These chips were used in the graphics subsystem of Sun 386i UNIX workstation and some CRT terminals (like DEC VT1000). It is like a complete computer on a card. TMS340x0 chips are fully programable 32-bit integer CPUs and this (rather low-end) card has 1MB of program/data memory (in addition to 1MB of framebuffer memory). It looks like TIGA cards are valuable among collectors, but there is very little info about what can be done with them. Once I fix it, I would like to play with the chip and program some benchmarks to see the real performance. The video output does not work properly as some traces between the GPU and RAMDAC are bad, but the rest of the card seems to be ok. This is my new project for next few months – SPEA Graphiti HiLite 1024 - a TI TMS34020-based professional CAD card (“TIGA”). PCMCIA SRAM boot siemens-nixdorf PCD-4ND laptops dos retrocomputing Only one known laptop that supported this – MiTAC 4022. PCMCIA cards if a user booted from a different device. Laptops with Phoenix and AMI software did not provide a driver-less access to They even supported booting from ATA/CF cards. ThinkPads wereĪn exception (486 and maybe also early Pentium ones). However, the support was flaky – just good enough to load a properįrom large brands (like Toshiba) mostly didn’t support this feature. Once it was enabled and a card was inserted, the system booted from PCMCIA and mapped the cardĪgain as A. With AMI BIOS could have an optional “PCMCIA Boot Function” module.

ATA PCMCIA andĬompactFlash drives are not supported here – they are ignored by the BIOS Works just fine and you don’t need to load any PCMCIA driver. These support just linearįlash/SRAM cards and let you boot DOS out of the card mapped as A. (in addition to “hard drive” and “floppy drive”). However, there were also laptops that supportedīooting from PCMCIA cards, and I am surprised that this feature was notģ86/486 laptops with Phoenix BIOS have “PCMCIA” in the boot device list

Quadernoīoots DOS from the internal ROM, loads a driver to support SRAM and allows using My Olivetti Quaderno subnotebook instead of its failed hard drive. PCMCIA linear memory cards (both SRAM and flash) that existed before PCMCIAĬontrollers started to support IO devices and ATA.

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