Uncreative Labs

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

Does anyone have any idea what this card is? It was in the XT I just picked up. Previous owner had no idea what it is, so I guess it was put in by the company who bought the XT new. It was used for accounting.

Card looks home-made from a kit and has no input or output on it. The only markings on it are "Delta Digital Design" on the silkscreen, and 12224/2468 written in marker pen.

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 6:52 pm

Here's what your chips are:
74HCT688N:
8-bit Magnitude Comparator

74LS00N:
Two input NAND gate

DM74LS37N:
Octal D-Type Transparent Latches and Edge-Triggered Flip-Flops

N82S123N:
Sub Data IO 29B.

256-bit TTL bipolar PROM 32 x 8
16 Pin DIP

SN74LS174N:
Hex D-Type Flip-Flops With Clear

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

Thank you! Now to work out what that combination of chips actually do...

Could it be some kind of homemade FPU? It's the only thing I can think of that wouldn't require I/O on the card. Plus the XT was used for number crunching...

Joined: 20 Jun 2006 Posts: 4

Bus adapter for non standard ISA cards?

Looks like the card, when a concrete status of bus is meet, it may power and modify the bus pinouts. Also can be a kind of hardware protection key. Maybe it demands a password at bootup and denies to power the bus w/out it.

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

It's strange, since my XT does not have any non-standard cards in it. And there is no asking for a password on startup.

The previous owner of the XT does not know what it is.

It is really a mystery to me Smile

Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 169 Location: behind you!

Perhaps it's a hardware key? You said it was used for accounting so perhaps the software they used required this card to run (a form of copy protection). Where I work we have many programs that will not work without a specail adapter pluged into the printer port. Perhaps this is a early version of that? (as I can't see what else it could do).

Joined: 21 May 2006 Posts: 47 Location: London, England

That could be true. The XT had Wordstar v3.4, Lotus 1-2-3 v2.1, Sidekick and Norton Utilities v4.0 on the hard drive, but apart from that nothing else. The drive had never been formatted since the machine was new, but I had to low-level format it to get it working perfectly again.

Joined: 09 Sep 2006 Posts: 3

I'm inclined to agree with them. The PROM connects to the buffer which goes to the I/O data lines of the card. (the second to the 9th pins on the ISA card) I have one around here from novell, I never did figure out what it was for albeit something like Netware server security wouldn't surprise me.