Plugging in old ISA cards is something that hasn’t really been possible since 80486 days. This makes plugging in cool things like Sound Blaster, Adlib, Monster3D and other ISA cards pretty much impossible for modern computers. It also means things like attaching 5.25″ floppy drives and old MFM/RLL drives are also off the table. Well, maybe. 🙂

There have been a few efforts to enabling plugging in ISA boards to modern pc.

• dISAppointment that I wrote about before is a USB plugin that exposes an ISA interface.
  • Uses the LPC (low pin count) interface that still has actual legacy ISA hardware support in any PC with a TPM port on the motherboard.
  • Hackaday article
  • VOGONS project link

• usb2ISA-R by ARS technology – costs about $150 and also requires power as well.
  • Discussion on VOGONS about the board and it’s capabilities – seems to indicate it does work for sound cards but audio can have bad background hum from power supply issues.

• ISASTM card is a little more involved setup but is able to be slotted into a ISA backplane and address multiple cards with one adapter. It seems to work with soundcards and video cards – though the USB 1.0 interface isn’t quite fast enough. A switch to USB 2 might yield enough bandwidth if Manawyrm has the time.
  • Here’s the VOGONS discussion about the setup
  • Hackaday article with more details