Does that laptop by chance happen to have a CardBus slot? Some companies were
still equipping laptops with CardBus in 2008 instead of switching to
ExpressCard, or using both, like Lenovo.
If you have a CardBus slot, then it may be possible to use a PCMCIA soundcard
from the 90's for DOS games.
DOS PCMCIA support was complex. First, it required a PCMCIA controller driver.
On top of that, there could be class drivers, which worked for any
manufacturers' devices - mostly RAM cards and IIRC some modems and network
cards. Devices that did special things which couldn't fit into a generic class
driver required their own separate one, called a point driver.
So the question is, is there a DOS PCMCIA controller driver that works with
early 21st century laptops?
This could quickly become a RAM hog if you needed more than a couple of class
drivers and point drivers.
If the only device you were using was a soundcard then you only needed the
controller driver and the card's point driver. If you were running Windows 3.x
then it needed its own driver for the soundcard.
Windows 95 brought order to the mess by not requiring any DOS drivers for
PCMCIA or CardBus and more class drivers with broader device support were
available.
USB went through a similar development process where before Windows Me nearly
all USB devices required their own separate drivers. Got to be a huge mess
installing different drivers for every thumb drive. The Maximus Decim port of
WinMe's USB Mass Storage class driver to 98SE was very helpful.
What would be nice is a generic universal PCMCIA controller driver for DOS,
like that OAK CDROM driver.
That became the only DOS CDROM driver I used once I first encountered it.
Hallelujah! I could finally do installs of two different brands of drives and
use only one driver. Even when installing two of the same make and model drive,
some of them required loading two copies of their driver. The OAK driver could
run any number from one copy.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot
_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user