There are a number of pieces of hardware that rely on interface cards which were built using
older interface types like ISA and PCI. There remain a number of options available to
integrate cards using these older bus types with contemporary hardware.
Industrial Motherbards
A number of manufacturers such as DFI provide motherboards
that contain PCI and ISA slots; for example the
CS620-H310. These boards support
modern CPUs (in this case a 9th Gen Intel CPU) whilst adding ISA slots via a PCI-to-ISA bridge
chip, in this case the
ITE IT8888G.
Care should be taken when selecting a board that your hardware and software will be fully
supported. The DFI CS620-H310 has the following limitations:
- The ITE IT8888G does not forward interrupts in the traditional way, so some hardware such as
older sound cards will not behave as expected
- The modern ATX Power supply specification doesn’t provide a -5V rail for reference
voltages which prevents a number of older analogue cards from working
- The ROM chip on the CS620-H310 states support for UEFI and BIOS however tests were unable
to get MS-DOS or FreeDOS in either mode to boot (it isn’t marked as supported)
- Windows 10 and 11 do boot and fully support hardware as expected. DFI provies a
solution based on Ubuntu 18 however support for this version has ended.
- Ubuntu 18 runs natively from disc and can detect the ITE8888 so provides a basis for modern
software accessing ISA hardware with the above caveats; however Ubuntu 20 and later LTS versions
do not boot.