Random electronica.
Mar. 28th, 2008 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brooksmosesI picked up a couple of things at the computer surplus store on the way home today. First was a network card for my new 486 computer. Yes, it's actually (mostly) new -- a new-old-stock single-board motherboard with built-in video controller and new enough IDE controller to support large disks, but oddly enough no onboard network card. And it only has one card slot, for an ISA-bus card. The only ISA-bus network cards the store had were some odd four-port ones from a company that's long since gone out of business, but I figured it was worth a shot.
And, indeed, it turned out that FreeBSD's standard drivers work quite happily with it, though it took a bit of looking in documentation from two different network driver files to figure out why -- the controller chip on it is a clone of a fairly standard one. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't get a connection; it would ping itself, but not the rest of the world, and the "connection" lights didn't come on.
Eventually, I figured out why. It's an ethernet card, and a hub, on a single board. And so the ports on it are "hub" ports -- and so, to connect it to my real network hub, I needed to use a crossover cable. For some reason, this seemed rather amusing; I'm not sure why. (Sadly, it's only a 10Mbps connection, so it's not actually much use as a hub.)
Also, I picked up a couple of game controllers to play with. I'm a bit confused by them, though -- they're standard original Playstation controllers, down to the "Sony Playstation" logo and the SCPH-1080 part number. But, instead of having Playstation (nine-conductor) cables, they've got flat six-conductor flat cables that look like heavyish-grade phone cables and terminate in an ethernet-style plug. Anyone have an idea what those might go to?
They're also rather interesting on the inside; I hadn't realized just how little electronic circuitry was required to convert fourteen buttons of input into a serial data stream. It's just a couple of tiny 8-bit shift registers (half a square cm each) and some resistors.
And, indeed, it turned out that FreeBSD's standard drivers work quite happily with it, though it took a bit of looking in documentation from two different network driver files to figure out why -- the controller chip on it is a clone of a fairly standard one. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't get a connection; it would ping itself, but not the rest of the world, and the "connection" lights didn't come on.
Eventually, I figured out why. It's an ethernet card, and a hub, on a single board. And so the ports on it are "hub" ports -- and so, to connect it to my real network hub, I needed to use a crossover cable. For some reason, this seemed rather amusing; I'm not sure why. (Sadly, it's only a 10Mbps connection, so it's not actually much use as a hub.)
Also, I picked up a couple of game controllers to play with. I'm a bit confused by them, though -- they're standard original Playstation controllers, down to the "Sony Playstation" logo and the SCPH-1080 part number. But, instead of having Playstation (nine-conductor) cables, they've got flat six-conductor flat cables that look like heavyish-grade phone cables and terminate in an ethernet-style plug. Anyone have an idea what those might go to?
They're also rather interesting on the inside; I hadn't realized just how little electronic circuitry was required to convert fourteen buttons of input into a serial data stream. It's just a couple of tiny 8-bit shift registers (half a square cm each) and some resistors.
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Amusement
Date: 2008-03-28 03:56 pm (UTC)*fans self* I love you.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 06:05 pm (UTC)Of the only three Google references to the card, two of them were to one of these device-driver repository sites where you can download drivers that people have uploaded (in, presumably, complete defiance of EULAs) if you sit through ads and give them your email address, and those turned out to have a docfile of the user manual included in them. Basically, this thing seems to have been sold as a home-network-in-a-box for Windows 95 -- the package included this card, a standard NIC, and a 50-foot (!) ethernet cable, and driver software that set it up as a home network automatically. (No, you don't get to choose your subnet; the server-side software is hardcoded to 90.0.0.1, and the client-side asks for a "unique computer ID number" from 2 to 255 when you install it. It tells you this in case you want to use non-Novaweb NICs with it.) The upgraded version also has a built-in 56k modem, so that you can include your connection to the internet on the same card, and the software will handle the connection-sharing.
That's what I find really interesting about the surplus stores around here, really -- all of the random pieces of long-forgotten ideas that were going to change the world and didn't quite get there. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with the serial-port mouse with the numeric keypad on its back....
no subject
Date: 2008-03-28 07:10 pm (UTC)Wait, like, instead of buttons? Or what?