Getting working ISA on P4 will be difficult to find.

as long as the board has at least 1 functional serial port, and the sound works on windows ME then I can manage without ISA.

Rodney Dawn wrote on 2020-08-09, 01:31:

as long as the board has at least 1 functional serial port, and the sound works on windows ME then I can manage without ISA.

Sound will work, but getting it working on dos games might be a bit hit and miss. Depending on the card and game. What sound card will you use?

What is your budget?

A good P4 setup with ISA with working DMA is going to generally run you $300+

Here is an ATX board on eBay that will fit your requirements - not my sale:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/1pc-used-Advantech-I … t2/143440598444

Rodney Dawn wrote on 2020-08-09, 01:31:

as long as the board has at least 1 functional serial port, and the sound works on windows ME then I can manage without ISA.

Good ! Because socket 478 with ISA are not rare but those with true ISA and 845, 848 or 865 based are not cheap . (Not saying they are not around but in general NO unless you have very deep pockets hahhaaa). I really like my MSI 865PE-NEO2 and Giga 8iPE1000 soc 478. But no ISA on either but they have at least one Com port and a Parallel port too.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-08-09, 02:13:

What is your budget?

Yes those with real ISA are not cheap 😀

You could perform an eBay search with keywords "845" and "isa". If you could live with 1 ISA slot, there are cheap ones around like these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-Intel-D845G … wsAAOSwtl5dCQjO

https://www.ebay.com/itm/MS-6555-OEM-Intel-D8 … xMAAOSwJq1ZZZUt

USD60 comes complete with CPU and RAM.

kalohimal wrote on 2020-08-09, 02:28:

You could perform an eBay search with keywords "845" and "isa". If you could live with 1 ISA slot, there are cheap ones around […]
Show full quote

You could perform an eBay search with keywords "845" and "isa". If you could live with 1 ISA slot, there are cheap ones around like these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Gigabyte-Intel-D845G … wsAAOSwtl5dCQjO

https://www.ebay.com/itm/MS-6555-OEM-Intel-D8 … xMAAOSwJq1ZZZUt

USD60 comes complete with CPU and RAM.

They are cheap (in comparison to others) because no AGP slot.

Obviously 😊

Thanks 😀
Unfortunately the boards without AGP would not fit my needs.
I have a few different PCI Soundblaster cards which I know have ME drivers, though if I can get a board with 1 proper DMA ISA slot I have a selection of nice ''true'' Soundblaster 16 cards to choose from.

as for budget, anywhere in the 300-500.00 range would be ideal. I'd rather pay more for a solid reliable board, than save a few $$$ and end up with a flaky system because of shoddy motherboard. I'm going all out with this build, including a relatively modern gamer case,(old enough to have two external 5.25 bays for dvd and floppy and one external 3.5 for the other floppy, but new enough it looks flashy and supports watercooling. I'm also going to use an AIO watercooler ( waterblock bracket modded to fit S478) to make for a very quiet system. sort of a 'sleeper' build as it will look all modern when powered off, but is actually a 9x gaming rig beneath the flashy modern exterior. (Unless you look close enough to see the "Designed for Windows ME" case decal (pulled from a dead laptop and carefully attached to new case with a tiny drop of epoxy spread evenly to prevent peeling. I also bought an unopened "retail full" copy of windows ME off ebay, specifically for this build. (I still have my original from back in the day, kept in a cd protector case, but for this build it just felt right buying another copy. I'll post some pics when I get it done, and run some 9x benches if anyone is interested. Using specialty overclockers' DDR500 simply because I can run it at DDR400/333/266 with much tighter timings and due to the DIMMs using high quality chips.

With that budget you can consider a 478 industrial board with ISA. I have one and the ISA slot does have proper DMA and my sound blaster AWE 32 works well on it. I use it basically as a 3-in-1 system that runs DOS, Win98SE and XP. Mine is the single ISA slot version which is cheaper. With your budget you can go for the 3 slots version. Bear in mind though, just like other China brand boards, the support is non existence.

So order the board I posted a link to. It is made by Advantech. Probably never have to worry about it dying. And it should accept the Gallatin extreme edition CPUs as well. Prescott should work as well but IMO the Gallatin is better and should run cooler.

That being said, another option would be to get a PCIAGP/PXAGP backplane with the P-ISA bridge card and an SAGP 865 based SBC. That will end up being more around the $400-$500 mark but you will have a lot more slots to play with.

Do you really need to be able to run Win7 on it?

From my experience it needs at least 1gb ram to be somewhat useful. With just 512mb you should be happy if you can even start a a web browser. Minimum to be usable is around 4gb but thats mostly not enough.

Rodney Dawn wrote on 2020-08-08, 22:28:

I know all the power tweaks to run ME on greater than 512 ram (up to 1gb max)

I have Windows Me running on a system with 2GB of RAM and suggest that given you wish to run 32-bit Windows 7 feel you should install 2GB.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-08-09, 17:21:

So order the board I posted a link to. It is made by Advantech. Probably never have to worry about it dying. And it should accept the Gallatin extreme edition CPUs as well. Prescott should work as well but IMO the Gallatin is better and should run cooler.

That being said, another option would be to get a PCIAGP/PXAGP backplane with the P-ISA bridge card and an SAGP 865 based SBC. That will end up being more around the $400-$500 mark but you will have a lot more slots to play with.

Thanks 😀 that looks to be exactly what I am looking for.

red-ray wrote on 2020-08-09, 18:54:

Rodney Dawn wrote on 2020-08-08, 22:28:

I know all the power tweaks to run ME on greater than 512 ram (up to 1gb max)

I have Windows Me running on a system with 2GB of RAM and suggest that given you wish to run 32-bit Windows 7 feel you should install 2GB.

As I said I'll have 1gb to start with. I can always add another gb later on as I have several tested 1gb and 512mb sticks of DDR500 (for tight timings at conventional speeds).

red-ray wrote on 2020-08-09, 18:54:

Rodney Dawn wrote on 2020-08-08, 22:28:

I know all the power tweaks to run ME on greater than 512 ram (up to 1gb max)

I have Windows Me running on a system with 2GB of RAM and suggest that given you wish to run 32-bit Windows 7 feel you should install 2GB.

I may have to go up to 2gb, but 1gb should be sufficient as its just for web browsing. I have an FX8350 running 7 for normal modern computing needs, as well as an Opteron 3280 which dual boots 7 and whatever linux distro I happen to be playing with at the time (currently Kali Linux KDE). so I really only need 7 to run bare minimum on the P4, just so I dont have to switch machines to go look something up on gamefaqs. Of course I used to work around that issue by using KernelEX and Opera, on ME, but with more sites switching to an even stricter TLS BS, its hit or mis if that will work anymore. (probably wont be long before someone has to make something similar to KernelEx for 7 the way things are going, and 7 is the last windows I will ever use. I tried the bloated spywere laden 8 8.1 and 10 for a brief period each on the Opteron, and always ended up ''upgrading'' back to 7. Of course as much as I like 7, I would still be running ME exclusively if not for lack of drivers for newer hardware, and the stupid TLS issues getting harder to deal with. I use classic view, and custom icons to make 7 feel more like ME, but its not the same. even on the Opteron with a fast PCIE SSD there is a noticeable delay in actions, which anything 2ghz or better and a fast ATA133 drive will do nearly instantaneously on ME. I like 7, but I still enjoy ME a lot more.