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Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-10, 05:43

Same theres no reason to stop that project but the two do not necessarily need to be the same. theres been products around made by Magma that are pcmcia to PC I am no engineers but Id think just a simple PCMCIA card to 2 port external PCMCIA would be even simpler than pcmcia to PCI. I purchased one …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-09, 07:43

I am working on a couple things and there is overlap. I had intended to utilize this thread for discussion about the PCMCIA sound card per the title and have a few times tried to steer away from talking about the HP specific aspects as that does not have a wider interest here. The "audio" portion …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-08, 23:35

I am working on a couple things and there is overlap. I had intended to utilize this thread for discussion about the PCMCIA sound card per the title and have a few times tried to steer away from talking about the HP specific aspects as that does not have a wider interest here. The "audio" portion of …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-06, 19:23

I made a breakout/dev board for the PCMCIA port, it has a flash chip and GAL to handle some of the basic logic needed and then has some ports for my logic analyzer, and a header that I can use to connect to the breadboard for testing different functions. I have a couple other pcmcia projects I am …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-05, 20:18

I like this frankenstein setup! Are you still sure you can fit all this on a pcmcia pcb? Did you try any real games? warcraft2 "your soundcard works perfectly" was one of my tests, doom and streamtracker. ST3 I was not getting the expected sound, I think there is still an error in how I calculate …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-05, 18:41

i had a couple hours to play with this over the weekend. okay this is a very crude proof of concept but it works in principal, and does not matter what mode the game is in. I am now at a point I am going to take it all apart and try to re-do it neater and trouble shoot some timing issues. every now …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-03, 01:33

I guess when I hear the word emulate in relation to soundcards, I assume we are talking about i/o trapping as step1, which does not work with many games so it fails there. the ibm method involves no i/o port trapping, the application is doing i/o transfers to the real hardware like normal, the isr …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-02, 17:39

This pcmcia card has specific hardware onboard that works in concert with the TSR to carry out the DMA transfer transparently to the application and the soundblaster dsp. There is not actually any emulation taking place, in that sense, there are no modifications to the game/application and there …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-02, 08:17

Okay I figured it out, it was a typo I was not shifting the value from the page register/latch correctly. I am now onto a timing issue that makes starting of the dma playback intermittent, because of how quickly the game initiates the DMA after hooking the interrupt my TSR may not have taken control …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-04-01, 03:15

Sounds very promising. If it's only about reading from the correct memory address, then you seem to be very close to success. You use IBM enabler and an own TSR for DMA emulation, right? Do you get sound from an actual game? A real or protected mode game? I am using the Roland enabler but I have …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-27, 08:40

no brick walls. I think I am close (to something), I can now play audio however it is not the expected audio, I am reading from the wrong place in memory. I will have to re-evaluate how I am using the address and page latch info that gets setup to the dma controller to assemble an address back to a …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-26, 07:20

FYI there were a number of laptops which for some reason used 201h in the motherboard design, as noted in this older PCMCIA gameport card: https://web.archive.org/web/20000526144514/http://www.expnet.com/Know.nsf/484430dae9e005278825647000080de0/e27cf7af28b67b4a88256463001aa03f?OpenDocument Good to …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-22, 06:25

so, it is not easy to get my hands on an isa soundcard I can use for testing so I proceeded with what I have for now. I am using the Atmel 89S51 with the soundblaster 2.02 dsp firmware that TubeTimeUS recovered. I have the pcmcia enabler working, and the i/o working, so no issue doing dsp version …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-18, 17:27

PCMCIA lacks ISA DMA mechanism, this makes it difficult to achieve compatibility with SB, WSS and others which use DMA to play back the sound streams. Some sort of software solution is necessary that simulates DMA controller and passes data to the card. Bus mastering is also unavailable so the card …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-18, 09:04

so I wondered about this too. For sure the patent must have played a role in others not doing this, and as is one of the issues with patents it is pretty broad, is it something they should have been able to patent? I don't know, I don't think so but that is looking back where a lot of just casual …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-18, 06:47

again, i should reiterate I do not know what I am doing or saying. my understanding is that those other tsr's are using some kind of ioport trapping which I know nothing about. also i thought the main issue was they could only be used with applications that do not enter protected mode but were okay …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-18, 06:36

I am starting to feel quite confident about this DMA emulation, I have a very rough proof of concept working I think I could do it. If performance becomes an issue somebody smart can rewrite in assembly. I do need to figure out how many people would want these cards. Once I have some further …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-18, 06:18

I am starting to feel quite confident about this DMA emulation, I have a very rough proof of concept working I think I could do it. If performance becomes an issue somebody smart can rewrite in assembly. I do need to figure out how many people would want these cards. Once I have some further …

Re: Newly made PCMCIA sound card

Posted on 2021-03-18, 01:40

DOOM is an excellent reference point IMO. As it reperesents a number of good games based on the same engine. Another group of games that is probably worth testing are those using Miles Sound System. https://www.mobygames.com/game-group/sound-engine-ailmiles-sound-system okay that is great, because …

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