
Originally Posted by
vol.2
I have a 486 Dell Laptop with a pcmcia slot but no ISA expansion. I could find an obvious solution with a search. Is there a way to get XTIDE on it? I'm not opposed to buying a pre-made solution.
Thanks
PCMCIA was a 8/16-bit expansion bus, but not directly compatible with ISA. It's got the data and address lines, but the control lines are different. See pinout here. It's possible to design a PCMCIA card, but at best it would all be fine-pitch surface mount, and there's no way to make this easily. Dig-Key does have the Female PCMCIA headers
The question is though, what do you need it for? If the laptop has a dead hard drive, it'd be far easier to just yank out the dead harddrive and stick in a 44-pin to CompactFlash adapter, like this guy on the right
44-pin CF adapter.jpg
Apparently, there were PCMCIA to micro-harddrive adapters around at one point, which I think used the CF card interface anyways, so you MIGHT get lucky and find one of them if you absolutely need the PCMCIA slot for an extra hard drive. If I'm reading this right, it almost looks like the PCMCIA to micro-harddrive adapter is just a straight-through adapter with no logic, because the PCMCIA pin designations look almost identical to a CF card (pinout here), with a few pins moved around.
Somebody else might be able to confirm that.
My vintage systems: Tandy 1000 HX, Tandy 1000 RSX, Tandy 1100FD, Tandy 64K CoCo 2, Commodore VIC-20, Hyundai Super16TE (XT clone), and some random Pentium in a Hewitt Rand chassis...
Some people keep a classic car in their garage. Some people keep vintage computers. The latter hobby is cheaper, and is less likely to lead to a fatal accident.
Bookmarks