First post, by The_Pope
Hello everyone,
Since you really, really inspired me with the new PCMCIA sound card project, I thought about another one: USB controllers. Any 386 or 486 with enough RAM can run Windows '98SE, which supports USB nicely.
So, I, uh... took the liberty of e-mailing Opti, who still have USB 1.x chips for sale. They told me they have low profile chips left in stock.
Furthermore, they even offer schematics on how to implement their chips on their website: http://www.opti-inc.com/html/usb1394-2003.html
Problem is, those cards are for regular 32-bit PCI and for Cardbus. But maybe they can be made into 16-bit PCMCIA?
I'm pretty sure a lot of us would benefit from such cards. For desktop ISA computers, most of the reasons why you'd need a USB port can be solved, as was discussed here. For wifi, you get an Ethernet to wifi converter and an ISA Ethernet card, etc.
But laptops with no expansion apart from 16-bit PCMCIA?
Also, writing drivers is out the window - if I understand correctly, the drivers are already written.
Stop the world...I want to descend.
