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P.S. - Does anyone know how I can hook up a Hercules ISA card to PCIe?

No need, you can hook it up to USB. It would be easier, though, to get a display card with a VGA output and fix the cable to omit the blue line. You'd still get colors, just not as many, and none of them would be at all blue.

A company went a step further and modified DOSBox to support their USB-to-ISA bridge adapter directly: http://arstech.com/install/cms-display/ste_uniformdos.html That CVS build list is interesting, what is the point of MP3CUE support?

Thanks for the tips. I'm definitely very interested in ram disk-ing them, and going read-only for normal operations.

I actually do use IDE to CF adapters already, although just as a direct HD replacement for the C: drive. Some of the DOS systems can't address disks(well, partitions) larger than 2gb anyway.

In one case the 98 system drives a 6 foot vinyl cutter machine, and the data files are created in a client program on an XP desktop. But the cutter software and drivers work with a custom PCI card that, along with a serial port, tell the machine what to do. I can't get either the core software or drivers to work under 2k or newer.
I currently use a CF card (plenty of backup cards in the desk next to it) for the C drive, which I can reimage to a bad or new card (bad as in windows broke itself, or someone broke windows)
D: is a spinny disk still.
98 USB support is pretty crappy, but I use that none the less to transfer files to it. (a different driver for each brand flash drive, really?) but have always wanted to try and get a network link up to the file server, even if read only and one way. I've been putting it off until I had a better setup for the whole thing to implement anyway, and this certainly qualifies.

Also, three of our five surface mount assembly lines have pcb screen printer machines still on DOS.
These guys use a couple ISA IO cards to drive the actual hardware. This I've managed to virtualize using a usb2isa adapter and virtualbox. Which also let me add networking support through the host, and all running on modern hardware with a linux kernel as the host.

After going the CF as C: route for awhile, it was still annoying using the on-board software to create machine programs when the nice GUI app was so much easier to use.
Now a CIFS mount puts a file server folder on the host pc, which is mounted as a drive letter under the VM, with the C: drive being a copy-on-write setup (I posted about that method earlier up in the thread)

I even have a 95 computer driving an xray machine (for detecting defects in mosfet chips) where the software has the most stupid thing I've ever seen in my life, making it a pain to moderalize.
The software doesn't use real timing loops, but hard coded 'for' loops of a fixed length, and uses this for bit-banging purposes on the serial control lines.
The CPU must be an Intel Pentium (one), and must be between 75mhz and 120mhz.
Any faster, or slower, and the timing loops are off too far for it to communicate with the machine properly.
The thing was already an old install when I got there, with no backups of course, misplaced serial keys, and the company that made it is no longer in business.
I'm completely at a loss what to do on this thing to avoid using the existing install, or virtualize it in any way to keep the timing proper.

So far I've resorted to a clonezilla backup image which was converted into a restore cd.
Drop the cd in, reboot, hit enter two or three times and wait a minute. When it's done restoring it reboots back to windows.
Apparently they have to do this at least once a month (but at least no longer eats up my time!)

On one hand, these things are quite the pain in the side to have to keep running.
On the other, most of these things are so expensive it's actually pretty cost effective to spend numerous hours of my time with such bandaid solutions.

At this point the easier and faster it is for the operators to do a restore, the better!

Funny enough timing wise, just last week at work we had a hardware failure in an old OS/2 computer that controls one of our radial insertion machines on the production line. I too ran into similar issues with replacement hardware.

In my case, the PC has a custom ISA card that acts as a controller to the machine hardware.
I found a product called isa2usb from a company called Arstech combined with VirtualBox that did a good job getting that custom controller board working with newer hardware.

VirtualBox has decent support, and the guest tools work great under both warp 4.5 and eComStation.
I used Linux underneath VirtualBox just due to licensing, but the isa2usb works under Linux as well as Windows.

You can install the OS/2 drivers for generic vga (gengradd) and sound blaster 16, make a 2gb image file for the HD, and allows for much easier backups of the entire VM instead of worrying about what boot CD of the day will work in under 256mb ram.
Just set the VM to auto-start with the host OS and go full screen, and no re-training of employees required.

It might seem like a waste of hardware, but it's still much cheaper than finding a complete replacement solution to remove a perfectly working system out of the mix.

