Solution 4 should definitely work, solutions 1 and 2 might work, and solution 3 definitely will not work, since desktop PCMCIA slots are not designed to work with anything other than storage devices.

I might try solution 2, since I have a donor card on hand and it doesn't require me to spend any additional money. If it works, great, I'll figure ou some way to support the thing.

If it doesn't, I'll try building the Covox speech thing (since I haven't seen any for sale and it sounds like an *extremely* simple device). I'm assuming I need drivers also, will probably be a tough time finding those.

Thanks for your input.

Not many games supported the covox speech thing directly.

Can you fit a half-height card? For example, the audio Excel AV310 is half height and if you remove the L-bracket you might be able to get it to fit. How much clearance do you actually have?

Not enough for a half-height card. Maybe 3/4 of an inch to an inch, max?
Its not much room.

Maybe contact these guys?
http://www.adexelec.com/isa.htm#ISA-01

The ISAR-04A seems like it would suit

😁

Already emailed them, no response yet though.

DonutKing wrote:

Maybe contact these guys?
http://www.adexelec.com/isa.htm#ISA-01

The ISAR-04A seems like it would suit

They have one in stock for $18, so I'm probably going to order it today!
Now I don't have to bodge something together. 😁

how about buying a new case
Im assuming the problem is the card wont fit not you dont have free isa slots

Well, there's only 1 ISA slot. I suppose I could build a new case, but it would probably be ugly as hell, seeing as how I don't have proper metalworking tools. I could use plexi but that wouldn't shield RF.
There is only 1 ISA slot, I'd still need to use a riser if I wanted more than one board.

I called Adex, someone bought the last two ISAR-04 boards so I had to get them to cut down a board for me. Luckily they are charging the same price. I would not be shocked to see the darn things show up on ebay for $50.

you have a board that only has a single isa slot ?
most of them have several

Strange as it sounds, it's true. It is a small form factor 486 in a 1U case, probably intended for industrial or POS applications. It was a freebie, it has 16mb RAM and a DX2-66 so seemed like a good project box. Ideally, it would be nice if it had 2 or 3 3.5" bays and 3 ISA slots, so I could have sound, better video and maybe a scsi board, but it is what it is. I'm not going to spend a ton of money on this box, maybe $50 tops.

I might not be understanding the problem correctly, but I was just posting about the Asound ISA sound cards, and they were very skinny. You could do away with the joystick port on the back and it'd be only about 2" tall. (The joystick part is connected to the board via ribbon cable).

Here's one for sale with a pic:

http://www.atomicmall.com/view.php?id=234388&mba=0

It's a PnP sound card but it does have DOS drivers available.

I just re-read through the thread, I guess it won't work. You mentioned plexiglass, but no shielding. They do make aluminum tape that you could cover it with. I suppose if you looked around you could find something even more suitable, like this:

http://www.lessemf.com/fabric.html

Thanks for the suggestion, but the Asound is still too big. The board would have to stop somewhere around the first jack for it to fit in this case (it is really cramped).

I suppose if I get ambitious, I might build a new case. I'm not really feeling up to it right now, though. If I do, I still have the 1 ISA slot, so I would still need to use a riser. That limits me to hanging 3 ISA cards off it, max, since I can't use the other side of the riser (unless I made it really tall, and I don't want to make it more than 3" tall. I would still like to have a low profile case, and since I can only fit one normal ISA card in there unless I use a riser anyway, I may as well make it a low profile case but just expand the number of horizontal ISA cards I can have.

I'm not sure what the limit would be, but seems like you wouldn't be able to hang more than 2 or 3 cards off one slot anyway.

Well, my ISA adapter came today but I think maybe its time to stop throwing good money after bad.

Let me explain: got the adapter today, was all excited. Installed it, started installing the soundcard and realized - the other simm slots are blocking it.
And, the sound card is practically right on top of the cpu heatsink.
Soooooooooo, at this point either I yank 2 of the simms and see if I can get the sound card in, and hope my cpu doesn't over heat, OR I give up on having sound at all. If I remove the RAM, I'll only have 8MB unless I buy 16MB simms. About the only other thing I could do is look for a really low profile sound card, and install a fan and hope that is enough, and forget about the extra RAM for now.

8MB is still heaps of RAM in a 486.

For DOS games at least.

snorg wrote:

Well, my ISA adapter came today but I think maybe its time to stop throwing good money after bad.

Even a single ISA slot can be an issue. On the small form factor Unisys 486 I had I could also only fit certain cards. The AWE64 Value would fit nicely.

You can drive an external Roland Sound Canvas as well. But I really needed a second ISA slot for a Roland MPU401 card. With a heavy hearth I sold the machine and went for standard desktop stuff instead...

CMI8330 and OPL3-SAX (YMF715) ISA soundcards are compact and functional and easy to obtain. The CMI8330 supports SB16 sound. The OPL3-SAX has genuine OPL3 FM. ESS based soundcards are usually small too.