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(Posted this on HW Rec but got no responses.)

Would like to use an ISA expansion card in a modern PC. There are

  • Expensive PCI - ISA adapters (but I cannot find any actually for sale now)
  • USB-ISA adapters, which may not work
  • New motherboards with ISA slots, rare and expensive
  • Old motherboards for sale on Ebay
  • PCI to ISA bridge chips (eg IT8888G), but no products using them?

Are there no practical solutions to this problem? I cannot be the first person to want to do this.

Edit: when I say "modern" I didn't really mean the very latest. Am not sure what CPU I have exactly but it is around ten years old.

More: The card is an SCM Swapbox.

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    ARS Technologies still show the usb2isa-r USB 2.0 to ISA card as available. I used something similar (if not identical) in a legacy application around a decade ago. I hesitate to post this as an answer as some driver code will need to be written and your specific card may not work. The hardware is beginning to get into legacy/mission critical status, so solutions that work reliably tend to be expensive. These target industry, not hobbyists
    – scruss
    Commented May 13, 2019 at 14:09
  • I was about to write the same as Brian above. There are hobbyist boards which can be used to rebuild XT-level PCs from scratch, with support for ISA cards, or you could use an ISA backplane with an S-100 converter and build a 486-based system... (But obviously that’s nothing like running a current CPU and being able to connect an ISA board. PCI is somewhat uncommon nowadays, let alone ISA, although PCI-capable motherboards are still easy enough to find, including new.)
    – Stephen Kitt
    Commented May 13, 2019 at 14:44
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    It is also possible to buy new PCs with ISA slots, e.g. here (with published prices), with 4th gen Core CPUs.
    – Stephen Kitt
    Commented May 13, 2019 at 14:50
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    We need to know what the card is. You may not be able to get drivers for it even if you can connect it. Many modern machines can't run DOS, and systems like DOSBox and QEMU can't access ISA hardware directly either.
    – user
    Commented May 13, 2019 at 15:26
  • @user dos is pretty much what s universal. That s how I got a 16Gb live Window 98se usb. It ran everywhere although in 640 480 16 colors. Though I recognize it was 8 years ago but I m not aware of a computer not able to run dos.
    – user2284570
    Commented Oct 8, 2020 at 16:25

5 Answers 5

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There's basically two possibilities you may find:

  1. The ISA card is a fairly trivial piece of hardware, using I/O ports or memory-mapping only. In this case, it is pretty likely an USB-to-ISA or PCI-to-ISA adapter will work. It is, however, also pretty likely a modern PCI-express or USB replacement is cheaper, thus rendering the adapter useless.
  2. The ISA card is not-so-trivial, might use DMA or even take over the bus completely, as many of the more complicated co-processor cards do. I happen to have a Motorola 68040 card on an ISA slot that does take over the bus completely and talks to the graphics card and disk controllers directly - something like that would be worthy of spending quite some of money for an adapter card - I don't, however, know of any adapter card that would support such a setup.

The above, either too simple to justify the cost of an adapter card, or too complicated that it is really working, is probably the main reason such ISA adapters are no longer available in the market.

Your best possible options are either buying a relatively modern used PC that still has ISA slots (they're still available on eBay, if you're lucky, you'll find a very small and relatively recent Pentium board like they were used for PoS systems, that's what I did), or investing in a more modern setup, you can still buy new ISA-PC setups targetted at the embedded market (at a price, however).

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    The problem with a lot of relatively recent (in the last 10 years or so) PC motherboards with ISA support don't support ISA DMA, since it can't be implemented using a PCI to ISA bridge without additional connections that PC chipsets don't support anymore. ISA DMA can be supported with LPC to ISA bridges though. I'm not sure how well bus mastering works with either kind of bridge.
    – user722
    Commented May 15, 2019 at 18:09
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    This. We still buy these for some legacy devices that just won't die. LGA1155 Sandy Bridge with one ISA slot and some legacy PCI also on the board.
    – J...
    Commented May 14, 2020 at 13:23
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As mentioned is a comment above by @scruss, some manufacturers (such as ARS Technologies) have created a USB device that provides an USB-ISA bridge and an ISA slot.

ARS tech usb2isa card

It is an expensive option, as it's a niche product, and most people needing this kind of item will be in a position where they have to support some old mission-critical peripheral that can't easily be replaced.

This approach deals with the hardware issue, but you may also have issues finding drivers to support your old ISA card in a modern OS. One person has recorded their experience of getting an old ISA network card working here.

