another PCMCIA goody!

[CRL]

Hi All-
I was wandering through a Staples (office supply store in USA) and saw a wall of blister-packed pcmcia cards for laptops.  The new one (to me) was a USB port mounted on the pcmcia card for about $50.  Of course, no Amiga drivers.    Eeeek!   First wireless net cards and now USB cards, both highly desirable expansions of my A1200, and both out of reach for want of a driver.  Is anyone working on this problem?  Is it just way more difficult than a naive non-programmer like me can understand?  Or is the "classic" Amiga so dead that nobody wants to decorate the corpse with new grave goods?  I would be willing to buy drivers that let me use such cheap and powerful extensions.   Right, - me and maybe 13 other fools who blindly refuse to be assimilated by the Bor-.. er... the M$ empire.
Oh well.
CRL ;-)

[bloodline]

CRL wrote:
Hi All-
I was wandering through a Staples (office supply store in USA) and saw a wall of blister-packed pcmcia cards for laptops.  The new one (to me) was a USB port mounted on the pcmcia card for about $50.  Of course, no Amiga drivers.    Eeeek!   First wireless net cards and now USB cards, both highly desirable expansions of my A1200, and both out of reach for want of a driver.  Is anyone working on this problem?  Is it just way more difficult than a naive non-programmer like me can understand?  Or is the "classic" Amiga so dead that nobody wants to decorate the corpse with new grave goods?  I would be willing to buy drivers that let me use such cheap and powerful extensions.   Right, - me and maybe 13 other fools who blindly refuse to be assimilated by the Bor-.. er... the M$ empire.
Oh well.
CRL ;-)

I have asked this question, but The A1200 PCMCIA is 16bit and the modern PC is 32bit (called Cardbus). the A1200 can not use these cards :-(

[Neo]

My Netgear Wireless card on my Laptop is 16bit 5V. So, there is still being cards manufactured for that standard. But I guess some high performance cards may use 32bit and 3.3V.

Anyway, wireless support for Amiga may not show up sone because the lack of 68k drivers. (Manufacturers can't release the source or specs due to FCC compliance rules)

For the USB ones check the specs. There are more 16bit 5V cards on the market than you think. But, ofcourse you have to make sure you can get a driver for it.

[B00tDisk]

There's lots of neat PCMCIA toys out there that unfortunately were post-16 bit era; IIRC there's a PCI slot box that connects via PCMCIA (although it's prohibitively expensive!), there's a trident based video card, and I do recall having seen a '286 based on a PCMCIA card with it's own RAM (2mb) and I/O!

Sadly without some kind of brain surgery none of these cool toys would ever work on any amiga, ever.

[adolescent]

Neo wrote:
Anyway, wireless support for Amiga may not show up sone because the lack of 68k drivers. (Manufacturers can't release the source or specs due to FCC compliance rules)

Not true.  There are lots of open source drivers for wireless network adapters (pcmcia, pccard, pci, and USB) on Linux.  So, the FCC isn't the hang up.

[Neo]

@adolescent

I got this info about the FCC from one of those open source drivers.
The radio part in those drivers are precompiled x86 code that you have
to link your open source driver to make it work. Apparently there are
drivers for PPC too. But I'm not sure that any of the Linux drivers
are for 68k systems. Haven't seen any yet!

I wanted to do a driver for Atheros based cards (Netgear, D-Link and
more) a couple of months ago but couldn't find any code that wheren't
bound to Intel machines.

[adolescent]

I've used the orinco driver with my MA401 with no problems.  I just looked at the source and there isn't any binary or precompiled pieces.  Maybe you're looking at the wrong place (or I am)?

[Trev]

The radio part in those drivers are precompiled x86 code that you have

Check out http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Wireless.html for the latest news on Linux wireless networking development. Some drivers may still include pre-compiled binaries, but I'm having trouble tracking them down. It should also be noted that we aren't technically allowed to distribute software ported from GPL code to a non-GPL operating system. When in doubt, contact the original author. ;-)

Trev

[CRL]

Hi All-
It is my impression that some of the wi-fi cards I looked at were 16 bit.  I can't remember about the USB card.  Does the existance of linix drivers for these cards mean there is some hope of someone having the information to do a port to ami?  There might be hope? :-o

Yours-
CRL

[Neo]

I would guess that many USB 1.0 and 1.1 cards are 16bit. However I'm
quite sure most USB 2.0 cards are 32bit.

32bit yeilds higher speed, but for a 11Mbit connection it wouldn't do
much different.

I've noticed that my 3com 10/100Mbit ethernet card for my laptop is
actually a 16bit version.

16bit cards are usually called PC Card or PCMCIA, while 32bit cards
are called CARDBUS.

Interresting that someone reversed engineered some of the WLAN
drivers and made the code MPL. I'll guess I have to try adding a
PCMCIA slot to my A3000 so I can play with it.