VOGONS


First post, by dionb

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Is there such a thing as an ISA sound, video or network card with bootable IDE or SCSI?

I know there are VLB VGA cards with bootable IDE (I own two, both based on UMC UM85C418 chipset), but I've not seen any for ISA. More than enough ISA sound cards have IDE and/or SCSI, but as far as I'm aware they're not bootable.

Reason is I have this very nice tiny low-profile system with 486SLC, no I/O onboard and exactly two ISA slots on a riser that take half-length cards. That means that I currently have a VGA card (ET4000) and a multi-I/O card installed, which somewhat cramps my style. The motherboard has lots of other ISA slots (it's a regular half babyAT board), but there's no room in the case to get creative with ISA cables. So my thinking is to try to somehow get I/o moved onto VGA, network or sound cards.

I know that sound and LAN can be done over LPT (and I have a parallel NIC and am working on a Covox-clone myself), but a) I probably want sound *and* LAN and b) I hate dongles with a passion, so want to avoid that as much as possible.