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fun PCI cards to fiddle with?

Somewhere, in the mess I call my card inventory, I've got a PCI card that has three 8255A's on it. It's PCI 1.0, so it doesn't work in everything. I don't know if you'd call that "fun".
 
There's also cards like the Catweasl that was designed to support the reading and writing of a number of very weird formats, notably Amiga ones.

That said, it's been touched by the Amiga Gods, which implies like any product for the Amiga that actually makes it do something cool (or you know, not suck), they made 12 and a half cards, stopped production 15 years ago and nobody has ever made another one due to varying stages of Neurosis.
 
Last I looked they were several hundred dollars, though that was before more modern USB based disk tools began to appear on the market.
 
Well yeah, the manufacturer never assumed you'd want to run both a Canopus AND a Pinnacle board. They do the same thing, so what purpose would you ever have for both? At least that's what the designers figured.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Aside from the basics, video, network, and audio; what other kinds of PCI cards do you like to use?
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M-audio Delta 1010LT multichannel audio interface (not your basic audio card):
IMG_20240417_210849963.jpg

Orban Optimod 1100PC DSP card:
IMG_20240417_220149861.jpg

Also have a rackmount M-audio 1010 that needs doubler capacitors, an Echo Layla rackmount audio interface, and a Measurement Computing PCI-DAS4020 12-bit data acquisition card (datasheet: https://files.digilent.com/datasheets/PCI-DAS4020_12-spec.pdf )
 
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lowen said:
M-audio Delta 1010LT multichannel audio interface (not your basic audio card)

Orban Optimod 1100PC DSP card
Click to expand...

Now them's some fun lookin cards. Pricey, but interesting.

I knew a guy on another forum who'd bought and fitting a PCI-e to PCI adapter for a pro-audio card he did not wish to re-purchase, said it worked beautifully. He then added a PCI-to-PCI expander linked to a rackmount unit with 14 more PCI slots, filled with cards like the M-audio and Orban, all worked A-OK in this weird configuration.
 
I've been using PCI production soundcards from 2004 to 2015 when I moved to USB. Including the depicted M-Audio which I still have - the entire original package.

And been talking about these every time the "best PCI soundcard" topic pops up and people start talking about Sound Blasters. There are PCI soundcards that are worth thousands of $ and you have no usage for them. Optimod AFAIK is connected to an external rack unit.

They're still soundcards tho.
 
Zare said:
I've been using PCI production soundcards from 2004 to 2015 when I moved to USB. Including the depicted M-Audio which I still have - the entire original package.

And been talking about these every time the "best PCI soundcard" topic pops up and people start talking about Sound Blasters. There are PCI soundcards that are worth thousands of $ and you have no usage for them. Optimod AFAIK is connected to an external rack unit.

They're still soundcards tho.
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Oh I'm well aware. Pro-audio gear lives in an entirely different world than consumer-grade sound cards. I love the world of pro-audio because it gives me all sorts of bits and bobs I need to do the weird things that make my life fun.
 
Zare said:
Optimod AFAIK is connected to an external rack unit.
Click to expand...
The Optimod card shown does not require an external rack unit, but does all digital signal processing on-card under PC control.

Here's a pic of the DAS 4020:
IMG_20240418_165449319.jpg

And then here's a specialty card used for synchro position measurements, using 90 volt three phase synchros...front, front with the front insulation board off, and back.... This was an expensive card made moot by the next card...
IMG_20240418_170536349.jpgIMG_20240418_165809903.jpgIMG_20240418_165825735.jpg

Heidenhain Endat 2.2 absolute encoder card with RCN 729 29-bit absolute encoder.....
IMG_20240418_171152486_HDR.jpg
 
Pro audio cards are always useful, they are practically the least affected by sands of time PCI peripheral. 24bit 192kHz is still high resolution audio.
Effects through 20year old DSPs might be a bit lower quality than what's out there today, but basic mixing and routing is unaffected.

Just looking at prices @ ebay. It's incredible that AWE64 Gold costs about the same as RME Hammerfall 9632.
 
To flip the meme, these two cards below are the stuff of nightmares....
IMG_20240418_172344767.jpg

Why nightmares?


These are OC12 622Mb/s asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) cards. These were in two servers acting as routers and firewalls, running the Linux ATM stack and connected to a 3Com CoreBuilder/Cell Plex 7000 (and later a Cisco Catalyst 8540MSR) network core via OC12.... ILMI, PVC, MPOA, and LANE...... I get exhausted just remembering the acronyms....and the 3Com management software running on NT 4.0....still have a disk image of that, maybe one day I'll fire up a CB7000 again and run it. Likely not. But ATM still shows up in DSL-land....
 
Zare said:
Pro audio cards are always useful, they are practically the least affected by sands of time PCI peripheral. 24bit 192kHz is still high resolution audio.
Effects through 20year old DSPs might be a bit lower quality than what's out there today, but basic mixing and routing is unaffected.

Just looking at prices @ ebay. It's incredible that AWE64 Gold costs about the same as RME Hammerfall 9632.
Click to expand...
I need to dig out my old AWE cards and see... RME Hammerfall...great cards. Those and several different model Auduioscience cards were used (and still are used) at many broadcast facilities.

The 1010LT wasn't too expensive back in the day, and if you could deal with the unbalanced I/O the sound is fantastic. That's why I got the rackmount 1010, but the power supply voltage doubler capacitors are the Achilles heel of that box, and I've just never taken the time to repair it.
 
That card that says "DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE" is the coolest thing I've seen all week until I got to the Heidenhain Endat 2.2. Can you explain what that thing even does? And maybe provide some more pictures of that external box? Looks like it belongs in a 50s sci fi film.
 
lowen said:
The Optimod card shown does not require an external rack unit, but does all digital signal processing on-card under PC control.

Here's a pic of the DAS 4020:
View attachment 1278168

And then here's a specialty card used for synchro position measurements, using 90 volt three phase synchros...front, front with the front insulation board off, and back.... This was an expensive card made moot by the next card...
View attachment 1278170View attachment 1278171View attachment 1278172

Heidenhain Endat 2.2 absolute encoder card with RCN 729 29-bit absolute encoder.....
View attachment 1278173
Click to expand...
A clever way to determine direction of travel!
 
hunterjwizzard said:
That card that says "DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE" is the coolest thing I've seen all week until I got to the Heidenhain Endat 2.2. Can you explain what that thing even does? And maybe provide some more pictures of that external box? Looks like it belongs in a 50s sci fi film.
Click to expand...
Sure.

Both cards are used to measure the angle of a shaft, just using different kinds of sensors.

The synchro card uses a three phase synchro (a form of transformer where phase relationships encode the shaft angle) to determine shaft angle; this card is a six axis card if I remember correctly, but we only used two (azimuth and elevation).

The EnDat card interfaces with the RCN 729 encoder over a bit synchronous bidirectional RS-485 interface; six bits of command, immediate bus turnaround, and 36 bits of data encoding the shaft angle. The RCN 729 encoder (that big round Star-Trekky-looking thing) is accurate to plus/minus 2 arcseconds, and again encodes shaft angle of the shaft it's mounted to. I'll try to post some pictures tomorrow.
 
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