Very interesting. Just a few observations: They currently offer support for DOS under Windows [98] operating systems. It's $135. Also, that mobo won't accept AGP 3.3V cards, eg Voodoo5.

Not sure if the ARS item is worth the hassle and cost. It may be to some. If its running DOS and isa based cards that you are after, you may as well spend the money on a 440BX based board, as RG100 and I have done, or on a 845 based industrial board P4 board, and run mid/late era DOS games, and all win98 era games, and use XP and dosbox for early dos stuff.

Alternatively, run a newer machine without DOS and ISA slots, and instead focus on win98, XP and Dosbox. Over on MSFN there is a win9x forum which has a sticky, listing the last mobos that support win98. There is an Asrock mobo with AGP and pci-E, but running win98 on it is not for the faint hearted. An Asrock 865PE conroe may be the best pick of the last Intel based board to support win98 (i.e., official drivers under win98).

buckrogers wrote:

Not sure if the ARS item is worth the hassle and cost. It may be to some. If its running DOS and isa based cards that you are after, you may as well spend the money on a 440BX based board, as RG100 and I have done, or on a 845 based industrial board P4 board, and run mid/late era DOS games, and all win98 era games, and use XP and dosbox for early dos stuff.

Alternatively, run a newer machine without DOS and ISA slots, and instead focus on win98, XP and Dosbox. Over on MSFN there is a win9x forum which has a sticky, listing the last mobos that support win98. There is an Asrock mobo with AGP and pci-E, but running win98 on it is not for the faint hearted. An Asrock 865PE conroe may be the best pick of the last Intel based board to support win98 (i.e., official drivers under win98).

Ditto on both 😀 440BX-based DOS machine and Win98SE-focused machine. i865/875 is a sure thing, if the southbridge chipset used is the ICH5, then you'll still have 'SBLink' support (to emulate older SB on PCI cards such as SBLive!/audigy/AudioPCI etc on true DOS environment). For a most-compatible Win98 machine i'd recommend an AGP mobo (no PCI-e) such as older P4 mobos (865/875). I'm looking for a VIA K8M800-based one (socket AM2 + AGP), but can't share any experience--haven't seen an MSI K9MM-V locally yet 😐

Just a tip if you're looking for intel-based industrial mobo solutions with ISA, be sure to check the southbridge as well (ICH5 or lower IIRC), otherwise, chances are you will have no sound in DOS.

Just a tip if you're looking for intel-based industrial mobo solutions with ISA, be sure to check the southbridge as well (ICH5 or lower IIRC), otherwise, chances are you will have no sound in DOS.

Depends on whether it uses PCI-to-ISA bridge or LPC-to-ISA bridge. See this document:
http://www.intel.com/assets/pdf/whitepaper/318244.pdf

Getting the ISA slot on a modern board is all good and well.

However I doubt these industrial boards allow you to disable the internal CPU cache and play with the FSB and Multi settings to slow the machine down.

If they do, well that would be awesome. Can anyone confirm?

Once you use W98 why would you need a ISA sound card? Aren't Windows games simply accessing the card through the windows driver, so a PCI Sound Blaster would do the job (or whatever other PCI cards where popular around that time).

I do like DOSBox a lot, but it's all in the detail. In "Heart of China" when you go into the bar right after the start, the screen scrolls from the right to the left. It's super smooth on a real PC. As if someone takes a Picture and moves it.

On DOSBox it's very jittery. Now you can enable "Double Buffering" which makes the scrolling smooth, but then the sound slows down / stutters...

I slowly come to the conclusion that there is no ideal way. They have their challenges on way or another.