I didn't watch the video. I guess they are using the LPC header available on some mobos and a microcontroller or FPGA to change it to a full-blown ISA bus.
LPC (Low Pin Count) is the last remains of the ISA bus in the PC.
Supposedly there is no way to properly implement 100% ISA compatibility on modern PC's after the Pentium 3. The reason being some less used bus mastering or DMA signals are unable to be properly implemented due to removal of those mechanisms by Intel. But most cards that are simple like audio, serial, ethernet cards that just do basic irq and dma should work fine.
> Supposedly there is no way to properly implement 100% ISA compatibility on modern PC's after the Pentium 3.
FWIW, I think that's probably referring to the fact that about then, x86 redefined dove of the semantics of the lock prefix. Before about then it'd be propagated out to the FSB as whole system visible transaction, but after about then atomic operations only went out to L2 to increase core count without the cores stepping on eachothers' toes.
That being said, very few drivers/cards actually depend on that behavior. Bridging the card to LPC (or worst case PCIe) should be fine for the vast majority of cases.
