NamelessPlayer wrote:You can get Socket 478 boards with fully-functional ISA slots, if you don't mind looking at industrial motherboards. […]
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You can get Socket 478 boards with fully-functional ISA slots, if you don't mind looking at industrial motherboards.
OTOH, I've never seen any LGA775 mobos with an 865 or 875 chipset needed for 800 MHz FSB support and fully-functional ISA with DMA support. Later chipsets drop the second part entirely.
I built my P4EE 3.2 box specifically to have the fastest Win98SE system possible with ISA capability, while still being powerful enough for early/mid-2000s XP gaming, thus sparing me from having to build a separate 98SE system. It performs quite well at that, and I even get modern features like just hitting F12 to choose a boot device - my preferred sort of multi-boot manager, as it means I don't have to deal with bootloader kerfuffles on a single drive with partitioning.
I never thought to use an ISA riser, though. My board only has one ISA slot, but that would circumvent that limitation quite nicely, if I can be bothered with designing a custom case for it.
😀 Please believe me they exist. And getting FSB400/533/667/800 without problems. Only three models with dual core CPU support and I named them here.
P4EE is a perfect decision too. But compared to Core2 the P4 is too fast for DOS games and too slow for middle-late 2000s XP/7.
I don't use boot manager, very happy with regular NT5 boot loader.
About ISA I can say that all contacts at this bus are parallel and no one ISA slot hasn't its own address line unlike PCI slots. Therefore we can use ISA riser on any board, in any case, without any modding. Number of slots is not limited, only number of IO, IRQs, DMAs is limited. For example my ISA sound cards:
1) IO=220, IRQ=7, DMA=1, first MPU-401 IO=300, second MPU-401 IO=320 --- EWS64 "SBpro"
2) IO=240, IRQ=5, DMAlow=0, DMAhigh=5, MPU-401 IO=330 --- AV310 "SB16"
3) IO=250, IRQ=3, DMAhigh=7, FM=OFF --- GUS Ace
4) IO=260, IRQ=9, DMAlow=3, DMAhigh=6, MPU-401 IO=OFF, FM=OFF, EMU IO=640 --- AWE64Gold
melbar, what is better everyone decides for himself. On old 462/370 systems with ISA which have SDRAM PC133 and AGP2X it is impossible to get fast compos work in WinXP and 2000s games. These 462/370 builds are only for older OSes.