Retail News / Sales : Wireless PCMCIA Networking Card from AmigaKit.com

[Paul]

"The PC and Mac have had wireless networking for a while now. Now the Amiga 1200 can join in! AmigaKit.com's latest networking product is NETPCM010- the PCMCIA wireless network card. To learn more about this card visit AmigaKit.com website at http://www.amigakit.co.uk/catalog/pr...roducts_id=121"

Source: amiga.org

[Adeptus]

Is there anything (apart from drivers) stopping you using a PC wireless card?

Sorry, I'm bored and have written one of my 1,000,000 word replies just to excercise my fingers and pass the time when I could of probably said what I wanted to say in 5 words or not bothered to reply at all

Originally Posted by Adeptus

Is there anything (apart from drivers) stopping you using a PC wireless card?

No, not really. PCMCIA is PCMCIA. In the Linux comminity people regularly hack/dissasemble Windoze driver code for the sole purpose of creating their own drivers if the manufacturer doesn't make any - this is happening less frequently these days as Linux has become more popular.

This card does seem a little bit more expensive than your regular one which of course only comes with Windows, and if you're lucky Linux/Mac drivers.

The card is more than likely a generic unbranded mass-produced card intended for PC compatibles which someone has been clever enough to produce a Amiga driver for. In fact it must be, imagine the manufactering costs for Amiga-specific hardware with low volumes these days.

There's probably more chance of George Bush winning the Nobel Peace Prize, me being made a moderator of lemonamiga (if/when it relaunches) and GTA San Andreas not sweeping up at the next major game awards than there is of any major league manufacturer supporting the Amiga, so if you wanted to use your XXXXX Windoze/Linux PCMCIA card in your Amiga you had better learn all the programming/hardware/hacking skills involved to make your own drivers, or hope that more than half a dozen Amiga owners have the same PCMCIA card as you and have the collective brains/patience/time to make this driver or the money to pay someone to make this driver.

Even if one of our resident programming gurus made a driver for you tomorrow, just out of spite to make me look silly in the last paragraph I wrote - The question is for the sake of saving a little bit of money do you really want to do this?

Personally if I had the option of buying a "BIGFAMOUSCO ABC123W" wireless network card with 100% compatible unoffical user-created hacked Amiga drivers for say the price of £25, and the knowledge that I was dealing with a big company that were likely to exist in 9 months time if I have problems etc...etc..........then unless I was extremely poor I would still rather by this Amigakit.com card, even though it is £10 more and made by a small company catering to a niche market with possibly one guy running the whole show from a spare bedroom (I apologise if you are the owner of AmigaKit reading this - I am just making extreme stereotypical exagerations to prove my point, if I can remember it by the time I get there!).

Unless the price of an Amiga product is really extortinate compared to a similar mainstream PC product, or the Amiga product is notoriously unreliable, or the company producing/selling the product has numeorus incredibly bad customer reviews/complaints then I recommend always going with the companies supporting the Amiga even if it does cost a little bit more money.

Too many of us already made this mistake with games companies back in the piracy days, this "killed" the Amiga and stopped pretty much 99% of any new Amiga developments/innovations ever happening. We should all support any small piece of innovation whenever we can.

I don't know why I wrote this post but as it's been written I'll hit the "Submit Reply" button. Maybe the combined times people waste reading this will balance out the time I wasted posting it Still, it gets my post count+1

[adolescent]

Umm, this is a standard "PC" PCMCIA wireless card and a freeware beta wireless driver. They do include other things like setup wizards and freeware TCP/IP stacks.

I have a Netgear MA401 and it works fine with the driver, although 40/64b WEP isn't working.

[alexh]

Kudos to the REAL person behind this... Neil Cafferkey.

His Wireless ethernet drivers are available here

I guess you need to get the RIGHT type of card chipset for it to work.

He's a very talented Amiga user who also written some drivers for PCMCIA ethernet cards, the very common 3COM variety. Which I use every day with my A600

Addition
As far as Amiga companies ripping off consumers, we know that we are all smarter than them, we get any and all PC compatible gear from somewhere else if it is cheaper.

Neil gave his permission to Amiga Kit afterall.

[vk4akp]

OK, So the big question is I guess. Which make and model PCMCIA Wlan cards do I look for on EBay so I can get my A600HD on my network here?

.-.-.

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by vk4akp

OK, So the big question is I guess. Which make and model PCMCIA Wlan cards do I look for on EBay so I can get my A600HD on my network here?

.-.-.

Not the most direct of answers, but hopefully helpful all the same:

PCMCIA drivers & tools
3com & prism chipsets as mentioned before seem to be best supported...
...eBay?
At least one of the driver packages contains a list of known-supported cards by make/model, so 'just' a case of looking for those & seeing what pops up.

That's what I did: Watch out, some of these cards seem quite popular (expensive) for nefarious uses so have a few options to hand.

TBH: I went back to my wired card as the driver supports security standards other than the one I've used on my network - I couldn't be bothered to change the rest of my network to suit.
Also
I've now got a non-PCMCIA solution as I don't like 'thingies' poking 3feet from the side of my A1200.

[vk4akp]

I couldn't see anything on that link.

But I think you might have meant this.

http://aminet.net/driver/net

prism2.lha1.6driver/net1152210K2006-06-23 Driver for 11Mbps wireless network cards - (readme)
I've read through the Doc (Best I could using a PC).

It lists a lot of the Orinoco PCMCIA cards, including one that I have (Orinoco Classic Gold).

But I'm pretty sure mines not Prism2 chipset. I think they changed over to Hermies from memory in the current manufactured batch.

Oh well, I'll keep searching EBay.

If anyone can advise a good cheap card thats suitable I'm all ears.

Doesn't have to be high powered or anything.

I also note that there are Prism 2.5 and Prism 3 standards. I have no idea weather these work also or not.

.-.-.