Retro TechTuber Adds Ancient PC ISA Slot via Modern TPM Header
A retro tech enthusiast has successfully ported an old ISA slot to a modern motherboard. YouTube short, Zarasteli Introducing a neat but ongoing expansion board with an ISA slot. Effectively used during short clips, sound blaster 16Powerful, gut-wrenching sound effects and a pumping soundtrack during a quick blast in the original DOOM (on DOS).
The PC platform used in the video has an Intel 6 series chipset. It has a 2nd Gen Intel Core i5-2400S ‘Sandy Bridge’ CPU (4C/4T), not the latest circa 2011. However, as YouTuber TheRasteri points out, “It’s a bit dated, but you don’t need to plug in an ISA slot.”
ISA slots are almost as old as the first IBM PCs. In 1981 the IBM PC XT provided an 8-bit ISA bus for expansion cards, but in 1984 the IBM PC AT implemented the first full 16-bit ISA slot. They fell out of favor as newer, faster PCI buses gradually became popular in his 1990s and became very rare from the early 2000s. Therefore, ISA slots were important to him during the heyday of DOS gaming.
In the days of DOOM, it was common to plug graphics cards into PCI slots, while sound cards, essential for an immersive gaming experience, went into ISA slots. Several versions of SoundBlaster 16 since then have had the PCI variety and worked fine with Windows 95, 98, etc. However, it was not fully compatible with the expectations of older DOS games.
While it is physically impossible to get an older SoundBlaster 16 ISA card to work in a PC without an ISA slot, the adapter board shown in the video uses the low pin count (LPC) bus and breakout PCB of modern motherboards. I am using it successfully as a solution.Intel introduces his LPC bus 1998 As a “software compatible replacement for the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus”. The LPC bus is accessible via his TPM port, and we can see a beige ribbon cable connecting the TPM pin area to the so-called “dISAppointment LPC to ISA Adapter” header. Do you know what he did there?
At the end of the video, TheRasteri mentions that he plans to open source the board design eventually. There’s also a longer video in the pipeline with a little more depth, possibly dealing with config files (editing autoxec.bat and config.sys?) or other chores that need to be cleaned up. Many old readers may have an old ISA card or two in their drawers.