General discussion
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Topic
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Need ISA Compatibility
LockedMany new motherboards do not have ISA slots and here is my dilemma. I build ‘industrial control’ systems and simulators, and most of the communication to the outside world is via 24 digital I/O lines from an 8255 IC on a custom built ISA card. Believe it or not, no matter how much processor speed you want to perform the maths, an 8 Mhz bus is more than sufficient for operating relays, logic circuits etc. Our cards also contains some other electronics (wasn’t full length ISA prototyping wonderful!!), but this is not an issue here – so long as I can get a 16 bit ISA bus or 24 (48) lines of Digital I/O..the external interfacing can be located anywhere! I’m looking for something that will EITHER give me effectively an ISA bus ( perhaps a PCI to ISA bridge on a PCI card, with a ribbon cable to an external ‘bus box’, with several ISA slots) OR an alternative to a 24 line DIO card in PCI format that I can access via DOS or C’s INP/OUT commands to directly read and write bits/bytes to and from the 3 8 bit ports. I don’t want to go to an industrial case and specialist (expensive) motherboard… I want to keep it in desktop PC (AT/ATX) form if possible. Any suggestions folks?