[NTLK] About Einstein...

[Matthias Melcher]

> On 4. Nov 2025, at 11:42, Doctor Clu <doctorclu at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Been playing with Einstein and it's been fun.

Oh yeah :-)

> I've heard of people creating card images for it, is there a place these can be downloaded and tried?   

To create virtual cards, open the "Setting" window. One of the tabs reads "PC Cards". You see a list of known PCMCIA cards (by default only the Network Card). At the bottom, there is a [+] button and you will get a list of cards that you can create or import from another Einstein user.

> How do you create cards for it from real hardware?

The last entry in that menu is "Create image from snapshot...". It's undocumented for a reason. The current way to download a PCMCIA card image from a MessagePad involves using Basilisk and the lowest level debugger available. It does work, but there are so many pitfalls that I think that only one single PCMCIA linear memeory card has ever been copied. 

But that is a good thing. It proves that it is possible. I have spent some time to get NCX to compile again on modern machines, and an alpha version is already available and looking great. I will release a new version of NCX soon, and if that one works for everyone, I will add a function to download PCMCIA cards from a physical MessagePad and convert them into Einstein images. But that's still a few weeks away.

> And I see that Einstein can sync to NCX.  Can you restore a save of another Newton back into Einstein?

I have not tried it, but it should be possible. Einstein and NCX don't always get along perfectly (which is nerd speak for "I left a bug in there"), but that's why I am doing all the work mentioned above.

> Actually when I try to do a backup of Einstein it crashes.
> 
> Trying to find solutions to bring items from hardware to Einstein aside from packages created.

NCX backup is probably the best solution for that. I'll try to fix this.

> It's a fun program, looking forward to hearing people's experiences and solutions.
> 
> 
> Greg / Doc Clu

Enjoy ;-)