This is a small project to try to use an old ProScan slow scan CCD camera with modern PCs

It uses an 'image memory' ISA board which is a board with an FPGA that stores the camera data to onboard memory. This can be read really simply by four IO ports at 0x300,302,304 and 306.
All other communication with the camera controller is just over serial.

I bought the ArsTech USB2ISA system and tried to use the ProScan software 'UDC' under DOSBox.
The ArsTech software is very bad. The enumerator is very glitchy and doesn't work most of the time.
The provide an object to be linked into dosbox for some reason, which fails to find a library so doesn't work at all.

I eventually /almost/ got it working by writing my own patches to DosBOX's iohandler.cpp and using ArsTech's simple library API.
Unfortunately, the IO to/from the board doesn't always quite work which we think might be because the ArsTech USB2ISA doesn't support the IOCHRDY ISA line which is wired on the card. Presumably, the card sometimes needs to delay the read, which the  
USB2ISA ignores, although I'm not entirely convinced this is the problem.

Inspired by this I connected the pins of an Arduino MEGA 2560 to the ISA card's IO, address and data lines and wrote a small Arduino program and matches DOSBox patches.

This seems to talk to the card OK, though I've not tested with the camera at the time of writing.

The DOSBox patches also log serial, keyboard and IO to a simple binary log, which can be decoded with dispLog.c. This is to try to reverse engineer the ProScan protocol to both the camera and the memory card.

Anyway, the result is the basis of a really simple Arduino control of ISA cards that just do simple I/O. I'm sure with a little effort you could make it do basic memory access if you need it, rather than buying the ArsTech USB2ISA thing.


For wiring, see ArduinoISAIO.h. No other components required, just Arduino to ISA, pin to pin.