[NTLK] Newton compatible PCMCIA WiFi Card

[Matthias Melcher]

> On 9. May 2024, at 23:25, Doug <ispinn at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> So the "no additional driver needed" gets addressed through the
> installation of the NIE drivers?

As it is, the card pretends to be a NE2000 and implements the I/O and card information service. So it can be controlled just like any other NE2000 (including with the NIE NE2000 driver). The advantage is that we don't need to write a new driver, and that the card can handle modern encryption and authentication (WPA2-PSK) for us, which would not work on the Newton or an original NE2000 card.

https://www.yyzkevin.com/pcmcia-pico-w-card/

This guy did something similar creating a sound card emulator on ISA bus (which is pretty much the same as PCMCIA in another form factor)

Yet another group built a RAM PCMCIA card for the Amiga. The same principle would work for linear Flash for the Newton as well, at least for reading a card. Writing is an issue because modern Flash chips have different erase block sizes that are not supported by NewtonOS

https://github.com/Sakura-IT/ppa-pcmcia-sram

So as you can see, PCMCIA is still not entirely dead.

 - Matthias