Ethernet MicroDock - any chance of repair?

[NJRoadfan]

(The internal arrangement of all those "PDX" based Powerbooks is very similar to your typical 386 or 486 PC computer; the CPU's native "fast" bus is used for little more than RAM while every other peripheral sits on the other side of an ISA bridge. Considering the needless complexity of NuBus for internal peripherals it's not surprising that Apple kept cooking up various flavors of "PDS" busses, which of course were no longer "Processor direct busses" when a next generation CPU necessitated the use of a bridge chips like the PDX. Various subsets of the 68030 bus are essentially "Apple ISA", minus the "Standard" part. No wonder Macs were so ridiculously expensive...)

Or they could have just cooked up their own bus from the beginning instead of using Nubus, a difficult and expensive mezzanine bus for both Apple to implement in their machines and for card makers to develop. It worked for Commodore. (see Zorro/AutoConfig, basically the same concept as PDS and ISA, even came in 32bit form).

We won't get into what Apple's engineers were thinking when they developed A/ROSE to "simplify" development of expansion cards.

Silent IDE boot and WiFi for the IIfx would be the holy grail of the kingdom of TREX . . . it'll never happen . . .. . . but the siren song of the HDD replacement PCMCIA card cage in the Duo 2300c hack remains irresistible. }

The IIfx has a PDS slot... that would be a good place to start. It might be easier to develop a card for that as opposed to NuBus!

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Great point about the IIfx PDS, I hadn't thought that through. I just figured that the IIfx might be able to run the lowest OS compatible with PCMCIA support. If so, it would clearly be the most cool to hack, given its wicked fast mythos.

I'd pretty much given up on the NuBus angle due to paucity of information in DCaDftMF3e, but I've now got the two earlier versions of Designing Cards & Drivers and it appears as though the information on the design example cards is a lot more complete than I'd expected, still far over my head, but fun to explore with a project like this in mind.

@G: the PBX bridge has been the most fascinating thing for me about the NuBus architecture PowerBooks and my personal favorite, the Duo 2300c. The "Pratt IC" in the PowerBook 190 does the same thing, but bridges the 68040 to what's hopefully the same 68030 compatible "slow I/O bus" of the PBX series.

Not that I'd consider this project, but given the Pratt IC interface, the Quadra 700 would be the obvious choice due to its sexiest Mac mythos. The incompatible 840AV PDS removes it from the competition.

The oddball PDS of the IIfx is much more alluring, mostly because not much has been done with it and the rest of the 68030 PDS slots are incompatible with it and each other anyway . . . stupid Apple.

 

[Bunsen]

We won't get into what Apple's engineers were thinking when they developed A/ROSE to "simplify" development of expansion cards.

A pre-emptive multitasking, memory protected nanokernel running on a 68000 in 1988.

Ah, what might have been ... *sigh*