On Oct 2, 2024, at 12:13 PM, Jeffrey Jonas via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I have some 8, 16 bit ISA cards that I'd love to keep running. Are there any options such as ISA via USB? ISA on Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone?
I would point out that the PCI Express standard still maintains the subtractive addressing carve-out and I/O address spaces required for ISA cards, not least because some low-level elements of the PC architecture still use/emulate the old addresses. I believe there should be ISA expansion chassis available using commercially available bridge chips (a lot of PCIe serial cards are also just ISA or LPC (which is kinda-sorta serialized ISA) chips stapled onto a PCIe->ISA bridge chip as well) meant for industrial controls, but be warned that they're generally not cheap. There are also USB bridges, but I assume you'd need to write new drivers because there's no standard for tunneling ISA over USB like there is for PCI/PCIe. This is one such example. https://arstech.com/usb2-products/37-usb2isa-x3.html And it sounds like they also have a compatibility driver layer for it for many legacy operating systems: https://arstech.com/content/35-universal-software-layer For something like RPi or BeagleBone, you'd need to write your own drivers. - Dave