alt Hacker NewsPicoPCMCIA – a PCMCIA development board for retro-computing enthusiasts
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I was able to see the development card in person at VCF Midwest last year; it's a very neat project! The version he had at VCFMW was in a transparent plastic case[1], which looks even better than the IBM-inspired design of the one on this page.
[1] https://youtu.be/hF0NKvmQmVA?t=47 (I couldn't find a good picture elsewhere)
Edit - I found this video on his YouTube channel with more info (with the latest version of the card): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-04EoGlayY
I love this project. It will bring great audio to a bunch of Pentium-era laptops and essentially expand this list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpd2CM3_384.
Problem with them, for the most part, will be about rebuilding the batteries and dealing with the poor quality of old screens.
The RP2XXX microcontrollers are so incredible in terms of what it's opened to hobbyists. I hope microcontroller-based computers become a thing.
Awesome !!
I have an old Thinkpad and had a similar idea for wifi, but I was thinking about MiniPCI.
Emulating NE2000 is great :)
And it'll be open sourced once everything is done!
I had a small bugfix in a PCMCIA driver for the Linux kernel, and I was thinking the other day that nobody uses it any more. But I guess they still are!
I love the IBM aesthetic on the card artwork.
A dream device for 486 and pentium laptop enthusiasts. Got in line to get one.
tangent but inspired by this: what about a retro-console development board? like saturn or playstation, would that be hard to do?
obviously this is way over my head, would be great if LLMs can help noobs
this looks sick as hell. i wonder whether there are viable NE2000 drivers for PowerBooks running classic Mac OS? modern WiFi (even limited by PCMCIA) might be preferable to era-appropriate WiFi. not much you can get an Orinoco card to talk to these days if you can even find one.
For those who aren't aware what PCMCIA stands for: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms