What it is
CPCISA is a project created by Siou, also hosted/worked on at Yarek.
Basically, it is a hardware add-on that lets you connect ISA cards to your old CPC! Some examples of what it can offer:
- An I/O interface (Serial and parallel ports, Floppy and IDE ports)
- An internal (card) modem (probably a full-featured modem is needed; that is, not a winmodem/softmodem)
- A SoundBlaster card (or 100% compatible)
- A network card
ISA cards were almost fully supported, including 16-bit mode and vectorized interrupts(thru Z80 IM2). Only video cards were not supported (CPCISA decodes only I/O ports, not memory mapped VRAM).
Status
The card is working, however only five of them were built (including the initial dev board). This is because the card was complex and outdated, ISA peripherals and the AT standard became old and difficult to find.
Most CPCISA software were created by Siou himself (IDE hard disk, ethernet and mouse drivers, as well a an audio sample player thru SoundBlaster 8-bit interface). Initial OS support was done by Futur's with a set of two ROMs ("Interrupt Lib" ROM to add vectorized interrupt support to Locomotive Firmware, and "ISA ROM" with low level ISA routines). Madram also created an Adlib music player supporting SA2 module files, which was later adapted by PulkoMandy to play these modules with the Willy card equipped with a OPL3LPT device.
It was mostly a proof of concept; none of the drivers and software came to a state really usable for the end user (no filesystem support, no TCP/IP stack...).
Additional info
- Siou's page on CPCISA. Siou is the creator of the system.
- Some more information about CPCISA from Futurs' website (French)
- Where to download and get information about "Interrupt Lib" and "ISA ROM" from Futurs' website (French).
- Yarek's CPCISA page about making a CPC-Isa compatible system which would connect to a full 286 AT PC motherboard.