I thought isa sound cards don't work in those newer systems that don't have dma support?

That website needs to upgrade from a potato camera.

I really doubt the ISA slots would be useful at all as they most likely don't support DMA. It depends on the ISA bridge chip thought.

When it comes to a "NEW" daily driver machine , I wouldn't want any of that legacy stuff on it.

It's a massive waste of board space to put standard pci and isa slots onto a machine that isn't going to be compatible with most operating systems or drivers that the hardware requires.

Just get a decent modern system and a decent legacy system. Don't try to frakenstein both together you'll just end up with a slightly worse version of each.

emosun wrote:

It's a massive waste of board space to put standard pci and isa slots onto a machine that isn't going to be compatible with most operating systems or drivers that the hardware requires.

Your pc can run numerous isa and pci era operating systems and in many cases make full use of old pci hardware for those platforms without ever leaving your modern desktop.

emosun wrote:

It's a massive waste of board space to put standard pci and isa slots onto a machine that isn't going to be compatible with most operating systems or drivers that the hardware requires.

Well, really the only thing that needs ISA is DOS, for sound cards. And DOS is compatible with everything (at least until Intel and AMD remove the legacy BIOS emulation).

So, it might be an interesting thing, as long as DMA will work properly for the ISA slots. If not - it's useless. If yes - then you can have a modern system that allows playing DOS games on real hardware, which is neat if you don't have room for a dedicated legacy desktop.

Going for a brand new daily driver, one better get a legacy free machine these days. It is going to last the next 5 years after all. ISA/PCI/AGP are fun after all, yet mixing vintage and brand new on this scale, can have some serious drawbacks, when one wants to do modern cutting edge computing. Better keep legacy stuff for vintage/retro hardware.

There's nothing exciting about it. This is not Ford re-releasing the '69 Mustang with auto pilot and Siri. These systems are meant for irreplaceable robotics/medical/military ISA cards still relied upon that nobody bothered to put on an FPGA before the source documentation was lost. Fan service to small technology companies that canned their engineering decades ago. $20 for the motherboard would be fun. $865 barebones isn't.

I just don't see any point of this PC for retro gaming. ISA sound card would almost certainly won't work on it, and without it, the whole existence of it makes absolutely zero sense. Even my semi "retro" PC, which has much older CPU (C2D grade Pentium) don't have a ISA slot, and I can't say, that I'm missing it. It's the same with my main rig, where during last upgrade I throw all PCI slots out out the window with replacement of the motherboard, and again, I'm not missing them even a bit...