Very cool.

The little hamster wheel is turning now as I'm trying to figure out what I would do with an isa slot in a s775 board...hmmmm.

http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.html - here's a website with more modern MB's with ISA slots...ISA slot on a Socket LGA 1155?! awesome.

I wonder if any of these MB's (maybe the s478 one in my url link) have Win98 drivers? That would make these boards with their ISA slots somewhat usable for gaming and other retrocomputing purposes.

Unfortunately, any board with a chipset made after the mid-late Pentium 4 era (Intel 8xx or earlier) will not support ISA DMA under any circumstances, and is therefore effectively useless for soundcards--the primary reason for wanting an ISA slot.

any board with a chipset made after the mid-late Pentium 4 era (Intel 8xx or earlier) will not support ISA DMA under any circumstances

Why's that?

I've seen a LGA 1155 board with ISA slot

Dant wrote:

Unfortunately, any board with a chipset made after the mid-late Pentium 4 era (Intel 8xx or earlier) will not support ISA DMA under any circumstances, and is therefore effectively useless for soundcards--the primary reason for wanting an ISA slot.

I figured as much...for this reason coupled with the high price point and fact that there's probably no Win9x drivers for these boards anyways, makes them dead to me 😵 ...unless someone can attest to a good use for the ISA slot in these types of boards.

smeezekitty wrote:

any board with a chipset made after the mid-late Pentium 4 era (Intel 8xx or earlier) will not support ISA DMA under any circumstances

Why's that?

I think the best thread on the subject so far has been PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers... .

It seems to me that the issues are still pretty murky and that someone could feasibly set out to design a motherboard that supports ISA DMA if they really wanted to. http://www.mdgx.com/newtip18.htm further suggests that the PCI clock frequency is much faster than the ISA clock frequency and that special measures may be required to slow it down.

retrofanatic wrote:

...unless someone can attest to a good use for the ISA slot in these types of boards.

Supporting super-expensive but somewhat dated testing and automation equipment in the industrial/scientific sector. They aren't targeting home users at all with these kinds of boards; it's more for the folks that have five-six figures tied up into equipment that can only interface with dated ISA cards, and upgrading that equipment or the I/O section is usually cost prohibitive unless you're Intel or something.

There's some really weird stuff out there... http://www.costronic.com.tw/EindexPI.htm
Yes, if a company spent $200k developing a specialized control card for ISA, they'd rather spend $1k to just rebuild the computer each time it fails. Working around that card design would be easier than to re-develop it for a new bus each time. I don't personally know of any real life examples, but that's just usually the case.
The Intel ICH7 datasheet does discuss a little bit about ISA and legacy interrupt support. I can't find larger photos of that motherboard to see if an extra chip is mediating the ISA slot or if they dared to make use of those options (unlike mass market consumer boards of the time).

a guy named tido has an ISA 775 board. i think he is on vogons and few other forums.

Would one of these industrial boards like an LGA 775 915 board work well for just a floppy controller card? Been looking at using these boards for a CD and Floppy writing/copying system im planning.

BIOSes of these boards often lack floppy support, so unless there's a BIOS on the floppy card, things are not going to work in DOS (but should work in windows as it doesn't rely on BIOS).

Tiido wrote on 2022-05-05, 06:48:

BIOSes of these boards often lack floppy support, so unless there's a BIOS on the floppy card, things are not going to work in DOS (but should work in windows as it doesn't rely on BIOS).

I intended on using Windows. and the floppy controller is the DIY one, the XT-FDC because im putting 4 floppy drives in the same system. From what I understand, the controller supports 4 FDDs on its own so the ISA would just be doing I/O i think.

FDC needs DMA...

Grzyb wrote on 2022-05-05, 08:27:

FDC needs DMA...

so based on what ive read, something like a 9xx board wouldnt work? Ive also seen a G41 board for LGA 775 with ISA.

AFAIK - no, floppy can be used in PIO mode. Intel does not support DMA after ICH5 south bridge, i.e. 8xx chipset series. Barring some rare exceptions, industrial boards on 9xx and later chipsets don't support ISA DMA. Industrial boards are used for very specific controllers, which rarely used DMA.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-05-05, 16:24:

AFAIK - no, floppy can be used in PIO mode. Intel does not support DMA after ICH5 south bridge, i.e. 8xx chipset series. Barring some rare exceptions, industrial boards on 9xx and later chipsets don't support ISA DMA. Industrial boards are used for very specific controllers, which rarely used DMA.

oh ok. So I would have to use something like an s478 board with ISA, since ive seen those on 8xx chipsets? And because my IDE burner drives wont write to my CD-RW disks, the one i know works and already have is SATA, so id probably need an IDE to SATA adapter... Im still learning the older hardware, and what can be done with it, so apologies for the basic questions

Edit: I did find an LGA775 with MB865 chipset and 2x ISA. I wonder how well that would work?

865 chipset had industrial boards both on S478 and LGA775. It has two native SATA ports and usually can handle HDDs up to 2 Tb. Few supported Core 2 to some degree, but good luck finding those.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-05-05, 16:50:

865 chipset had industrial boards both on S478 and LGA775. It has two native SATA ports and usually can handle HDDs up to 2 Tb. Few supported Core 2 to some degree, but good luck finding those.

right. the 775 board with 865 chipset is $500... ick. the other reason ive considered S478 instead of 775 is OS. I can run Win10 on 775, and still use all the drives I need either thru command prompt, or NT based writing software like Rawwrite. on S478, Id probably have to step back to something like Win2000. The problem with that OS is it wont see SATA controllers, only IDE, which is why I brought up possibly needing an IDE to SATA adapter for my SATA burner drive. For context, Im planning a build on a PC that can run 4 FDDs and a CD burner drive to write OS's, Programs, drivers, or games, onto the proper media for whatever older PC I may be working on.

How does Win2000 not see SATA controllers? Other than the SATA controller not having drivers for Win2k/XP it should just work.

If you want an LGA775 865 based board with AGP but sadly no ISA, there is the ASUS P5PE-vm

If you want LGA775 865 based board with PCIe but again no ISA, there is ASUS P5GC-MX/1333