ideally the drawings should be extended with pictures of actual cards to read any small markings which may not be mentioned in the specs.
 
carlsson said:
If your laptop takes USB memory sticks, they would work just as well as dragging the CD-ROM with you. :)

Anyway, those expansion cards not in TH99 surely are more fun. Those you might find something roughly similar or need to analyze individual chips. Ideally the drawings should be extended with pictures of actual cards to read any small markings which may not be mentioned in the specs.
Click to expand...

That's a good point, though using optical media (particularly a CD instead of a DVD) can enable use on, for example, a Windows 95 system (perhaps the one you're trying to get working 100% again) with no USB if you didn't happen to lug your laptop with you.
 
While TH99 is pretty good for ordinary things, as other people have noted, they're far from complete. They perhaps cover a third of the ISA cards that I have in my possession.
 
carlsson said:
Ideally the drawings should be extended with pictures of actual cards to read any small markings which may not be mentioned in the specs.
Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing. Those schematic patterns are hard to match with actual cards, especially if there are several similar (though slightly different) once. And scanners are cheap and ubiquitous these days.

For example, compare the TH99 schematics of the various revisions of the ATI EGA Wonder card. Quite confusing.

It would be nice to upgrade the TH99 document with actual scans of said cards, as well to add new ones. That would be a interesting volunteer project within this forum, perhaps... Perhaps take some sort of stewardship over the TH99 documents (since they are apparently no longer maintained by anyone), and gradually update and improve them centrally through community input, perhaps using a revision control system like Subversion. Or alternatively, by making it into a wiki, but at least something that can still be downloaded and packaged easily when people need it off-line.

Would that be a crazy idea?
 
Nice ideas here. I'm itching to get my old domain back now, but that has to wait untill i have some more $$$. I wiki is very well for user-input, relativity easy to use, but ive no other experiance with it aside from a mild edit or two in wikipedia. I'v no idea if it can be extraced for offline reading, which is a major concern

A possibility, thou it would mean quite a bit of learning, is to use a database like MySQL. One of my friends had an entire website mostly run off of mySQL and a very small PHP file. I'm in the process of getting the guide right now.

Adding actual pictures of the cards adds a bit of bloat, but IMHO it is well worth it. Adding drivers and software would probabily add quite a bit more, but, its pontentialy worth it.


What i'm interested in getting feedback about is how everyone would like the data organized. I'm looking at useing the FCC ID, which should help with differant revisions of the same card. Any further thoughts on this?

The presentation end is another story. My suggestion would be a bootable cd/dvd (Useing one of the linux distro's), booting into a minimual X windows system. TWVM or similar desktop manager. Also, it might be helpfull if the cd includes freedos configured to run interlink or laplink for getting the drivers across a serial link (if we are going to include them in)

To combat overall bloat, I'd suggest makeing the database (at least to start with) only include cards from a givin number of years. Say, from the start of the first PC to possibly 1990 or so. Again, at present, this is only a blue-skying "thought experment" untill we get some of the details ironed out. What are everyone's suggestions?
 
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