TANS ISA Controller Card TS-5188 (FCC ID: JP7TS-5188)

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Welcome. This page contains partial, unofficial info on TANS ISA Controller Card TS-5188. Unfortunately after a quite thorough search, I have not found a page with a description on how to set the jumpers on this card. So I have to do it the hard way: play "Logic" with the pins and see what I will get. This is based on my own interpretation of what I think the correct settings are and I am in no way saying these are all correct. So take any info here, as is, for educational purposes. I shall, in no way, be responsible if these settings will have undesired result to your system. These settings is are for the 2 COM ports and LPT ports only.

Q: So why would you want to use this old ISA Card? Are you still using 386 and 486 PC?

A: No. My system is an AMD K6-2+ on a Jetway SiS530BF motherboard with 200+ MB of RAM. The chip is a 523 MHz K6-2+ (95*5.5) but I overclocked it 600MHz (100*6.0) and all is running stable.

You might want to use this kind of controller card because:

• You already have this card in the "junkyard" from an old PC, still working OK.
• You don't have the money to buy a new generation PCI Controller Card with Ports or you can't find one in your locality even if you have the money and web orders through credit card will have transaction costs which are the half the price of the card your buying (sucks!).
• You just want to fill in something into that ISA port.
• You enjoy creating a "Frankenstein" PC with junk parts from an old model and yet run Windows 2000/Windows XP OS in it (oh yeah!! ego trip!!). But why? because I can! :-D I am Tweak Master (hehehe!)
• Although I would fancy an extra IDE controller for another 2-4 IDE device, I don't think there's a way for it to work with my system. Current PCI IDE Controllers have their own BIOS, this one has none.
• You have a serious need for an extra COM port and LPT port. For me I need the ports because COM1 is for Modem. COM2 is for my Nokia DAU-9P MBUS/FBUS cable and COM3 (from TANS card) is for my UPS monitoring. LPT1 is for my Printer (also doubles as Direct Computer Connection - Laplink from time to time) and LPT2 (TANS) is for my Nokia Flasher adapter.

Q: Hey, you skipped IDE and Game settings and just disabled them. I want to have an extra IDE controller and another Game port for 2 player games. Why didn't you include that?

A: I've done away with the IDE Controllers because this card can't work with current existing IDE Controllers built-in in current mainboard. If you have all four possible IDE connections full (e.g. 2 HDD for dual-booting WinXP and 98, and 1 CD-ROM and 1 CD-RW), and you would want to connect other IDE devices, get a PCI IDE Controller Card with it's own BIOS (like Extreme IO). Game port is also disabled here since most likely you already have one in your soundcard or built-in in you mainboard. Your system will only support one Gameport, and having two of them would mean one is not functional. If you need and extra port for 2 players, get a Game port splitter cable.

So lets get on with the real score. Here is the picture of this card taken with my UMAX AstraPix 380 (this is really a webcam with flash in the guise of a camera so photos are not that good, my apologies)

[o][o] o [o][o] o      [o][o] o [o]
[o][o] o [o][o] o      [o][o] o [o]

These are the default jumper settings. Pin colored green are for the the LPT settings, the blue pins are for COM1 and red for COM2 if upper and lower pins are enclosed in brackets that means they are jumped, if not in bracket they are open.

With settings at default, we get these settings:

• IDE Controller enabled

• Floppy Controller enabled (you will get Floppy controller error on boot)

• Game Controller enabled

• COM at 3F8/IRQ4 (conflict at boot with system default ports)

• COM at 2F8/IRQ3 (conflict at boot with system default ports)

• LPT at 378/IRQ7 (conflict at boot with system default ports)

If I remove all jumpers, nothing is detected in the card. Since I don’t want IDE Floppy and Game, I disabled them. I just left the first four rows of pins open. I am interested in the colored pins only.

Please note that address 2F8 and 3F8 are available on both COM1 and COM2 however 3E8 is available only on COM1 and 2E8 is only available on COM2.

After setting a new port, you will most likely need to have the system search for this new port, because these are PnP devices (I think). Well for me I did that for the Windows 2000 to be able to see this devices.

So there you go. Hope that helped you tweak your TANS 5188 ISA Card. It was unfortunate for me I don't have spare IRQs for these added ports because I have a lot of PCI cards loaded into my system. So I still can't use this card. Hopefully your system might have lots of spare IRQs so it might work for you. I just hope this page helped and spared you the effort of figuring this out yourself. Happy tweaking.

Yolly Zubrick aka Pax Man © 2003.

No part of this page may be copied in any form without asking authorization from me. Please link here if you wish but don't mirror it.

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