McTrinsic wrote:
To be honest, nowadays the PCMCIA is superfluous.
For some time there was a certain usability with WiFi cards. They needed a special chipset, though, and have nowadays issues with encryption.
The thing is that with the A1200 the PCMCIA slot it is not nearly as good as the A500s side expansion. So if you want ethernet and Wifi at decent speed then the PCMCIA slot is your main choice. And while yes the encryption is usually a joke on those old PCMCIA WiFi cards, usually WEP, which is a total joke, it is your only choice for WiFi. (Not counting the WiFi Modems that plug into the Serial Port, since these are not true network devices with a stack available on the OS side) While newer routers usually won't accept it, you can easily plug in an old router to your network and us it for connecting to the Amiga when needed. You could also isolate this router on a Virtual network, like I do for my old devices, so that it cannot access your network and compromise your security.
mscdex wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2020 5:44 am
What about wired ethernet cards?
Certain
3com 10base-t cards are supported.
Even though the PCMCIA implementation on the Amiga is not that great it is perfectly fine for all the things you mentioned. The Wifi cards that are known to work are cheap and abundant, same with the Ethernet card and with the CF card adapters.
The cards that are not abundantly available are the various SCSI cards. I lucked out earlier this year and found an Adaptec SCSI card with the Cable for $3 at a local thrift store. Not sure I can get it to work though. Cards that don't work are the CardBus variety. You can usually tell these if the card edge, the side that plugs in to the Amiga has a series of bumps on the top of it. These won't work in the Amiga's 16-bit implementation.