Sorry, but somehow the pics are in the wrong order and I can't find the edit function.

Another member asked similar question in this thread: PCMCIA CardBus to PCI adapter

There's a working solution available on indiamart:
https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/communic … 8831215473.html

I tried to contact them but got no answer. They say that it is possible to use any card with their adapter.
But instead of an attached box I gonna make mine like this:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Pcmcia … .5ab85f93gDiMSc

Just that mine will have a shorter cable and will connect to a pci-adapter-pcb.
Beside the next idea is to make another variant for the external adapter: for AGP.

My goal is to have a convinient way to test or use pci/agp/pcie cards sitting besides any old notebook. Especially as it is pnp: no need to power down a clumsy desktop-pc to install another card. Just attach or remove any card for tests, tinkering or pure fun. Using my old gericom webgine from 2001 with a Geforce TI4200 or let's say a vodoo as external gpu 😉

I got some minor improvments by:
- pulling up the IDSELECT line of the PCI socket. This signal has no counterpart on the cardbus side. photos of disassembled carbdus cards show this signal also being pulled up by a resistor.
- blocking the backfeed of power into the 3.3v volt rail with a shotky diode. My OZ6912 cardbus controller refuses to start the interface if it senses power being already applied on the card.

This improved the detection rate of the cards I tested. And even my USB3.0 Card could be seen behind a pci-e bridge on linux.
But still both windows and linux refuse or cannot start the cards. I fear I have some bad data corruption. gonna scope the signal the next days. Ideas:
- improve the ground connections between the socket and the card. Currently only 5 lines of the ribbon cable carry ground - could be to few.
- insert some resistors into the data lines to dampen reflections. That are at least 32 data lines, gonna be another soldering nightmare.

OK. all what was needed was a proper back shielding of the ribbon cable to improve signal integrity.
The results still aren't perfect but at least my usb 3.0 controller appears fully working:

Running Matrox Millennium PCI Gfxcard via cardbus as dual screen in Win7:

This looks nice and very useful, good job!
At the sacrifice of a rt2560 cardbus card though, those can be still used to load demo files on DS.

The company Magma made external enclosures with one or more pci ports and a cardbus interface, they're not easy to find.
There are cardbus to expresscard34 adapters, and expresscard usb3 cards I believe.

There a numerous adapters for expresscard and either they do not provide details or mention explicit that they are not suited for pcie based expresscards as they only translate to usb 2.0.

That's the reason I started this experiment.

Currently my success rate is at about 50%. Some cards still fail to init and though my usb3.0 cards gets recogniced it speed is still usb2.0 in linux and in windows the communication gets stuck.

I'm confident to improve this - all that is needs is even better shielding and grounding.

But my via based sata/ide card achieved a transfer speed of 55MB/s

Logged in just to comment, awesome project! I'd looked in the past for MiniPCI or Cardbus adapters to PCI to extend the life of some older laptops as servers, but only saw those more expensive external enclosures.

Would be cool once you have it more stable if a couple PCBs could be designed.

PCB-design is what I planned next. I just build this first as the cheapest test to see if it can work at all.

Though I've got some bad news:
I tested my pci-e bridge card and WinXP fails to init with Code 12 - Not enough resources,
but Win7 does start it OK.

Still I'm not sure if it's is due to a limit in XP's pci.sys or still to bad signal integrity.
So the next step is to design more proper PCBs. I already sourced the connectors on allconnectors.de, even the cardbus socket and housing:

http://www.allconnectors.de/pages/board-to-bo … ---cards/pc.php

I wanted to let all you know that my project is advancing!
Thanks to the holidays I had enough free time to get used to LibrePCB. Over the last days I was building the components for the cardbus socket and the pci socket and initial board placement has begun:

Now I have to decide on the following remaining questions:
- how many layers I should use? The PCBs of cardbus cards are rather thin and I suspect that cheap ones only use 2 layers.
- shall I insert level shifters between the connectors or trust the fact that the cardbus-controllers are fully 5V tolerant? Maybe at least insert some resistors to dampen reflections?
- what kind of buck converter to use. I already researched the TPS54- series, but still would prefer something in so-8 that has legs.
- understand the logic of the Carddetect-pins. I liked to have a physical bush-button switch on the adapter that disables the card without the need to actually remove it from the socket to prevent wearing out the pins.
- etc. etc.

I kindly accept any hints you can give me on this.

Happy new Year to all!