Will EMC work with any ISA card and controller box

I've got an old ISA card system that uses a 3 axis amp and servos. I'd like to put Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux on the machine and use EMC if it's possible. It's a DOS based control at this point.

Curious what it would take to get it running EMC2?

I think there are two problems here:

1. Finding a Host CPU with and ISA slot that also has enough memory and performance to run Ubuntu.
Not sure what the exact limits are but I suspect than anything less than 256-512M of RAM and a 700 MHz processor will cause trouble. Its unlikely the original DOS based CPU has enough resources to run Ubuntu

2. Like John said, writing a driver for your ISA hardware. This may or may not be difficult depending on the hardware design and whether you have register level hardware documentation.

PCW wrote:

I think there are two problems here:

1. Finding a Host CPU with and ISA slot that also has enough memory and performance to run Ubuntu.
Not sure what the exact limits are but I suspect than anything less than 256-512M of RAM and a 700 MHz processor will cause trouble. Its unlikely the original DOS based CPU has enough resources to run Ubuntu

2. Like John said, writing a driver for your ISA hardware. This may or may not be difficult depending on the hardware design and whether you have register level hardware documentation.

Excellent and thanks! I have the first part (a host PC with sufficient hardware to function).

The second Part... how would I even begin? I'll read the link given in the above post. But as far as writing drivers, I've programmed microcontrollers and have done some other programing. I have a little bit of background. But I've never done anything with drivers.

I do have the DOS installer. I guess I could reverse engineer maybe??

Do you have register level documentation for your ISA interface card?
Without this there's not much hope unless you like reverse engineering...

There is a skeleton driver (hal_skeleton.c in /src/hal/drivers) that covers the basics of whats required.
Also take a look at the other driver sources in /src/hal/drivers, for example the hal_stg.c code is for a ISA servo interface card with digital and analog I/O and encoder counters.