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First post, by xjas

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Sorry for starting a whole bunch of new threads in a row lately - just came into a lot of gear that I'm trying to decide how best to use.

Basically this Asus CUBX would be extremely more useful to me if it had a second ISA slot. The solder pads are there; it looks like it might have even been designed to have one. Might have to bend a couple pins but that's no big deal. I'd have no problem removing the PCI slot.

Can I just solder an ISA slot in there and expect it to work? Have any of you done that?

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Reply 1 of 8, by The Serpent Rider

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Apparently all required lanes to ISA are connected, so it's possible. I have CUBX with 2 ISA slots.

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Reply 4 of 8, by cyclone3d

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The other option is to just get an ISA riser card. You would have to make a new way to mount the cards in the case, but you can get more ISA slots easier than soldering in a new slot to a motherboard.

And you could also hook up a passive ISA backplane and have a cable going from your single ISA slot to it. It would have to be mounted externally, preferably in another case though. You can get up to 20 ISA slots that way.

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Reply 5 of 8, by xjas

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kiwa wrote:

I can confirm that it does work on this mb, i did exactly the same thing years ago, the hardest thing was getting an spare isa slot.

Sweet, looks like I have a project on my hands. Thanks for the confirmation. 😀

cyclone3d wrote:

The other option is to just get an ISA riser card. You would have to make a new way to mount the cards in the case, but you can get more ISA slots easier than soldering in a new slot to a motherboard.

And you could also hook up a passive ISA backplane and have a cable going from your single ISA slot to it. It would have to be mounted externally, preferably in another case though. You can get up to 20 ISA slots that way.

I have a 6-slot backplane I could use, but the CUBX already reaches down to the bottom of a typical ATX case. Fabricating the cable AND an external ISA box sounds like more work than just adding on an extra slot. If I decide I need more than 2 slots it's an option though.

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Reply 7 of 8, by Deksor

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I think that as long as you have enough IRQs DMAs, etc, you can fit any number of them

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Reply 8 of 8, by .legaCy

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Errius wrote:

What limits the maximum number of ISA cards you can have connected at the same time?

Deksor wrote:

I think that as long as you have enough IRQs DMAs, etc, you can fit any number of them

IRQ is not needed but the software designed for the card would have to pool the card.
The irq is a good way to let the cpu do other things while the card is doing the required task because when the card is done it will do a interrupt request and the processor will be interrupted and may send more tasks to the board.
even dma is not needed, you can do stuff with programmed io.
As long as you have free addresses you can put isa cards on the system.
On the ISA bus the address lines will be set and the address set on the card will make the card input or output data to the bus, hence why two cards cannot exist in the same address, they will try to input or output data at the same time and the result will be corrupted data potentially freezing the system.