Adding a vintage ISA bus slot to a modern computer #VintageComputing #Retrocomputing @rasteri

Andy on Twitter and YouTube has demonstrated the dISAppointment board. It’s a 16 bit ISA slot (which were in old computers from the PC inception to the 1990s). How can a fairly modern computer be interfaced with an ISA card?

In 1996 the Low Pin Count (LPC) bus was formed to interface slow peripherals to PC processors. This is through a chip typically referred to as the PC Southbridge (where ISA circuitry still exists). While the LPC is not usually available on a connector to interface to, it can easily be accessed by using a socket added for a trusted platform module (TPM), which many desktop motherboards of recent vintage have.

In the video below, Andy demonstrates using an ISA sound card in Doom on an i5 motherboard, amazing.

You can see more on Twitter and YouTube.


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1 Comment

  1. This is great. Now I could add the floppy disks I’ve been setting aside to my Ryzen motherboard based machines. Some of them are sleepers so this would finish the retro look on them.

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