Might be something worth looking into.

http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isar.html

there is a Zorro to USB 2.0 card.

http://www.e3b.de/usb/

One of these might do the trick:

http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isar.html

At work we have PC's much older than that, running manufacturing equipment. If any of them break down, I have a whole room full of old PC's that I could simply search for parts. Eventually we'll run out of parts (the equipment need ISA bus to operate), but at this rate, we're good for another 25 years or so.

I manage IT at a manufacturer as well, and have come across this same issue.

Too many manufacturing machines use old PCs for their controllers due to two main reasons, one exactly as you mentioned (ISA slots), and two is timing issues with faster CPUs.

My solution has been a more modern computer, dosbox (or worst case vmware), and a USB to ISA Slot adapter such as this guy

You then get all the benifits of having a visualization/abstraction layer between the old software, and more modern hardware.

With dosbox, you can limit CPU type and speed down to the hertz, and with a choice of running the translation drivers on the host (So the emulator accesses the hosts "isa bus" directly) or in the emulator itself (If the software is win95 or better based, this is a more direct option.. But if it is DOS based, it is easier to not mess with USB DOS support and do it on the host)

The trick is to do the scripting yourself for the 'behind the scenes' work, like booting into the visualization layer then into the software automatically and 'full screen', so you will not need to retrain your engineers on how it operates; and then provide a method to 'pause' the virtual machine, perform a backup, and continue processing at times when the machine is down or in your normal scheduled downtime. Backing up the entire virtual environment over to your usual file storage SAN/NAS, then over to your backup solution with all the other machines is a huge time saver. Most of those older machines either did not support networking in hardware, or was such an old OS/App combo that I would never attempt to put them on our LAN.

Now granted, if your hardware is under a support contract, you are probably forbidden from making such a change. But as you stated that you maintain your own replacement parts stock, I'll assume that is not something you have, or not an option (as is our case for most of the older 2nd hand machines)

Google is your friend. These are industrial computers, not your typical desktop machine. You can build out from a chassis, selecting the appropriate backplane and processor card:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us&q=picmg+isa

If you're a hobbyist looking to play with ISA bus or old cards, here's a link to a company which makes an ISA to USB adapter. I found these guys on the web; but, to be honest I've never tried their stuff:

http://www.arstech.com/

Thought I was kidding, didn't you...

I remember seeing something a few weeks ago about a ISA to USB adapter.

http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isa.html

I think they sell the appropriate enclosures and supplemental power supplies as well as adapters capable of mounting multiple ISA card simultaneously.

The same thought occurred to me, as did another.

Is it such a big deal that this is USB?
Don't they make PCMCIA --> USB adapters?

Hmm.. The only ones I saw in a quick Google search were large and expensive. I think they might be based off this company's chipset.

You dared me did ya?

Well according to your next post you think I'm working on NMR quantum computing. I'm not. It's an optical scheme involving coherent transients in rare-earth doped inorganic crystals. So we aren't using a bought system, it's a system that's been put together over a decade, out of all sorts of discrete pieces of equipment, many of which were not bought by us for this purpose, all of which must be usable under a given OS for the whole experiment to use that OS. The only software that really can't be replaced is the hardware drivers, and the whole issue is that they can't be replaced without information from the company.

Whilst you are correct that much of the hardware we use, such as DSOs, waveform generators, etc. are OS-independent (via GPIB busses most of the time), we have some things that we simply can't replace and yet they don't work without proprietary drivers. Such as the USB->ISA converter in the pulse sequencer. We do fortunately know everything we need to know about the ISA card, but ARS Technologies manufactured the USB->ISA converter and it uses a magical black-box driver. No help with the specs when I asked them. So we would have to pull it all apart and use the ISA card directly from the PC (which I'm open to do BTW). Also the NI DAQPads are USB devices with equally mysterious USB converters, once again requiring black-box drivers under Windows.

I'm sure you realise that I am one of the people who *wants* to dump Windows in our lab. But I have to start by proving it's both possible and simple, on my own specific project, which for the present month is to retrofit an old optical spectrometer to be controlled from a PC. And before I got here, we had a PC running Win95, and using a broken VB app that talks to an NI PCI-7324 stepper card.

Now that's the thing that consumed going on two weeks of my time now. Instead of implementing a solution using VB, I felt adventurous. I tried GNU/Linux, but found that there's most likely no way without some hardcore reverse-engineering, to get the card going under Linux. Not all of that time was wasted on the card, some of it went into experiments with QT as a cross-platform development environment. Still, I've given up (at least for now) as I still have to use Windows.