VOGONS


First post, by Camtheman

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How did it go? More specifically, has anyone done this with an ISA FDD controller on a modern system? If it’s theoretically possible i’d like to know, or if anyone has done it before. Conventional PCI slots are still obtainable on modern platforms (see Supermicro X13SAE) so you wouldn’t have to do nonsense like pcie-pci-isa.

and No, i’m not above writing my own Windows 11 drivers for the ISA card either. Would be a fun project I think.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Early 90s: IBM PS/2 Server 95/A, Pentium 66, 16MB RAM, XGA-2, IBM SCSI Corvette, SCSI2SD, 3 Com EtherLink III MCA, Resound 2 AdLib MCA
Late 90s: Micron Millenia MXE, ABIT VH6-II, Coppermine 1ghz, 1024MB, Voodoo 5 5500 PCI, GUS Max 2.1, 128GB SATA PNY SSD

Reply 1 of 3, by Jo22

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Pentium board used to have PCI-ISA bridges..

https://www.science.unitn.it/~fiorella/guidel … tlk/node69.html

This worked, because the PCI buses in these early PCs had the ISA address space reserved.
The bridge then mapped the atrached ISA slots back into the original ISA memory regions.

Not sure it this still works out of box with modern PCs, too, though.
I mean, PCIe looks like PCI to software. But I don't know if PCIe still supports the ISA address space.

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Reply 2 of 3, by weedeewee

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The topic of ISA crops up from time to time, and I wish I had bookmarked some.
The problem, if I recall correctly, is that the below 16MB address space is no longer available for the pcie space, and thus also not for the pci or isa space.
Virtualization should be possible, direct hardware access not.

edit: and FYI, the PCI on that supermicro board hangs off the PCIe bus. Chips are located on the underside of the board.

Last edited by weedeewee on 2022-10-17, 16:00. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 3 of 3, by rasz_pl

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1 can you even load non signed drivers in spyware 11?
2 afaik PCI to ISA is not possible for full compatibility, thats what SB-Link and DDMA were for
3 ISA was replaced by LPC, but even LPC cant fully replace ISA https://flaterco.com/kb/ISA_chipsets.html#intelind
4 just buy USB FDD, or if you need something other than 3.5 get a https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3uvuCrcF2Y

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