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Home Forums 68kMLA SCM SwapBox SCSI<->PCMCIA Adapter — #3
Post #3 by Gorgonops
Source Forum68kMLA
CategoryHardware
Post DateMon, 19 Nov 2012 - 20:40
Original URLhttps://68kmla.org/bb/threads/scm-swapbox-scsi-lt-gt-pcmcia-adapter.26585/
Post
So... what is it that makes you believe that this device is SCSI in any way, other than a clearly confused discussion thread post where the person saying it uses "two channel SCSI" is undoubtedly solely doing so based on the device using SCSI-ish wide ribbon cables to connect the remote card slot carrier to the expansion bus? The chipset it's based on is explicitly an ISA-PCMCIA bridge device, with the datasheet saying *nothing* about SCSI, and if you look at other products based on they're all *also* ISA-to-PCMCIA bridge boards, or once in a blue moon it's found directly integrated on a device's motherboard.

The majority of ISA-PCMCIA bridge boards just mount a single slot so the card sticks out of the back of the host through the ISA slot cover, but I've seen remote dual-slot devices like this before too, usually in desktop small-form-factor 486/early Pentium era boxes. (I actually used one of the single-slot ones fairly recently to get a 16 bit Wavelan card running on an old luggable's ISA slot.)

SCSI to PCMCIA flash card readers do exist, but I'm 100% positive this isn't one of them. The pinout of those two cables is undoubtedly a completely proprietary arrangement which carries a buffered subset of the host's ISA bus (98 pins for the whole thing, so it would just fit on two 50 pin SCSI cables) to the slot adapter. (I'm assuming here that the Vadem bridge adapter is in the slot carrier, not on the ISA adapter card. Do you even have the ISA card portion? Alternatively of course the bridge chip would be on the ISA widget and the cables carry the necessary set of signals to support the two PCMCIA slots.)

mp.ls