Message-ID: <00a901c0a9e4$84d58fc0$0708e289@mpaul> From: "Matthias Paul" To: References: <004701c0a8a8$50043900$0400a8c0 AT alain-nb> <3AA8FFE1 DOT C6F7EBFA AT earthlink DOT net> Subject: Re: PCMCIA struggles Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 01:17:26 +0100 Organization: Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id XAA07068 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com 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... ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------ Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html ------------------------------------------------------------ My homepage has moved, please update your pointers.