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    I wonder if there are any open-source boards that would combine a USB-equipped microcontroller with 5-volt level converters and perhaps some DC-DC converters as well)? If one has an ISA card with a fairly simple documented read-write interface, having code which operates the card running on a microcontroller, and communicate with the PC using an application-specific high-level protocol, may be more practical than trying to adapt low-level code on the PC to work with USB.
    – supercat
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 16:40
  • @supercat: "USB-equipped microcontroller with 5-volt level converters" ==[ Doesn't a pin on the ISA bus pass the 5v line from the pwr supply to the USB? Do you have to condition the 5v power or something? What is a level converter?
    – Jess Fuckett
    Commented Jun 3 at 13:48
  • @JessFuckett: Most readily available USB microcontrollers use 3.3-volt logic for their I/O pins. While some chips exist with 5-volt I/O (e.g. some Cypress PSOC chips) such chips don't seem as readily available as 3.3-volt chips.
    – supercat
    Commented Jun 3 at 15:13
  • @supercat - the ATMEGAxxU4 series is very easy to get hold of, I've found. I recently built a keyboard using one; they're pretty good.
    – occipita
    Commented Jun 11 at 13:55
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The Rasteri has come up with a way to connect an ISA card (at least, an ISA sound card) to systems with a TPM connector, up to Broadwell-era or AM4 systems; see his dISAppointment video for details. Everything needed to build your own is in the dISAppointment repository, and there’s a thread on Vogons.

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    The technical detail of this: The LPC bus the optional TPM on some motherboards connects-to was meant to be the interface you connected legacy IO hubs to. As a result it's effectively an ISA bus with half the IO width, clocked art the PCI clock speed and can be buffered and unpacked back to ISA with a chip. On a system where TPM is connected via SPI for example this will not work. Also there is no standard LPC header.
    – davolfman
    Commented May 22 at 18:48
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I found 2 boards for socket 1150/1151:

cost about 270$ us:

http://aicsys.com/Industrial-Motherboards-MBC-6605.html

cost about 140$ us:

https://ipc.msi.com/product_detail/Industrial-Motherboard/ATX/MS-98L9-V2.0

Motherboards-MBC-6605 - this is the best option because this motherboard uses Intel chipset 8-series that supports drivers under Windows XP 32, which supports almost all ISA cards.

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    Welcome on the RC SE! I think the OP wants to build his card into an existing PC, not into a new one.
    – peterh
    Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 11:16
  • Unfortunately, this is not possible, I even bought an ARS USB-ISA bridge for 150$ dollars, but the ISA sound card over this bridge did not work. Therefore, buying a motherboard for a modern platform is the best option.
    – Hellraiser
    Commented Apr 3, 2020 at 20:09
  • ISA has problematic autoconfiguration (ISA-PnP, but not all devices support it), maybe that was the problem? As I can remember, all the irq, dma and io settings need to be configured manually by jumpers, and by software (by driver parameters). Could this ARS USB-ISA bridge do this? It should have emulated irq, dma and also io.
    – peterh
    Commented Apr 4, 2020 at 1:39
  • Sound card 100% PnP - Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects (CT4170). I'm tired of suffering so ARS USB-ISA bridge already resold
    – Hellraiser
    Commented Apr 6, 2020 at 8:54
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Our custom ISA test cards are working in a more modern PC. The system uses a PICMG 1.0 single board computer with a Intel gen. 4 I5 processor and a PICMG 1.0 backplane

Full-size PICMG 1.0 with LGA1150 Intel® CPU https://www.icpamerica.com/wsb-h810/ https://www.ieiworld.com/en/product/model.php?II=209

14 slot backplane to fit in existing chassis https://www.icpamerica.com/pci-14s3-rs/

Note: ipcamerica is a US distributor ieiworld is the manufacture

This got our ISA cards working with windows 10 but now am looking for a windows 11 solution. This has many more challenges due to the Microsoft's Windows 11 minimum requirements of only offering the OS as 64 bits, needing TPM 2.0 module, minimum generation 8 processor, minimum graphics level, etc... https://www.ieiworld.com/en/news/con_show.php?op=showone&cid=1266

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  • In the datasheet they list a bunch of other backplanes with different slot configurations.
    – Alex Hajnal
    Commented Mar 29, 2022 at 21:44
  • When you say "our" cards, can you confirm you are involved in the manufacture or distribution? Promotion of relevant products is permitted here with full disclosure, that would avoid accusations of spamming.
    – Chenmunka ♦
    Commented Mar 30, 2022 at 8:16
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    OP has never returned, but I'll respond for him: The "our" appears to me to refer to custom cards his company built, for internal purposes only, some time ago that they have to keep working, and so he's talking about how they're keeping them working.
    – davidbak
    Commented Jul 19, 2023 at 17:30

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