VOGONS


First post, by my03

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Hi fellow retro enthusiasts (or should i say nutheads 😉 ) 😀

I have this issue with getting an Orinoco Gold (wifi) card to play nicely along with my laptop (which basically is an Amrel 486DLB at heart (What is this machine (odd clone laptop - 486 dx66)), but disguises itself as a rebranded "Login" machine (in the Nordic market). The thing is, i have been using a Xircom PE3-10BT dongle with it (so plain ethernet) for some time, and that has worked perfectly fine. But i recently wanted to try to get it to work with Wifi as well, so i dug up my old Orinoco Gold card to try it out.

While trying out the recommendations here - https://www.notanon.com/networking/how-to-set … dos/2010/09/16/ , i realized that this laptop did not really support handling wifi with just the packet driver on its own and so i tried to install the card-services for this laptop (depicted here as "DLB486 enhanced card services" https://web.archive.org/web/19970408222103fw_ … n.se/archsv.htm).

With the card services in place, i can easily mount FAT-formatted CF or SD cards using CF/SD <> pcmcia adapters. They happily show up as a D: or E: unit. When inserting these, they beep one time (which according to the manual means success)

With the Orinico inserted, it looks like it can detect that card as well (it does not complain - please see image). But after setting up the packet.ini according to my (open) wlan, it still complains, saying "no card available" 🙁 Also, when inserting the Orinico card, it gives three "sad" beeps in return (which i think means not successful).

Did anyone stumble across the same hurdles and managed to sort it out?

Reply 1 of 7, by majestyk

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There were different versions of the "Orinoco Gold" cards - with Lucent / Hermes chipset, with Atheros chipset...
Maybe you should identify the chipset first and make sure your DOS has a driver for it.

Reply 2 of 7, by my03

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Hi majestyk, thanks 😀

Any easy way to identify the chipset?

Reply 3 of 7, by majestyk

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Do you have a picture?

Reply 4 of 7, by my03

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Sure

Reply 5 of 7, by my03

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HWInfo can identify the card even

Reply 7 of 7, by my03

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I tried it majestyk. For some odd reason, it did actually work sporadically (once or twice) but then it did not want to recognize the card anymore.

i also (for reference) tried the same thing on a slightly newer laptop (a Thinkpad 760E) and there i found the same behaviour, only slightly better). By removing and inserting the card into the other slot (relatively speaking), it detected it. Its super weird tbh. I have no real issues detecting the card in W95/98 btw. Could it be a tad bit shaky drivers in dos?