Dolphin PCI parallel card

I ran over to Frys yesterday and bought one of the Dolphin cards
(the line at the checkout counter must have been over 300 people
 long, this is the WRONG time of the year to go into a store...)
The good news it was cheaper than I thought it would be ($80..
I figured any PCI card was going to be >$150) the bad news is
they used the ST78C34 instead of the ST78C36 which supports
hardware handshaking.
Still, it's cheaper than having a card made..

This was the first PCI card i've ever seen that was on a two
layer PCB (oops, I mean double-sided, it isn't multi-layer)
and has four active components on it (78C34, LS00, 83LC46
and PLX9050). I guess the margins are better for this sort
of card than the veggie ISA peripherals (like Clay said, the
PLX part is fairly expensive, around $25 in volume)

It's fairly easy to hack a simple I/O interface onto the
space where the 2nd parallel interface would be, since the
parts are surface-mount, you can just tack wires onto the
I/O signals on the pads (assuming you only need 3 adr lines)

I would guess that someone is going to do an I/O kludge card
with one of these bus interface parts, but you can't get it
right now except for the PLX evaluation kit (here's a
'market oportunity' Clay :-) for $300 which has the wrong
connectors and way too much stuff on it...
Received on Sun Dec 21 09:30:02 1997