I dont know what you exactly mean.

ISA is still present internally in parts in the most modern PCs.
So the only thing on this MB is, that they put a Chip in the Board that bridges PCI to ISA and put some physical slots on it.

Huh? What Intel based board has had ISA slots since the BX chipset except for this one??

Robert

PS/2 and serial ports still use the ISA bus.

Some P4 mobo's have had ISA slots for a long time so I don't see what the huge wow factor is.

'Never seen one before until today. I guess I learned something new. Well, I still like my BX chipset board for DOS games and SB16 support, but I suppose this is a modern day alternative.

Robert

Yeah, I don't know what the compatibility is like for those things. I believe there may be a couple of people on the board who bought a P4 with an ISA slot (I think for old sound cards). I'll search around and see if they've had any problems with them.....

ISA slots on modern mobos are used in the industrial/research sector, that just need the ISA bus to plug interfaces in... so it is no wonder they still exist in small quantities... and NO, those where not made in case anyone wanted an ISA soundcard 🤣 😁 but u can use one too

actually ISA has been replaced by the "LPC" bus (low pin count). It uses a lot fewer traces than ISA did but is compatible sorta.

Here's my (to coin a phrase?) neo-retro rig mobo:

http://www.baber.com/baber/411/soyo_sy-p4i-845pe-isa.htm

I've mentioned this thing before. I can personally attest that it is the missing link with a college education... The ISA slots in this thing work perfectly in DOS and it doesn't have any trouble with modern games. It's a bit easier to get ahold of these than most of the brand-less "industrial" motherboard models I ran across when looking for this, although the top-speed CPU is a little lower, and the FSB is 533. Oh well. It can still fly. The 4x AGP slot is certainly a redeeming feature if you ask me.

But speeking of ISA bus mysteries:

I heard that the ISA bus is somehow locked into 11mhz. Is there any validity to this? Anyone know? All I can say is my ISA Sound Blaster AWE64 keeps up with anything I can run on this, so this has always confused me.

I wish there were ISA boards that supported the Dual-core or Quad-core CPUs. Talk about rockets on a skateboard.

I've been using the soyo PE845 ISA board for quite a while now and can recommend it. It has no issues with my sb16/SCC-1 in dos/win98se or WinXP. The only shortcomings is that it only supports one floppy, so I have to manually change the cable when I want to use my 5.25 floppy and I'm having some trouble getting enough IRQs under WinXP. The onboard USB seems to grab like 3IRQs and something called the SMBus controller grabs another. The USB can be disabled (but it's all or nothing, you can't just disable one of the controllers) but I haven't found a way to disable the SMBus controller to free up its IRQ.

I would love to see a newer dual core/quad core mobo with ISA slots, I know I would buy one.

the SMBus is the interface that monitor chips use (so u can see the cpu temp, fan speeds etc) you cannot disable it in modern systems...
also, I was under the impression that XP does not support the ISA bus... do ISA cards really work under XP???

keropi wrote:

I was under the impression that XP does not support the ISA bus... do ISA cards really work under XP???

It does and they do.

keropi wrote:

the SMBus is the interface that monitor chips use (so u can see the cpu temp, fan speeds etc) you cannot disable it in modern systems...
also, I was under the impression that XP does not support the ISA bus... do ISA cards really work under XP???

Ahh..thanks, I had googled it a bit before but never was able to find out exactly what it was for. I find it somewhat ironic that Win98 supports IRQ sharing better than XP, when the SMBus shares IRQs with other components such as the network card, XP hangs during startup but Win98 works fine. I was finally able to get everything working in XP by disabling both com ports and the lpt irq and manually assigning the pci resources in the BIOS setup.

As for XP and ISA, it doesn't detect ISA devices during hardware discovery as Win98 did, but you can add the devices manually yourself and they work fine.

How did you get an SCC-1 to work in XP? I went through hell to get it going on Win2k (although it's just a generic MPU-401 GM device, so I don't think I can access the GS set). To do this I remember having to open up a hidden driver list file, and uncommenting a line for generic MPU-401. Can't recall the exact driver name though. This procedure was listed in a Windows Knowledge-base Solution.

I read somewhere that XP flat-out does not support the MPU-401, so I didn't try. I read that again with Vista recently.

I'm not sure if XP supports a real MPU-401, but I have the same thing with my Roland SCD-15 daughterboard attached to my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Both work in WinXP fine. It's my sound card of choice until I can use it no more. (I don't play many modern games)

Robert

Microsoft still includes the MPU-401 driver with XP, when you go to the Add Hardware wizard, choose the option to manually select from a list, choose Sound, video and game controllers, select Microsoft as the manufacturer and MPU-401 Midi as the device, then configure the resources to match the jumpers on your scc-1 (IO 330-331, irq 9 by default)

I did have an issue though when I subsequently installed the device driver for the SB16 card, XP insisted there was a conflict on IO port 330 even though the SB16 is configured for IO 300. I finally ended up uninstalling the the mpu-401 device and letting XP configure the SB16 for IO port 330. But since the SCC-1 is actually what's listening on 330 all midi goes to it and not the SB16 anyway so it works as I want it to. If you don't have a SB16 you shouldn't need to worry about this. I also have my MT-32 connected to the SCC-1s midi out port so I can still use my MT32 under XP as well.

Really all be damned i DLed a driver for an mpu 401 based on board sound card i have computer that have mpu 401 based sound cards. i had no idea xp already had a river. 😳

Just browsing around the intrawebs and happened to run across a LGA 775 socket board that supports C2D processors and has an ISA slot!

http://www.ibase-i.com.tw/mb886.htm

I got to have one so I can upgrade and keep my SCC-1. Anyone know how much or where I can get one?

jthieme wrote:

Just browsing around the intrawebs and happened to run across a LGA 775 socket board that supports C2D processors and has an ISA slot!

😳

And in goes the AWE32 + SCD15 DB combo! LMAO