PCI/ISA conversion.....?

[JeffN825]

Hi all. I do network admin for a medium sized doctor's office. They have this old piece of diagnostic machinery that is hooked up to a really old system running DOS. I think the interface on the card that the machine plugs into is pretty proprietary (although it MAY be really really really old SCSI), but the card is definitely ISA. The manufacturer is sadly out of business. The doctors want to get the machine working on a Windows system so that they can share the pictures it takes over the network and have a reliable way of backing up the data the machine records.

Anyway, I need an ISA/PCI converter or something like that so I can see if I can get this machine working on a Windows based system...

Ideas?

 

[FrequencyX]

Your best bet would be to try a riser card

here is an example > http://www.impulse-corp.co.uk/...eets/PCM-10560-5_4.pdf

 

[Hajime]

That's going to be difficult.

I'd recommend looking for an older machine with an ISA slot on the mobo - riser cards suck.

You may want to even look into a dual-proc late P3-era machine. It'll have ISA, and 2x Socket 370's @ 1ghz or so should be more then sufficient power for that machine.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Good suggestions above, also: if there are no Windows drivers for the card you could dual-boot and create a DOS-comptaible FAT16 data partition for sharing data between DOS and Windows., i.e.

active 1 = FAT16 DOS
active 2 = FAT32 or NTFS, WinXP
logical 1 = FAT16 data shared
logical 2 = FAT32 or NTFS for XP data

and use something like V-Com.com System Commander to present a boot menu at startup. This would make backups easy (in XP), and networking sharing would work when the machine was rebooted to Windows.

Also, besides a socket370, you could also get a BX mothernoard and slotket-T to run with a Tualatin Celeron up to 1.4 GHz.