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Old 16th Oct 2017, 1:23 pm   #5
cmjones01
Nonode
 
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Warsaw, Poland and Cambridge, UK
Posts: 2,669
Default Re: Old ISA soundcard

I'd say don't bother, unless you want an exercise in keeping vintage technology running. I think the last time ISA was common on PC motherboards was in about 2002-2003. I have an old Athlon XP machine in the workshop from this era which serves for data recovery, testing old hardware, and so on. It's running a modern version of Debian Linux. I suggest that the only way you'll get useful results from such an old card is to see if it's supported in Linux and find a 15-year-old PC to run it in, and put up with the associated reliability issues.

Any external ISA adapter is very unlikely to work with any existing software for the card, because of the way the ISA bus is entangled so deeply into the bowels of the PC's architecture.

I wouldn't advocate using old versions of Windows unless you can keep the machine disconnected from the Internet and can tolerate the lack of support.

Check the specifications of modern USB audio interfaces and you might find that matching the performance and features of the Terratec is cheaper than you think. I have one made by M-Audio that works very well, though even that isn't officially supported on Windows 10.

Chris
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