[NTLK] PCMCIA for the brave...

[Matthias Melcher]

> On 14. Nov 2022, at 21:41, Mark Kuberski <berskyboy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Matthias,
> 
> I wanted to create a dump of a 256MB PCMCIA Card, 
> 
> To be used with Einstein you have made available under PC Cards + Add existing PCCard Image...
> 
> How do I do that? 
> 
> Thanks,
> Mark

Is that a card that worked on an actual MessagePad? I was under the impression that NewtonOS can not handle more that 64MB. Einstein creates cards with up to 32MB which IIRC was the biggest card available then.

If I am wrong and you can read the card on a physical machine, then the process involves BasiliskII with a full installation of Classic Mac OS and all the Newton developer tools. 

Using the Hammer debugging tool, you can dump any memory area of the Newton into a file on the emulated Mac via serial port. If you find out, how your card is mapped to memory, you can dump that memory range which will take about 20 hours, or probably twice that much, because PC cards are only 16 bits wide, but Hammer dumps 32 bits.

Or has you 256MB card been used in a different machine? Microsoft Windows can handle cards of that size and bigger. They are not memory mapped as in the MessagePad, but instead are mounted like a harddrive and behave very similar. You can read thos cards with any 20$ PCMCIA to USB reader, but you can't use those files on a MessagePad. Newtons have their own disk format that is more like a database than a desktop file system. Only very few file types can be converted.

 - Matthias