PCI floppy controller

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2022 at 7:54 PM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> On 4/21/22 5:47 PM, Charles Dickman via cctalk wrote:
> > Were there ever any floppy controllers for the (parallel) PCI bus?
>
> Didn't some of the Adaptec SCSI cards have a floppy controller on them?
>
> Could that be made to work?
>

The AHA 15x2 cards had a floppy controller. It was a nothing special
floppy controller that you'd otherwise find bundled on a multi-function
card. These cards were ISA. The details of which controller varied over
time, IIRC, but I had one of these since I didn't have a multi-function
card in my 486 DX2-66 that I started my PC journey with (it took me
a while to give up on the Rainbow).

The AHA 1742 cards had a floppy controller on them as well. Same
deal: but this was a EISA card.

I'm told the AHA1642 was similar, but I've not seen a microchannel
version of the card.

By the time there were PCI Adaptec cards, there was no longer a
floppy controller on them that I ever saw. As others have pointed
out, though, it would need special drivers and/or BIOS support because
PCI devices mixed poorly with ISA DMA that the floppy was built on.

Warner