I work in a life sciences lab. Our work involves a wide variety of research techniques in molecular biology that involve imaging. Some of this imaging was being run on an old machine connected to a CCD camera. The machine recently kicked the bucket so we purchased a refurbished Dell with the intention of having it drive the camera. Turns out we should have checked the controller board first because it definately won't fit in the Dell. In fact, the board - which is a 13" PCI card - hardly fit in the old fashioned clunker case that we pulled it from. The circuitry on this board, arguably 15 years old or more, is very non-compact and extraordinarily simple. The company that manufactures this board no longer supports the camera (a bottom-end one to begin with).

I don't have the board, but I can describe it:

Three coaxial connections (Trig in, Tx, Rx), a handful of capacitors, a few chips (XILINX, AMCC and Lattice) and nothing that resembles a TV tuner's encoding architecture. The board also has four SIMM slots, 30 pins each. I don't know how much memory we're talking about but the board clearly didn't have too much.

My question is; is there any way to replace this card with a more compact one? I'm thinking that these cards are specifically designed for the hardware they are supplied with, but I'm wondering if there are any (reasonable cost) workarounds or alternatives. I suppose one answer would be just to build a CPU in a monster box..

Thanks in advance..