#Adding PCMCIA Interfaces
6 messages in this thread
Hey-
With all the new Amigas coming out with PCMCIA slots, what are the
chances of getting some info on how to hack one into an older Amiga?
Could (say) a 2000 get a ram-card slot by plugging an appropriate
interface into an unused slot? Would the OS (2.1) be able to support it?
How about a 500 hack? Or is the thing too hardware-dependent to even
attempt such a thing?
Len,
I'm sure it could be done, but you would need a custom interface…I saw
several PCMCIA "drives" for clones at Comdex, and they all used a
proprietary interface card (and, possibly, driver software…not sure on
that one). I imagine that things would be somewhat similiar for the Amiga,
although there is support for PCMCIA in the OS (of course, this may be
limited to CBM's implementation only).
I really think that there would be a very limited market for this,
unless drivers start getting written for things like Ethernet cards, modems
and the like.
Jonathan
Only problem, is , that the PCMCIA card drives for clones, look at the
disk as a floppy. How do I know? Well, I have one. I have an HP 95LX
Palmtop (1MB version), and a 2MB PCMCIA card (Ace Technologies, Ca.).
The HP and the PC's see the card-drive as another drive (after drivers
are loaded, of course) I just use stacker on the card, and make it
about 3-4MB compressed!
Tony
Jonathan-
> there is support for PCMCIA in the OS (of course,…limited to CBM)
Well, what I had in mind was a thing that would match the CBM
implementation – an external (or, for the 500, internal) device that
matched, address-space for address-space, the interface now used on the
A-600. That way, the native OS driver could be used.
> I really think that there would be a very limited market
Oh, I don't know… I've seen PCMCIA cards with Megs' of memory – if
configured as a floppy-type setup, it COULD replace the 880K-1.44M
floppies CBM uses now. (A 4-Meg, credit-card sized disk would be a boon
to anyone who has to transfer lots of data from machine to machine,
without benefit of a high-speed modem or network connection. ^_^)
I thought it would be a good idea to make an external CBM CD-ROM for
the 2×00/3000 with a PCMCIA slot.