Mail Archives: opendos/2001/03/10/23:35:08
On 2001-03-09, Thomas Webb asked:
> Most manufacturers provide support for their older products, and drivers
> are available over the Internet for most of the hardware we encounter.
> We seem to hit a wall with certain manufacturers that appear to have no
> interest in their customers after money changes hands. It appears
> Toshiba is one of those.
Two years back I temporarily had a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop for
client work (right now I don´t know the exact model any more, it was
a 133 Mhz Pentium/32 Mb with a 1 Gb harddisk, was equipped with CD,
floppy, sound, track point, so far not too bad, but it had a horribly shady
and extremely low-contrast DST display and IMO a very unergonomic
keyboard "with click", which made it almost unuseable for work in
text mode without plugging in external components).
Like yours I got it without documents and useable drivers of any kind
and I remember I also had alot of trouble to get a 3com PCMCIA Ethernet
card to work under DR-DOS in my LAN. Since there was more important
stuff to do in the queue and I had lost several days fighting with that beast,
I gave up eventually and copied my data via the good old serial port.
I do remember having visited several Toshiba sites (including Toshiba
in Germany), found a couple of DOS drivers and Flash BIOS updates,
but no PCMCIA card drivers in particular. Although I didn´t used the
networking in the end, I had at least partial success in the limited time.
For full support of any kind of PCMCIA- or PC-Card you must
load a so called "Socket Services & Card Services" (SS&CS)
stack, usually in form of a set of modular drivers. This will allow
for hot plugging, power management and all the like.
If, however, you only use *one* card *and* do not plan to insert/remove
it during work *and* have a supported PCMCIA controller chipset,
you may instead have luck with a so called "Enabler".
This has the advantage that it is much easier to configure, requires far
less resources (in terms of interrupt, I/O address, memory mapped
I/O address, and DOS memory usage), and you usually get it with the
PCMCIA card, not the PCMCIA controller (in your laptop).
In my case, I could download the Enabler software from 3com´s site.
One requirement is that you must have a PCMCIA chip that is supported
by the Enabler, and these Enablers seem to support Intel chips mostly.
That laptop didn´t had an Intel chipset, but one of Toshiba´s own breed,
however, after fiddling a while, I found out that it was compatible with
one of the supported Intel chipsets. I seem to remember I had to give a
special command line switch because the auto-detection didn´t work.
This gave me access to the PCMCIA card (at least according to a
PCMCIA test tool). I still had no success, because after loading the
usual bunch of network drivers, I was not able to log into my LAN,
so something was still not working in that configuration. Unfortunately
I had no time to further dig into this, but I would strongly assume given
more time to play with it, I would have had success in the end. So you
might have more luck!
This list is probably not up-to-date, but there have been several
SS&CS suites available in the market, including Award CardWare
1.01, 2.0, 2.5, 5.0, CardControl; SystemSoft CardWizard 4.2.00
(1996-03-14), Phoenix Card Manager 3, Databook CardTalk,
the Madge Enabler with Hot-Plug, and CSM´s SS&CS. Check out
http://www.award.com/, http://www.systemsoft.com/,
http://www.ptldt.com/, http://www.madge.com/, for example.
You may also have luck asking Lineo for the DR-DOS´ PCMCIA/SS
stack (and Flash file system stuff), which is (or was?) available to OEMs.
I have worked only with Award´s Cardware 2.5 so far, which appears
to be one of the most flexible ones. Unfortunately my old version
always produced protection faults under DR-DOS EMM386 (probably
due to configuration problems on the Toshiba), so I could not use it in
this case. Newer issues (e.g 5.0) are probably better, but I haven´t
tried. Anyone? One thing that seems to make CardWare 2.5+ very interesting
for DR-DOS users, is that it supports DPMS. Meanwhile Award no longer
produces CardWare, I heard, they have sold it off to another company
(Right now I don´t remember who it was).
Research revealed that older Toshiba laptops were shipping with
Phoenix or Award SS&CS drivers in the US and Europe, and since
1996 with Systemsoft´s CardWizard, if this helps.
From those times, I have a collection of Toshiba Technical Support
Bulletins. They should still be available on http://www.toshiba.ca,
but if this no longer holds true, I may be able to help out, if you tell
me the laptop model. Please contact me privately and I will see
what I can do.
> Which brings us to the pcmcia port and the lack of software support for
> it. The pcmcia modems and ethernet cards we have were also donated and
> the software didn't come with them. Microcom is now a part of Compaq,
> and Compaq doesn't have support for older Microcom stuff. I keep hoping
> there's someone out there that has something in their "stash" that will
> let us use these machines for Internet access. Other wise, they will
> probable end up in the landfill.
I tried to look this up in two (German) books about PCMCIA- and PC-Cards:
- Hermann Strass "PCMCIA optimal nutzen", 1994,
Franzis´ Verlag, ISBN 3-7723-6652-X
- Bernd Mielke "PC-Card Anwender-Lösungen", 1997,
Franzis´ Verlag, ISBN 3-7723-4313-9.
One of the books has a huge lists of card vendors and describes
a number of particularly interesting cards in very details. Regarding
Enabler software, however, I only found one mentioning of Microcom
in the book. It was listed as PCMCIA card vendor for modems only,
not for Ethernet cards. No actual info on the software, unfortunately.
But: There seem to be only two major manufacturers of modem chips,
AT&T and Rockwell, seldom on older hardware also Sierra and
Texas Instruments. So, you may find, that on the software side
Microcom cards are identical to cards from other vendors, and that
Enabler software of similar cards would also work with the Microcom
cards, if you try...
Hope it helps,
Matthias Paul
BTW. If you happen to have some used NEC Pinwriter matrix printers
coming around, please keep an eye open for EPROM character sets & fonts
(fitted into the otherwise spare IC socket on the printer´s mainboard) and
external font cards, in particular an "IBM X24 emulation card". I´m still
searching for such no longer available options for my NECPINW.CPI
project work... ;-)
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Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
<Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de> <mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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My homepage has moved, please update your pointers.
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