VOGONS


First post, by bjwil1991

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I have a pair of FMA7600 laptops that use Vadem VG-468 chips and the APSoft I found charges for the software and my wallet doesn't want me to buy it for $63.90 USD/59.99 EUR

For DOS/W3.X since I'd rather keep the laptops the way they were back when they were brand new. I already have the drivers for the video and sound card. Just not PCMCIA.

CardSoft, I doubt that'll work with it and the installer doesn't work either.

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Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
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Reply 1 of 5, by giantclam

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Try the attached (gericom drivers based on same board)

Reply 2 of 5, by Bondi

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Phoenix Card Manager 3.01 seems to have support for Vadem-468 chip. See the link in my signature to download it.
EDIT: Cardsoft has support for Vadem chip as well. Not sure why the installer doesn't work.

PCMCIA Sound Cards chart
archive.org: PCMCIA software, manuals, drivers

Reply 3 of 5, by bjwil1991

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It's because it requires an actual floppy diskette to install it, not from a hard drive in a folder.

I'll give the Phoenix one a whirl and see how it performs. Currently, the one I'm using is not getting the card to detect and I think it's because I'm using the wrong version.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser

Reply 4 of 5, by Thermalwrong

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Does that mean you've not got a working floppy drive right now?
It's possible to get cardsoft going in DOS manually by setting up the files in config.sys manually and running cardsoft\config.exe to allocate resources. And make sure that the PCMCIA gets some memory space left alone by himem.sys for it to use.

However you probably don't need to do that - try this version, I just gave it a go in DOSbox with the installer on the C drive and it just installed happily in Windows and includes Vadem 468 socket services:

The attachment 86pw31.zip is no longer available

It's CardWizard 1.0 which seems to follow on from CardSoft 3.1.

BTW I do not think it's worth shelling out money for the ATA enabler, I've got PCMCIA working on most of my collection both in DOS and Windows right now, as long as there's a good installer it'll go well 😀 Of course there can be lots of initial hurdles with getting the memory allocation set up, but the installer seemed to handle that in my test just now.

Reply 5 of 5, by bjwil1991

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Funny thing is the GamePort card I have, NMCGP would say the card is not installed, but if I run GPORT, it detects it and GPDIAG does the same thing: doesn't detect the card. Either I missed something when installing the drivers or DOS/Windows wants to throw it under the bus.

But the 3Com Ethernet/Token Ring/Modem card is detected fine in Windows and the GamePort is detected as unknown. I might try to switch the cards around and see if it makes a difference.

The floppy drive works fine, though. I'm out of blank 1.44MB diskettes and had to use a temporary diskette (I archived the contents from that first and foremost).

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser