Hello all,
I have found several PCIe cards based on the MOSCHIP MCS9901 chip that looks like a great candidate for interface tweaks (at least the parallel port alone is worth the efforts).
However i use only laptops these days and mine has only a mini-PCIe slot (not a normal PCIe). I have enough room under the laptop's body (thank to a thick, very high capacity battery) so I can put some kind of adapter card or something like that, while i hack and develop the interface code.
What is the best solution ? The MCS9901 has several operation modes, including a "pseudo-ISA" bus that I want to use for my projects. Are there already miniPCIe boards with this chip and all the necessary I/O pins brought out of the board ?
At this moment I also look at miniPCIe-to-PICe (X1) adapters : I have found a few on the 'net but price, availability and features are not encouraging. Ideally my PCIe card would be parallel to the miniPCIe plane, with a distance of about 15mm. Has anybody found such a board ? how and where can I buy it ?
Or is there some Gerber file around so I can order a custom PCB ?
The end application is for plugging the laptop to my custom, simple electronics without all the issues of USB and other stupid interfaces ("in al,dx" is so much faster and easier to do than countless system calls)
I'm sure that there is already a solution but i've been reluctant until now to adopt PCIe... I count on you to help me catch up :-)
yg