Isa

[bigbeark]

I was cleaning up the basement yesterday and came across a bunch of ISA sound and network cards, and one ISA video card.

I have several older motherboards with up to 3 ISA slots.

My question is, when did motherboards stop supporting ISA video?

I have never seen the option to specify ISA video in the BIOS, and these boards have AGP and PCI slots as well.

Can I assume that ISA video was last used before AGP came along?

I haven't been able to POST with the ISA video card installed. Of course, it could be dead.

[mariushm]

Re: Isa

If I'm not mistaken, the first boards no longer offering ISA were around the time of Pentium 3.

Well... not sure I'm saying it right, there probably were boards without isa before - what I mean is Intel recommending that ISA slots should not be implemented and then dropping the support in the chipset.

i810 was the first chipset to drop it and that was for Socket 370: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mai.../intel810.html

The first thing that strikes is the lack of ISA-controller. Well, i810 became the first chipset without the built-in ISA-bus support, which should be eliminated according to the PC99 spec.

later edit: wikipedia says microsoft's pc 97 recommended removal...

Microsoft's PC 97 specification recommended that ISA slots be removed entirely, though the system architecture still required ISA to be present in some vestigial way internally to handle the floppy drive, serial ports, etc., which was why the software compatible LPC bus was created.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Isa

I don't think ISA video per se was removed, as I remember ISA cards where recommended to have when you flashed the BIOS of your PCI or AGP video card, since then you could flash a bad card and not "be in the blind"
I never did this process with a ISA VGA card so can't comment, I did do it blind tho