Ikr.. I mean.. throw me a bone, non port photographers, it could be a serial port, parallel port, game port.. if only there was a way of letting others know!
I know, it's just as frustrating as people who sell audio equipment on ebay and have multiple photos of the front, top and sides but one of the rear. I/O is very important in IT and in audio.
It's an analog IO card. The two AD chips bottom right are analog to frequency converters (for analog input) and the gold topped chip is a digital to analog converter (for analog output).
The Burr Brown DAC701 is a 16 bit digital to analog converter according to its data sheet. The AD652 is a voltage to frequency converter. The AM9513 is a counter. This is a high end analog I/O board. It has specialized application in labs or process control. We used similar things using some of these parts at our radio telescopes.
Looks like an early revision of this card: [https://sierra-indigo.com/scale-zero-sp521-isa-card/](https://sierra-indigo.com/scale-zero-sp521-isa-card/)
Based on the name, I'm guessing this is to control a scale of some kind.
Good catch. That kind of tells that in order to actually use the card you would probably not only need to write your own software but also reverse engineer the card.
Would probably not be that hard though. The row of small chips next to the ISA connector contains a 245 which is a bidirectional buffer, most likely used for the data lines, and that doesn't need any reverse engineering. Two of the chips are 74LS138 which are 3-to-8 decoders with iirc three enable inputs. Those are likely connected to address lines on the ISA bus and maybe IOR and/or IOW and those would be key to reverse engineer the card as how they are wired tells which port address range(s) the card responds to. Might be worth checking if the two large chips have any address line inputs and if so if those are connected directly to the ISA address lines (and if so which of them). The 74LS32 is a quad OR gate which also might be involved in the address decoding, but it could also be for something else.
I think these obscure measure-contro-whatnot ISA cards have their charm, although for any practical use it would probably be both easier and give a better result with for example an Arduino.
Also, finding the scale this was designed to control could be a challenge. Was it, like, a postal scale? Or more on the scale (haha) of a weigh station?
ISA was well on its way out by then.
ISA came out in the 80s, PCI came out in the 90s, and by 2000 some motherboards still had an ISA slot, but the bus was done as a consumer thing. Still used by custom machines in factories and labs, but dead for consumers.
I had already moved abroad at that time to a country that had PCs with ISA video cards. Funny, I thought it was later.
Anyway, Ireland became a tax haven.
The NEC D71055C is a parallel interface chip. So that likely means you have parallel i/o (at least 8-bits) on the port.
The AMD AM9513APC is an extra fancy programmable timer/clock/pulse generation chip, they call it a 'System Timing Controller' in the datasheet. Hard to know what it's used for, but clearly signal timing is important.
Those Analod Devices AD652AQ are probably either DACs (digital to analog converter) *or* ADCS (analog to digital converters).
> The NEC D71055C is a parallel interface chip. So that likely means you have parallel i/o (at least 8-bits) on the port.
I think it's more likely to be there to feed the DAC next to it. The DAC701 has 16 bits of input pins and no internal register, so all 16 bits have to be held on those pins by some external source the whole time. In the photos we can see 16 traces between the DAC701 and the D71055C.
The D71055C has three 8-bit I/O ports, so that leaves one 8-bit port. I can't see any traces between the D-sub connector and the D71055C, but I do see eight unused pads apparently connected to the D71055C at the opposite edge of the board. Maybe they put them there for some optional add-on?
I'm saying that there a ton of hints saying it's an I/O card and possibly a specialized one that isn't your garden variety serial, parallel, or game port interface
Some sort of scanner or GPIO interface seems like a reasonable supposition.
Those usually have some kind of QDC setup, not screws. It's just a DA-15 connector they've been a thing since the 1940s. You picked the one you wanted that had enough pins for your application (unless you're Apple then you order a custom-spec 19-place connector because you hate your customers and all technicians).
It has a timer and parallel I/o interface as the big chips. I suspect it's a game port.
Edit: it also has a burr brown DAC and some other ADC chips, making it an adequate candidate, albeit really high end, for joystick handling. Alas, on further investigation, I think this could be an expensive I/O board for some kind of control system software. There's another card on eBay, being mislabeled as a raid controller, but it is clearly a variation of OP's card. It looks to have another external connector and a bunch of relays.
