Hector Martin

But hey, the TPM port looks to be pretty much just the 7 LPC pins plus some extra clocks and voltages. Which means if we have a TPM module port on our motherboard, we have access to the LPC bus...

And given that LPC is just a modified version of ISA, it should be possible to convert an ISA card to work over LPC with relatively minimal changes. And what would we want to convert, exactly?

Maybe some existing classic ISA card that has an open source reverse-engineered replica available, that can be easily modified to work over LPC instead of ISA, and therefore run natively on modern systems?

So yeah, given how the LPC bus is mostly compatible with the ISA bus, it should be possible to build a modified Soundblaster replica that hooks into the 19-pin TPM port instead of an ISA slot, and then run it on a completely unmodified modern PC.

For me, I'm instead picturing connecting 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppy drives through some kind of controller thing, in a way that it'd actually show up within the OS, or when in USB mode, it would work like that thing being used to digitise Apple II games.

That'd be the dream ,yeah! I really want a modern native floppy controller, just because the USB ones are so fucking annoying.

Me too! My only desktop PC that can run a modern OS has a dead floppy controller. I think that USB thing I'm referring to must've been the Kyroflux, but yeah, while I like that, I believe it lacks a "native" or "direct" mode.