First post, by mrfrakes
So I just received my first retro notebook the other day. It is a Fujitsu Lifebook C345 with PII 266MHz. While I think it is a pretty nice system, it is let down by the Trident Video Chipset.
It does have 2 CardBus slots for which I originally planned to insert a Ethernet card and USB 2.0 card. This got me thinking that it might be possible to create a adapter from 32bit CardBus to PCI to add a video card.
The notebook uses a TI PCI1225 (http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net/specs/ti1225.pdf) chipset which basically converts PCI to 2 CardBus slots and judging by the pinout of the CardBus slot (https://pinouts.ru/Slots/CardBus_pinout.shtml) and PCI (https://pinouts.ru/Slots/PCI_pinout.shtml) they do seem similar but some signals are missing.
Looking at the CardBus specification it does mention that it is based on PCI 2.0 but some details are changed (see http://affon.narod.ru/09gu80.pdf, starting at page 3) which makes me think that it might be possible to create a "dumb" converter from CardBus to PCI by literally connecting the corresponding signals to the connectors and pulling some pins high. But this idea could fail on a driver level since some interrupts and other things are missing on CardBus.
https://www.wuntronic.de/en/7-slot-pci-expansion-system.html This company seems to offer something similar but I don't know if there is some other chipset involved.
I might just order a PCI riser and some random CardBus card to "zombify" and see what happens. But first I want to hear what you guys think. Has anybody got some experience with this?