iirc some of the older usb chipsets dont play nicely with others (winbond springs to mind)
Yeah, I disabled the onboard USB before installing a USB2 card.
Which reminds me of something I wondered about briefly when putting this together. (Pls correct me if any of this is wrong).
Max xfer rate of USB 2.0 is spec'ed at 480Mbit/sec, or roughly 48MByte/sec.
To achieve that rate, it has to be attached to a mboard bus that supports that xfer rate.
But PCI busses are clocked at ~ 33MHz.
This suggests that
no PCI plugin USB 2.0 card will ever achieve 48MB and will be limited to < 33MHz xfer rate. It may be protocol-compliant, but is transfer-rate limited.
If so, then this is also playing a big role in slowing things down. And no machinations of cpu or memory speed will make up for it. It probably explains why the Soyo was not more than 2X faster than the Tyan combo. By all rights it should have been.
You might be able to cobble together a custom BIOS but that is a lot of effort.
Definitely not worth it !
There are also Intel 845 based boards (ick, P4) that do up to 333 MHz DDR supposedly with a "real" ISA slot with working DMA, etc.
... that you don't need DMA, then any newer board that has a PCI->ISA bridge or LPC->ISA bridge on it should work, though it has been so long I don't remember how the IO ports would get mapped in there. It is usually DMA that causes the problems when trying to do ISA since newer chipsets simply do not support mapping that stuff to where it needs to go.
PCI, though, you should be able to use your own PCI->ISA bridge and have success (or any motherboard that has one built in like some of the SuperMicro boards, industrial boards, etc.)
There is indeed a SuperMicro P4 board (the P4SCA) with two 16-bit ISA slots that looks like it would work well. But they're industrial darlings and pull a minimum of $400 used...
oops i missed 2 posts on page 2 - i see you had to get the drivers in the right order - i forgot that was a thing back then
Yeah, wasn't that fun?!?!
It surprising what you forget, new info in - old redundent info out
Maintaining sanity (or some semblance thereof)
requires that we forget such things