we know intel removed isa support in all 8x0 chipsets, and what are the fastest chipsets with isa support from via, sis and ali?(i think nforce never had any isa support)
and i mean native isa support from the chipset, not isa slots with third party bridge chips. they are mostly for dedicated purposes, rather than universal boards for DIYers.
I think that I have seen it listed on several modern chipsets but boards with ISA support haven't been made in any real numbers in years. The last that I had seen were some socket 478 boards that were meant for industrial applications.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
How about a PCI to ISA bridge like http://www.costronic.com.tw/Ev71p.htm
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wrote:How about a PCI to ISA bridge like http://www.costronic.com.tw/Ev71p.htm
I've seen that page before. Have you or someone else here ever used it for retro soundcards? Anyway, I suppose you will still need DMA-ISA support in the I/O controller (southbridge chipset) for ISA soundcards to work properly in DOS.
It's been said that for Intel chipsets, 875P/ICH5 is the latest you're going to get with ISA DMA. Don't know about AMD, but I frankly doubt any Athlon 64 or even Athlon XP chipsets support ISA DMA.
Maybe my BC875PLG industrial mobo does have a bridge chip on it somewhere, but functionally, it's just fine, with a perfectly functional AWE64 Gold installed in it.
As for the PCI-to-ISA bridge card approach, how the heck are you going to have a case that lines up perfectly with the ISA card? It's bound to be especially disastrous with large sound cards like AWE32s.
wrote:Don't know about AMD, but I frankly doubt any Athlon 64 or even Athlon XP chipsets support ISA DMA.
I'm sure prophase_j can confirm on that. (look at his signature rig)
How about an ISA adapter that plugs into a USB port?
http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-ca … S-usb2isar.html
USB and DOS dont work well together. I wonder just what would work over USB in general for ISA.
wrote:or even Athlon XP chipsets support ISA DMA.
KT133A is the last option AFAIK. Athlon XP will work on them usually.
wrote:USB and DOS dont work well together. I wonder just what would work over USB in general for ISA.
wrote:or even Athlon XP chipsets support ISA DMA.
KT133A is the last option AFAIK. Athlon XP will work on them usually.
I'll eat my hat if that ISA-to-USB adapter is any good for sound cards or anything else I'd use an ISA slot for...like the controller board for Forte VFX-1 headsets. (That thing even requires a VESA feature connector! I sure hope the one on the Voodoo5 5500 AGP will work, assuming the pin header I'm thinking of is a feature connector to begin with...)
The VIA KT133A seems a bit dated for my tastes; then again, I probably wouldn't go with anything other than nForce 2 Ultra 400 for a Socket A setup, which is pretty much top-of-the-line like 875P was for Socket 478.
wrote:How about an ISA adapter that plugs into a USB port?
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wrote:The VIA KT133A seems a bit dated for my tastes; then again, I probably wouldn't go with anything other than nForce 2 Ultra 400 for a Socket A setup, which is pretty much top-of-the-line like 875P was for Socket 478.
nforce provides superb performance but less compatibility. besides, my only reason to get a k7 rig is either a fastest platform for agp2x cards(kt333) or an isa platform(kt133a), neither applies to nforce chipsets.
wrote:nforce provides superb performance but less compatibility. besides, my only reason to get a k7 rig is either a fastest platform for agp2x cards(kt333) or an isa platform(kt133a), neither applies to nforce chipsets.
Dito.
AFAIK i875P ISA boards do exist, but they are rare as hell and offer zero extras (OC or similar etc) 🙁
IIRC I875P does not support ISA Bus Mastering which is needed for most of the devices we are interested in.
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The i865 is about the latest chipset with full isa support - meaning the best possible cpu is probably the P4 3.06Ghz or the P4 EE.
Myself and several others on here have industrial PC motherboards based on the 865 - here's one example: http://www.ibase.com.tw/2009/mb865.html
I can confirm that the isa support works correctly, as tested with a range of my dos sound cards: GUS Max, SB16, AWE32, Roland MPU401 and Midiman MM401.
That's about the latest, fastest design you can get with isa slots without losing bus-mastering, non-masked-interrupts etc.
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No, the last one is the i875P, which is a tad better. I know someone running it with an ISA Sound card, 4GB of memory and a P4 3.6GHz! On windows 98! Crazy! 😁
All later chipsets don't assign a DMA to ISA (or something like that), but the i875 definitely works fine
Lots of 845G chipsets on ebay which work well with ISA sound cards. I own two of these boards and have tested personally with a GUS and several ISA Sound Blasters.
Amibay has a listing for this board (disclaimer: my listing):
http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=38559
The key isn't to look at the chipset but rather the I/O bridge. The last bridge to support ISA devices before this feature was removed by Intel is the "ICH5".
However, ISA slots are STILL ok all the way up to the Intel 945 chipset if you want to support Windows 98se as the the minimum Windows OS. There are unofficial chipset drivers available for this board which work fine with a little bit of tweaking (also tested personally).
ISA bus mastering is only important for digital audio. No MIDI devices that I'm aware of use it. So, you can mix an ISA card for MIDI and a PCI card for sound effects. If I remember correctly regarding PCI card backwards compatibility for DOS, it's always the midi that has a problem since the cards are trying to emulate an entire MIDI synth which would never be accurate or have any variety. Digital sound effects are always more or less the same. It's the MIDI that has a wide range of possibility depending on your synth.
I have had a hunch that it should be possible to support a fully backwards compatible ISA slot on an i945 chipset with an I/O bridge newer than ICH5 as long as there is a DMA-compatible third-party PCI-ISA Bridge chip on the board as well. I actually have a i945+ICH7 board in the mail which should arrive today which has such a combination. So we shall see. 🤣
What is the scaling like for demanding SVGA games goind from a P3 1.4 GHz to something more modern like a Core 2 or Athlon 64?
What kind of "demanding SVGA" games are you referring to?
wrote:What kind of "demanding SVGA" games are you referring to?
It was an assumption because of the requirement of an ISA slot. I guess this is for a sound card...
Hmm games such as System Shock, Duke Nukem, Blood maybe? AFAIK they can run at very high resolutions...
I've only ever put a sound card into the ISA slots. What would be the benefit of an ISA video card over PCI/AGP?
