[PLUG] What is a passive PICMG 1.0 backplane???

michael at robinson-west.com michael at robinson-west.com
Sat Jan 4 19:06:50 UTC 2020


Is the HPP 14S a passive picmg 1.0 backplane? Why is there a keyboard jack on the backplane? Why is there a Texas Instruments IC on the backplane?
Does the HPP 14S backplane support reset? This has two picmg 1.0 slots, will it work with one SBC as a uniprocessor Win 9x system?

What is the hottest 64 bit picmg 1.0 SBC on the market right now?

Does picmg 2.0 exist?

What works with Linux and what doesn't if you need to emulate Windows 9x and access an ISA card from the guest?

Thought has been floated that a PCI to ISA bridge would allow plugging an ISA card into a PCI slot. The PCI device would reserve 32k
of I/O space at base D0000 and it would have to reserve IRQ 11 as well. This PCI device would have an ISA output that the shared memory
card would plug into and that the reserved resources would be mapped to. This low level hardware has to be mapped to a Win9x guest OS running
in QEMU or perhaps KVM for this to work.

I'm evaluating what I have and whether or not to sell it as well as what is actually needed. A p4 can run 98se, but most of those are old and relatively
expensive. It would be better to get into modern SBCs that are less likely to fail. Possibly the Linux host for example can do video capture with the
9x guest running QSoft. In an ideal world, I would have the skill and time to redesign the Tyco QSP-2 to use Linux directly for the GUI. I'd reverse engineer
the real time msdos system as well porting it to freedos. Freedos should be adequate to run the real time system. If we had time, we would substitute
freedos and see what happens... Realistically, you'd use debuggers and reverse engineer Q-Soft. If only PPM would release the source code to the old
Tyco system since what they distribute today is a totally different system that runs on Windows 7. Many argue that the present day system isn't as good
as the old Tyco system.

I also have an IBM backplane that is indeed passive with P8/P9/P10 and a bulk power molex connector. It has 12 ISA, 1 picmg 1.0, and 2 PCI.
I don't know because of how close the PCI slots are to two ISA slots and the PICMG slot if you can use both PCI slots with an SBC plugged into the PICMG.
If you use the PCI slots and the PICMG slot, you are limited to 10 ISA slots. Seems the RTC requires upwards of 16 ISA slots... so probably no backplane with
PCI on it will work for the RTC. Still, I could possibly use a P4 SBC, a hauppauge pci card, and an NVIDIA graphics card on this IBM backplane and still have room for an EISA scsi+floppy card if the P4 lacks floppy. I have an Adaptec 2742AT coming. This IBM backplane lacks PCI, but it should work.

One last problem, how do you buy a 300W or larger AT power supply with the 3.3V P10 connector? I can't find them for sale. I really don't feel comfortable modifying a
standard AT supply with a buck converter. I've seen something that converts ATX power connector to p8/p9/p10 and 3 pin power... but what do I hook the 3 pin power to? If I can use a standard ATX supply, I'll be easily able to switch out the backplane for a more modern one (if I need to).



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