Adding USB to a computer with ISA (Windows 98 content)

UncleDavid218

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Jan 16, 2006
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Hey guys,

I am working with a customer that has multiple CNC machines. The oldest one runs Windows 98 with a custom motherboard setup (It's a Fanuc). They need to add jobs to the machine and used to use a floppy drive, but the jobs are now bigger than the floppy drive can handle.

Unfortunately, the machine has no USB ports nor does it have regular PCI ports. It just has ISA and PS/2.

As far as I can tell there's no such thing as an ISA card with USB ports on it. But could you do an ISA card with a serial port and then get a serial -> USB cable?

Any other ideas? This machine was $200k so just replacing it isn't easy :)

BTW we have already tried networking the machine with no success, so that's not really an option either.
 
Does it have a spare IDE channel?

CD/DVDRW? ZIP? Hotswap IDE?

IDE to CF/SD card?
 
It does have a spare IDE channel, but not the space for an optical drive. An IDE to SD card reader might actually work!

Thanks.
 
IIRC IDE to CF adaptors aren't hot swapable.so they are likely to be a pretty painful soloution.

If there is a spare internal 3.5 inch bay you could put an IDE zip or LS120 drive in there.

If you can't mount a drive internally I'd say the best option is probablly a ZIP drive connected by either parallel or SCSI.
 
This should work http://www.addonics.com/products/aeudmd4.php. It'll do all kinds of media cards and uses IDE.
And importantly unlike a regular IDE to CF adaptor it's hot swappable :)

Nice find, though for some reason they don't seem to actually be selling it... A google does find some third party suppilers but none of them seem to give a positive indication of stock.

EDIT: found an ebay seller with one http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Addonics-...814?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item35b860039e
 
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