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DOS and Windows software for PC Card (PCMCIA) hardware whose drivers were lost to time, never shipped, or never existed. Enablers, passthrough drivers, and tools that read, write and repair.
DOS has no idea a PC Card exists until something programs the socket controller, maps the card's I/O windows and writes its configuration register. These do that in one command, then get out of the way.
One enabler for every ES1688 PC Card — three host paths, one binary.
Merges three sibling enablers into a single .COM. With no mode switch it auto-detects the host: Card Services first when an arbiter is loaded, then the OmniBook Socket Services signature, then an 82365 probe at 3E0h. Brings up SB direct-DAC audio, ESFM at 220h, AdLib at 388h, MPU-401 and gameport.
Enabler and CIS repair kit for the Panasonic CF-VEW211 and its NEC sibling.
A 1994 CS4231A + OPL3 card in a ~13 KB .COM, with the same three auto-detected backends. It still handles its founding case — a card whose CIS is dead — and now covers the PC-98 badged PC-9801N-J04, which shares the ASIC and codec but has no FM synth. The CF-VEW212 is identified and politely declined: its working configurations are not the one its CIS declares.
Wakes the Roland SCP-55's onboard Sound Canvas as a General MIDI device.
Three host backends in an 11 KB .COM, auto-detected at run time, with a polite I/O window allocator on the OmniBook path. The original single-backend C enabler the project started from is kept in legacy/ as the readable reference.
Finds the MIDI port that the EXP Game Traveler's CIS never mentions.
The card's CIS declares one thing: its gameport. The vendor's Windows INF declares the rest — a second 8-byte block at 250h holding a 16550-class UART, clocked so that divisor 24 lands exactly on 31250 baud. Built from the CIS, those plain-text configuration declarations and live recon; no vendor binary was read or disassembled. Bench-proven on the GAME/MIDI G3.
Point enabler for the I-O DATA PCJOY2 — gameport and MPU-401 UART.
Written from the card's own CIS, dumped on target, and the public Intel 82365SL register set. The card carries no MANFID tuple, so it is recognized by its VERS_1 string instead; the configuration register base comes out of CISTPL_CONFIG at 200h.
CardBus bring-up in DOS, starting from a socket the BIOS left completely dark.
In DOS the BIOS leaves CardBus sockets unconfigured: no socket register window, no resources, and no power to the card. Nothing in a plain DOS install fixes that, so the card may as well not be in the slot. AUD2GO powers the socket, brings the card out of reset and assigns it PCI resources — then deliberately stays out of the audio silicon, because the chip's wake-up sequence belongs with whatever drives it.
The original C enabler, kept for the REX-5571 project history.
Where the ES1688 work started: a DOS enabler for one specific card, the Ratoc REX-5571, whose driver was lost to time — and which grew into a general ES1688 enabler. Development continues in es1688go; use that one.
An enabled card is still useless to a game that expects different silicon at a different address. These sit between the two and translate — in real time, without dropping a byte.
Sound Blaster emulation for laptops whose card slot has no DMA.
The target machines are 486-class PCMCIA laptops whose card bridges have no ISA DMA to the socket. The guest's Sound Blaster audio is intercepted and pushed to the real card's FIFO by programmed I/O — a passthrough, not a mixer: the chip plays the guest's native rate and format and nothing is resampled. FM rides the card's real OPL at 388h, untrapped.
Validated from a Pentium MMX down to a 386-bus 486SLC/25. One binary carries the ES1688, CS4231 and CS4248 backends; /CARD: picks one at load time. A fork of Baron-von-Riedesel's VSBHDA, itself a fork of crazii's SBEMU.
Makes a bare serial UART answer like an MPU-401 at 330h.
Some MIDI interfaces are a raw 16550 and nothing more. A DOS player can drive one directly, but games speak the MPU-401 handshake — reset, the FEh ACK, and a status port whose bits report data-ready and write-ready. A bare UART answers none of it, so a game's drain-pending-input loop spins forever and it hangs before drawing a frame.
MPUSHIM traps both ports, returns a correct UART-mode status byte so drain loops terminate, answers reset with the ACK and an All-Notes-Off broadcast, and forwards MIDI paced on the Line Status Register — bytes are never dropped. One resident binary covers both trap worlds: real-mode V86 and 32-bit DPMI/DOS4GW.
A Windows 95/98 USB stack for a card that only ever had CE drivers.
RATOC's REX-CFU1 is a CompactFlash-sized USB 1.1 host built around the SL811HS. RATOC shipped Windows CE drivers and nothing else; this makes the card work on PCs. Insert it and Windows PnP-installs an INF plus a CONFIGMG-integrated VxD carrying its own USB stack.
Current state on Windows 98: USB mouse, keyboard, hubs, and a real read/write drive letter for USB sticks. A ring-0 hot-plug supervisor enumerates and classifies devices and feeds Windows through VMOUSE and VKD — keyboard and mouse work simultaneously behind a self-powered hub, devices can be yanked and replugged freely, and a watchdog recovers hubs whose firmware crashes.
Every 16-bit PC Card carries a CIS — a chain of tuples in attribute memory describing what it is and how it may be configured. These read that account, write to the card's memory, and in one case put a destroyed CIS back.
Reads a PC Card's CIS without disturbing a card that is already running.
Card-agnostic: decodes MANFID, FUNCID, the COR address, and each configuration's I/O windows and IRQ options through an 82365-class PCIC — no Card Services or Socket Services required. Polite by default. It borrows the controller's first disabled memory window, saves those registers, reads, then restores the window and the enable byte precisely, so it never clobbers a running enabler's I/O windows. Only a card it powered up itself is powered back down.
Reads, writes, erases and identifies linear flash and SRAM PC Cards.
The memory-mapped kind of card, not ATA: a flat window of chip memory, where writing flash means real block erases and byte programming. LINGO does that itself — including switching the socket's Vpp to 12 V for the older Intel parts that need it — with no Card Services, no Socket Services and no FTL driver.
In the CISDUMP tradition, READ and INFO never write a byte; chip identification only happens under /PROBE, and anything a probe touches on an SRAM card is saved and restored.
Repairing a PC Card's destroyed CIS in software — no programmer, no soldering.
Reverse-engineering notes and DOS tools for the Panasonic KXL-C101, the sound+SCSI card bundled with the KXL-D20 and KXL-D745 portable CD-ROM drives: an ESS ES1688, a QLogic FAS408 SCSI controller and a NEC µPD65622 glue ASIC tying them to the PC Card bus.
The headline result: its damaged CIS was restored entirely in software, by finding the ASIC's undocumented factory CIS-write mode and defeating the specific way the storage had failed. Everything here was learned by probing the hardware, from a byte-exact dump of a known-good card, and from the public ES1688 and FAS408 programming models.
If you arrived here holding a specific card, start on this list.
Every claim on this page was made on a real machine with a real card in the slot.