Been working on the 486 NEC laptop again....
On Friday my 16MB memory card came in as did the Cisco Aironet LCM-352 PCMCIA card.
On Saturday night I was out playing a show when the Lucent WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card ce in.
The RAM upgrade was a piece of cake of course, now I have 20MB of RAM and it runs NES games in NESticle x.xx at full frame rate.
The Cisco was a PITA to setup. I had to use a splitter utility to split files for floppies the spoon feed them over because not Linux nor Win 10 could see the partitions on n my 80 GB drive formatted to FAT-32 because Fujitsu Disk Manager does something that renders the partitions unreadable without the DDO loaded. Once I got it on there....the next roadblock was WEP vs WPA2. The long and the short of it was that all of these old PCMCIA cards from the 2000s use WEP encryption.
So I decided to run my Spectrum given router temporarily in WEP mode....ha, instead when I clicked Dave, the administration must be hard programmed by my ISP to only use WPA2 and nothing else....oh well.
Tried using the guest Network feature and could not find my WAP on it....so I guess that's out of the question, at least with the Cisco. Kind of a shame, I picked the LCM version vs the PCM because if it worked I was going to route a home designed and built antenna through the laptop case as the card works with the cover closed.
But the biggest pain is not WEP, it's not extended antennas out the PCMCIA slots....it's that Cisco makes it so ridiculously painful to impossible to get ANY drivers or software. They require you to login to their site, setup an account, list your employer and contract, and the I'm not sure what access you can get or how to get it. Not out of the question that I did anyway since my career is taking me down the Cisco/Meraki path anyway as of late...but still.
Now on Sunday I sorted this all out.
Reformatted the 80 gig and reinstalled Windows 95 OSR 2.5 using the MAXBLAST DDO this time after testing my 486 desktops WFW311 15GB drive and seeing all four FAT-16 partitions on it in Linux Mint. While I still can't see the other 4 (Logical DOS drives in an extended DOS partition perhaps?), I still have the 20GB drive C to work with....which is WAY more than enough.
The Lucent WiFi went along much better except the one caveat of the NEC Versa V - PCMCIA management in Win95 is totally jacked up during install. But after some fiddling (ie, remove the PCMCIA slots in device manager, rerun the detect hardware wizard, shutdown, power off, reboot) it worked. The reason is I think Windows setup loads the wrong driver which causes it to hang, or installs the device out-of-order. Found the Lucent card right away.
Victory today at work at lunch though because it found the company guest Wifi right away using the default profile. Shame Retrozilla won't work though....not enough RAM, probably will try Opera next. Still have yet to try out my temp on open guest wifi at home though, and Opera, plus toying with using WebOne or WRP with this.
For home wifi though, I'm toying with getting a second router and setting up a separate non broadcast WEP network withAC Address filtering that I can switch on and off for retro clients. Probably a modified Linksys wrt54g (I had one....loved it for vintage tech wifi).