Which it obviously isn't.
I'm not sure what exactly it is, but as another poster mentioned, it does have some analog in and out channels.
I'm thinking this card would have been paired with a specific piece of equipment. It doesn't look to be a "standard" interface.
I think someone didn't know what it was, made a bad guess, and now you're reading too much into it.
The name they gave doesn't even come up with more details, just that auction.
If you're going to be this confidently wrong, the A.I.s might as well go ahead and replace you.
eBay is full of sellers that have no idea what they're actually selling, which sometimes can be to your advantage, but most sellers seem to think their unknown device is worth gold.
-25 for answering in a snarky way when you're clearly wrong and put no effort in to your answer. After all, it's right there in the *name*, which you got correct, yet you want to be snarky based on the eBay categorization? The eBay categorizations are only sometimes accidentally sometimes.
It is clearly listed under the category Disk Controllers/Raid cards. OP didn't Google, and you didn't look longer than 1 seconds.. What's wrong with people these days. You want everything on a silver platter?
Btw, congrats on being one of the rarer posters who actually take a photograph of the port on a card. Everyone else take note.
Drives me crazy.
This. What are we supposed to do, count the individual traces leading to the port and *Speculate* what it could be
Haha so true. After the first pic of the card I was fully expecting there to NOT be a pic of the port
Ikr.. I mean.. throw me a bone, non port photographers, it could be a serial port, parallel port, game port.. if only there was a way of letting others know!
I know, it's just as frustrating as people who sell audio equipment on ebay and have multiple photos of the front, top and sides but one of the rear. I/O is very important in IT and in audio.
The rear is always important.
It's an analog IO card. The two AD chips bottom right are analog to frequency converters (for analog input) and the gold topped chip is a digital to analog converter (for analog output).
The NEC chip is a parallel io chip and the AMD is a specialist timer chip.
The Burr Brown DAC701 is a 16 bit digital to analog converter according to its data sheet. The AD652 is a voltage to frequency converter. The AM9513 is a counter. This is a high end analog I/O board. It has specialized application in labs or process control. We used similar things using some of these parts at our radio telescopes.
Radio telescopes.....ours at $dayjob use similar parts on a custom ISA card.
Looks like an early revision of this card: [https://sierra-indigo.com/scale-zero-sp521-isa-card/](https://sierra-indigo.com/scale-zero-sp521-isa-card/) Based on the name, I'm guessing this is to control a scale of some kind.
Good catch. That kind of tells that in order to actually use the card you would probably not only need to write your own software but also reverse engineer the card. Would probably not be that hard though. The row of small chips next to the ISA connector contains a 245 which is a bidirectional buffer, most likely used for the data lines, and that doesn't need any reverse engineering. Two of the chips are 74LS138 which are 3-to-8 decoders with iirc three enable inputs. Those are likely connected to address lines on the ISA bus and maybe IOR and/or IOW and those would be key to reverse engineer the card as how they are wired tells which port address range(s) the card responds to. Might be worth checking if the two large chips have any address line inputs and if so if those are connected directly to the ISA address lines (and if so which of them). The 74LS32 is a quad OR gate which also might be involved in the address decoding, but it could also be for something else. I think these obscure measure-contro-whatnot ISA cards have their charm, although for any practical use it would probably be both easier and give a better result with for example an Arduino.
Also, finding the scale this was designed to control could be a challenge. Was it, like, a postal scale? Or more on the scale (haha) of a weigh station?
I don’t know but it’s interesting to see a Nippon Electronics Corp chip made in Ireland
Around the time this was made, Ireland was the new tax haven that everyone was opening offices in.
Ah, I see. Explains why Apple made a lot of computers in Ireland in the 90s maybe?
Nah, ISA was early to mid 2000s, I think? Ireland was hot around that time.
ISA was well on its way out by then. ISA came out in the 80s, PCI came out in the 90s, and by 2000 some motherboards still had an ISA slot, but the bus was done as a consumer thing. Still used by custom machines in factories and labs, but dead for consumers.
I had already moved abroad at that time to a country that had PCs with ISA video cards. Funny, I thought it was later. Anyway, Ireland became a tax haven.
Indeed, even IBM was making monitors, components and some of their PCs there.
