68kMLA Classic Interface
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| Mystery Nubus Card - SCII RNIS MAC V1.1 | |
| Posted by: chrisdunderdale on 2026-06-01 08:28:29 Hello, I have a SCII RNIS MAC V1.1 card, pulled from a machine some time in the late 90s, and I can't remember what it did/was for! Any ideas, much appreciated! | |
| Posted by: finkmac on 2026-06-01 08:40:13 That's an ISDN card of some sort. Seems ISDN is known as RNIS in France. | |
| Posted by: chrisdunderdale on 2026-06-01 08:46:21 ah yes ok - It has an RJ-11 and RJ45 connector on the back, so that makes sense. Are these of any use to anyone these days? | |
| Posted by: finkmac on 2026-06-01 08:50:39 @Compgeke (and I) do have use for them 🙂 | |
| Posted by: Compgeke on 2026-06-01 09:13:27 RJ11 would be for telephone passthrough to use one of the B channels for telephone. ISDN's really cool 🙂  | |
| Posted by: chrisdunderdale on 2026-06-01 14:16:38 what use do people have for these cards today? What can you do with them? | |
| Posted by: adespoton on 2026-06-02 15:31:01 If you happen to be lucky enough to have a POTS emulator sitting around, you can connect the card up to that and run a real ISDN connection 🙂 Alternatively, if you have TWO of these cards, you should be able to connect them directly with a crossover cable. You might even be able to leverage such a system to spin up a software-driven POTS emulator using the ISDN channel (essentially, phone "passthrough" that really just connects to an internal Asterisk server). | |
Posted by: Compgeke on 2026-06-03 07:09:31what use do people have for these cards today? What can you do with them? Mostly just retro-revival so to speak. It's particularly true for us in North America where we suffered through the regular dialup era but ISDN was never widely adopted and cost prohibitive for the masses. I'll be dragging a setup out to VCF West in August. If you happen to be lucky enough to have a POTS emulator sitting around, you can connect the card up to that and run a real ISDN connection 🙂 ISDN's a fully digital system and a POTS TLS won't work correctly for them. I'll get into the weeds a bit (since people may find this thread later looking for the card) but you need one of three things: a rare ISDN telephone line simulator, one of the Adtran type boxes that can provision BRIs or a mid range+ PBX. The later are typically the easiest and cheapest to work with. Avaya Definity is a great option since the TN556 cards are cheap and all you need to do is "add data-module [EXTN]" and configure switch type and SPIDs from there. A Nortel BCM is another good option with a Windows GUI configuration tool however finding the BRI-4 module can be a bit difficult. Adtran can work, but they're very Cisco Brained in both configuration and documentation. Imagine you're trying to bake some bread, and they tell you what every ingredient is and what it does, but not how you actually bake the bread. Just a bunch of "yeast makes the dough rise" and not how much to use, when to use it, etc. | |
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