ISA cards

Letarian

We have a bit of scientific equipment that interfaces via a proprietry interface card, which happens to be an ISA card. Currently this is in ~10 year old computer running Windows NT. The computer is starting to show its age, and we want to upgrade it.

We have been told that there may be data transfer issues matching the speed of the ISA card to the motherboard for data transfer. We currently have a (very expensive) tender return to replace this computer, and the question is whether we can simply just use a modern motherboard (which has an ISA slot) for this.

So, penny arcade technology experts, does anyone know anything about ISA cards and their data transfer to modern motherboards, or whether this will be a problem or not if we build out own computer?

Thanks in advance for anyone who knows anything about this (my google fu has failed me on this issue).

Dark Shroud

You would be better off telling us the device that you connect to the PC. Because ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) is no longer in use. However it's very possible the card type is available in PCI or better. If it's a Serial or Parallel port then this is in fact very easy to do.

xzzy

He says it's a proprietary card.. which if my experience with scientists tells me anything useful, it's that some grad student spent a summer soldering the thing together with his bare hands.

As for data transfer, I got no experience with that. I haven't plugged in an ISA card in years. I would think getting any drivers to work on a modern OS would be a much bigger headache.

ASimPerson

Uh, "modern motherboards" don't have ISA slots.... I haven't seen a motherboard with it in about 8-9 years.

xzzy

ASimPerson wrote: »

Uh, "modern motherboards" don't have ISA slots.... I haven't seen a motherboard with it in about 8-9 years.

You can still get them, if you hunt around.

http://www.adek.com/ATX-motherboards.htm

That's just from a 10 second google search.

ASimPerson

Huh, well then!

logic7

I can't imagine running NT4 on a Core 2 processor. "HOLY SHIT SCREAMING FUCKING FAST" just doesn't quite describe it well enough... Looking at Intel's site, though, I see that you're probably going to have to upgrade to at least Win2000 going with a Core 2, but I know from personal experience that NT4 runs well on P4's (had an in-house app that only ran on NT4 once, had to run it on some Northwood P4 machines)

Then you scream.

I've always hated that ISA was done away with. For years I ran a pair of ISA MIDI interfaces in my DAW machine until I finally upgraded past the P3.

xzzy

Well it's not like they pulled the plug one morning with no warning.

It's been on the way out for 10 years now.

Daedalus

logic7 wrote: »

I can't imagine running NT4 on a Core 2 processor. "HOLY SHIT SCREAMING FUCKING FAST" just doesn't quite describe it well enough... Looking at Intel's site, though, I see that you're probably going to have to upgrade to at least Win2000 going with a Core 2, but I know from personal experience that NT4 runs well on P4's (had an in-house app that only ran on NT4 once, had to run it on some Northwood P4 machines)

Then you scream.

I've always hated that ISA was done away with. For years I ran a pair of ISA MIDI interfaces in my DAW machine until I finally upgraded past the P3.

The software end of things was an unspeakable pain in the ass to deal with. Or so I've heard; it was before my time.

citizen059

My line of thinking is that if a system has an ISA slot it should just work; it wouldn't be there if it didn't. Admittedly I haven't tried one of the new/modern mobo's with an ISA, but still...

My company has a similar situation; we have one department that runs an old DOS app, and it does the job better than any modern Windows version they've tried.

As a result we have a MS-DOS 6.22 machine in use. When I started working there 5 years ago it was a 486, which eventually died. I replaced it with an old P-II @ 400Mhz, which had an ISA slot. This was needed because the software requires a 'dongle' of sorts, and this one just happened to be an ISA card.

If the old P-II dies we're screwed, I don't think I have any more systems with ISA in the scrap heap. :P

I mean, old tech for sure, but when something is working and doing what you require, the desire to spend money and upgrade just isn't going to be there.

theSquid

You might want to consider writing something to forward the data generated by the ISA through a net connection to a more modern computer, and working from that basis.

Then again, I'm just a CS student, and that's really just my input.

Letarian

We should be able to use a more modern OS, thats not really a concern.

The ISA board is a frame grabber for a scientific CCD camera. Having pulled the side off the computer to look insode it is made bu Photometrics. I think, but am not sure, that the interface cable from the camera to the card is also proprietry (which is possibly why we can't upgrade to PCI). There is a proprietry program that runs the data collection, which has to run on the computer with the ISA card (it also interfaces to other bits of the system with 2 9 pin serial ports, and to a video microscope which interfaces through a PCI card).

There are various reasons for trying to upgrade - the computer is starting to show signs that it is dying, and we also want a much larger data capacity than the drives we are currently limited to.

Thanks for the help so far :-)

Deicist

Maybe look at something like this?

http://www.arstech.com/item--usb2isax7.html

USB->ISA