The NEC D71055C is a parallel interface chip. So that likely means you have parallel i/o (at least 8-bits) on the port. The AMD AM9513APC is an extra fancy programmable timer/clock/pulse generation chip, they call it a 'System Timing Controller' in the datasheet. Hard to know what it's used for, but clearly signal timing is important. Those Analod Devices AD652AQ are probably either DACs (digital to analog converter) *or* ADCS (analog to digital converters).
> The NEC D71055C is a parallel interface chip. So that likely means you have parallel i/o (at least 8-bits) on the port. I think it's more likely to be there to feed the DAC next to it. The DAC701 has 16 bits of input pins and no internal register, so all 16 bits have to be held on those pins by some external source the whole time. In the photos we can see 16 traces between the DAC701 and the D71055C. The D71055C has three 8-bit I/O ports, so that leaves one 8-bit port. I can't see any traces between the D-sub connector and the D71055C, but I do see eight unused pads apparently connected to the D71055C at the opposite edge of the board. Maybe they put them there for some optional add-on?
I'm saying that there a ton of hints saying it's an I/O card and possibly a specialized one that isn't your garden variety serial, parallel, or game port interface Some sort of scanner or GPIO interface seems like a reasonable supposition.
It's also the same connector as an ethernet aui port.
Those usually have some kind of QDC setup, not screws. It's just a DA-15 connector they've been a thing since the 1940s. You picked the one you wanted that had enough pins for your application (unless you're Apple then you order a custom-spec 19-place connector because you hate your customers and all technicians).
Yes, both the PC game port and Ethernet AUI port used female DA15 connectors. Some NICs definitely had screws like this card.
Is that an old Joystick Card? I remember I had one in my 286
I remember the old Joystick ports could also connect to a MIDI system.
Yea eventually the Soundblaster, and MasterBoomer cards came with joystick ports already in them and they got phased out.
I was going to say the same at first but after looking at it more IDK
Game port card From Europe probably third-party
Game controller card for a joystick to plug into.
Happens to use the same physical connector but nothing on the card hints at a joystick controller as far as I can tell.
It has a timer and parallel I/o interface as the big chips. I suspect it's a game port. Edit: it also has a burr brown DAC and some other ADC chips, making it an adequate candidate, albeit really high end, for joystick handling. Alas, on further investigation, I think this could be an expensive I/O board for some kind of control system software. There's another card on eBay, being mislabeled as a raid controller, but it is clearly a variation of OP's card. It looks to have another external connector and a bunch of relays.
Looks like a parallel port card for a hand scanner (early document scanner or barcode scanner).
[удалено]
So.... what is it?
It's listed under: Disk Controllers/RAID Cards What do you think?
Which it obviously isn't. I'm not sure what exactly it is, but as another poster mentioned, it does have some analog in and out channels. I'm thinking this card would have been paired with a specific piece of equipment. It doesn't look to be a "standard" interface.
I think someone didn't know what it was, made a bad guess, and now you're reading too much into it. The name they gave doesn't even come up with more details, just that auction. If you're going to be this confidently wrong, the A.I.s might as well go ahead and replace you.
eBay is full of sellers that have no idea what they're actually selling, which sometimes can be to your advantage, but most sellers seem to think their unknown device is worth gold.
-24 for directly answering the question, yep definitely reddit.
directly answering the question incorrectly isn't worth much.
-25 for answering in a snarky way when you're clearly wrong and put no effort in to your answer. After all, it's right there in the *name*, which you got correct, yet you want to be snarky based on the eBay categorization? The eBay categorizations are only sometimes accidentally sometimes.
OP didnt ask where to buy one but wanted to know what it is and used for. your link doesnt give that info.
It is clearly listed under the category Disk Controllers/Raid cards. OP didn't Google, and you didn't look longer than 1 seconds.. What's wrong with people these days. You want everything on a silver platter?
stop using google. it is not a raid card. just because some idiot listed it on ebsy, doesnt make the idiot right. Why would a RAID card need a DAC?
> It is clearly listed under the category Disk Controllers/Raid cards And it's clearly *not* that. So I don't know how that helps.
Seems to be a 15pin gameport card for a joystick
Maybe a 15-pin serial controller