iBook G3: Questions about the Airport Card (PCMCIA?) slot

[YesWeCat]

Since the original Airport Card is useless with modern Wi-Fi networks (no WPA2 support) I was wondering if its slot could be used for other things.

As far as I know, the Airport Card slot is just a PCMCIA slot. Is that correct? If that's the case, it should be easy to put a more modern network card on the thing, or even a PCMCIA USB 3.0 card (that would make for a cool mod).

Has anyone tried something like this?

 

[Franklinstein]

It's kind of confusing but there are significant differences between 16-bit PCMCIA and 32-bit CardBus. AFAIK, there are no 16-bit PCMCIA WiFi cards that support 802.11G.

The original AirPort slot uses a variant of 16-bit PCMCIA, not CardBus, so even if you could physically get something else in the slot, your options are limited to 16-bit cards, basically just an 802.11b card or a modem of some sort, both of which you already have. I don't believe it's a complete implementation of PCMCIA so some pins may have been repurposed or may not be used, which will preclude the use of some cards, most likely ATA devices or anything with video capabilities.

 

[Fizzbinn]

It does seem Apple didn't implement a complete PCMCIA slot for the AirPort card slot. In the original iBook (first to support AirPort) developer note they show it in the architecture block diagram as being on the ATA bus with the CD-ROM...  I wonder if this does mean you might be able to logically (if not physically/easily) connect a PCMCIA/CF storage card. Of course that would be must useful as removeable storage which would be hard to jury rig. Fun to think about but probably not practical.

http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G3/original_iBook/original_iBook.pdf

 

[Franklinstein]

Indeed, further reading suggests that they only implemented the ATA section of the PC Card standard, which makes more sense than building in the entire ISA-based PCMCIA interface, at least as far as Macs go since they never used ISA. Unfortunately I was unable to find any info regarding the interfacing of the Lucent Orinoco/Hermes chipset (which is what the AirPort card uses) to determine exactly how it works over ATA. Maybe its DSP just sends its signals over ATAPI? I can only assume that other original PCMCIA 802.11 cards used the same wifi-over-ATA configuration.

Regardless, it seems anything outside of an ATA-based PC Card won't work in an AirPort slot, though it may be interesting to try to see if an ATA-type Flash card reader could be made to work in its place. Useful for swapping cards for switching OS versions or something, perhaps, though not as fast or as spacious as just swapping the HD out with an SSD.