creepingnet
Veteran Member
Been hanging around Vogons watching the "New PCMCIA Card" thread....which turned out to be a misnomer....so I guess "Party On" for me.
Considering the number of reproduction soundboards being put out as of late - you have Sergey's Adlib, you have a Gravis UltraSound clone, you have someone working on an AWE64 clone.....I'm surprised nobody has attempted to make a PCMCIA card, especially since that's something people in the retro-gaming community tend to pine for the most.
My idea for the card would be an Adlib card for PCMCIA - that listens on Port 388 like normal, and re-routes the signal either to a piezo element inside the card, or to the internal speaker Panasonic CF-VEW/KXL-D745/TDK style. Basically Sergey's design reconfigured to work with a PCMCIA slot instead of an ISA slot - and likely reduced to SMD Components to fit in a Type II style card.
The idea is to solve the following problems with vintage portables....
1.) Offer some kind of music option for DOS games that's fairly universal in nature with minimal fuss (no dongles required), and that will work with the majority of old laptops from that time period.
2.) Start small, if this works out well I could apply the same principles to a more elaborate SB compatible card later
3.) PEople with WSS who don't have music over Adlib/MIDI in games where WSS is not supported, will now have support for sound. Just slap it in there and forget it's even there.
Of course like most things with me, it might just end up not being done because time/roadblocks. I'll admit, I'm a pretty crappy collaborator and more a lone wolf with these things. But I have faith with some perserverance I could pull this off.
Considering the number of reproduction soundboards being put out as of late - you have Sergey's Adlib, you have a Gravis UltraSound clone, you have someone working on an AWE64 clone.....I'm surprised nobody has attempted to make a PCMCIA card, especially since that's something people in the retro-gaming community tend to pine for the most.
My idea for the card would be an Adlib card for PCMCIA - that listens on Port 388 like normal, and re-routes the signal either to a piezo element inside the card, or to the internal speaker Panasonic CF-VEW/KXL-D745/TDK style. Basically Sergey's design reconfigured to work with a PCMCIA slot instead of an ISA slot - and likely reduced to SMD Components to fit in a Type II style card.
The idea is to solve the following problems with vintage portables....
1.) Offer some kind of music option for DOS games that's fairly universal in nature with minimal fuss (no dongles required), and that will work with the majority of old laptops from that time period.
2.) Start small, if this works out well I could apply the same principles to a more elaborate SB compatible card later
3.) PEople with WSS who don't have music over Adlib/MIDI in games where WSS is not supported, will now have support for sound. Just slap it in there and forget it's even there.
Of course like most things with me, it might just end up not being done because time/roadblocks. I'll admit, I'm a pretty crappy collaborator and more a lone wolf with these things. But I have faith with some perserverance I could pull this off.