Woah never heard of that! Is it a PCI to ISA (or ISA to PCI depending on how you look at it) or just a 1 ISA to many ISA?

I had one in my 286. Worked just fine. Actually, I still have one of those lying around.

Carrera wrote:

Woah never heard of that! Is it a PCI to ISA (or ISA to PCI depending on how you look at it) or just a 1 ISA to many ISA?

The ISA bus really just is a big electrical bus. The slots aren't individually addressable like newer types of slots. So long as you're not taxing the electrical aspects of current/voltage, etc of what the ISA controller can deliver, those ISA bus expanders work just fine.

Most of these boards were used in slimline desktop cases, where a normal ISA card wouldn't fit when mounted vertically. Sometimes there were timing issues with cheesy boards and fast or out-of-spec ISA cards (such as Adaptec controllers).
ISA extenders usually are simple devices, only a few ISA slot connectors soldered onto a piece of PCB, but there are also active units intended for testing prototype cards.

Expansion boards come in different varities. A search on ebay in "any country" using the terms isa riser or pci riser will show you what's available.

I found an ISA expansion board here in AUstralia:

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI … bayphotohosting

The expansion slots look ISA, but the parent header is wider. Can someone shed some light?

This one seems to come out of a proprietary box, like a Compaq or Dell machine. The seller doesn't seem to know what mainboard he took it from - which is a pity, because it won't work on anything else than the board(s) it was built for.

My Compaq 386SX mainboard has a matching connector for this expansion board. Not sure if it would work, but it would at least fit in mechanically.

The extra connections on the header seem to be only for ground and voltage lines.

Ebay has lots of interesting stuff right now: Here is a typical ISA extension board , and here you can see a very cool active external unit.

OK. Looks like I don't need to throw away that LAPC now that I can make room for it! It looks like the typical ones have three slots on one side, and two slots on the other or two slots each side:
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI … me=STRK:MEWA:IT
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI … me=STRK:MEWA:IT

So I can connect an SB16 pnp, a Roland Scc1 and LAPC all on one expansion board and have no issues for dos gaming?

It might be tough getting some games to use the card you want them to use, as some are hard-coded to use certain port numbers. As far as the hardware itself goes, it sounds like the only limiting factor is how much power they draw.

OK then. Out with LAPC and in with the SB AWE32/64! At least I will have dodgy LA synth music - most I of the games I want to play are GM supported anyway.