The point is not power but hardware compatibility. Emulation only goes so far and many, if not most, weird esoteric hardware systems from the 90s depended on idiosyncracies and strange usage of standard busses and weird interactions of the CPU. Emulation almost always breaks this.
also most of those USB adapters likely won’t support true hardware switch interrupts, Direct Memory Access, or raw bus control to talk to other cards, which almost every special ISA card actually needs at least one of these to function.
I’d be interested in the form factor with like a raspberry pi in there.
Less powerful than that seems like a waste.
The point is not power but hardware compatibility. Emulation only goes so far and many, if not most, weird esoteric hardware systems from the 90s depended on idiosyncracies and strange usage of standard busses and weird interactions of the CPU. Emulation almost always breaks this.
I’ve never had a problem emulating windows 95.
Have you tried emulating it while interfacing with some ancient ISA card?
They sell ISA to USB adapter boards and you can tell the emulator to use the device.
Tell me you’ve never tried it without telling me you’ve never tried it.
I’m sure you’re the first to think of this! You’ll be rich!
Let me Google that for you.
That will add extra latency from USB. Old programs are not likely to be very tolerant of that.
also most of those USB adapters likely won’t support true hardware switch interrupts, Direct Memory Access, or raw bus control to talk to other cards, which almost every special ISA card actually needs at least one of these to function.
i believe the use case is for old tech that require win95/dos …like interfacing with old science instruments
especially at that price point