Storage cards (SRAM, ATA flash, Compact Flash)

Actually, the 95LX was designed to work only with SRAM cards for storage, these cards are available in capacities up to 4 MB (or are there even 8MB SRAM cards?), and they are fairly expensive. The 95LX can handle up to 2 MB without any problem. For larger SRAM cards, you may need the acecard driver. SRAM cards need a battery to keep their data - some cards use a lithium coin cell battery, while others have an internal rechargeable battery which is charged by the host device.

 

The PCMCIA interface of the 95LX follows the standard PCMCIA 1.0 (don´t confuse that with the PCMCIA type, the slot of the 95LX is PCMCIA type II, i.e. you can use cards with a thickness of 3,3mm or 5mm), thus it is designed to work only with "memory mode" PCMCIA cards. No "device mode" cards, such as modems and many flash cards, are recognised (there is one exception: NewMedia designed a PCMCIA modem for the 95LX). SRAM cards are memory-mode cards, but Flash cards, no matter if full-size ATA cards or Compact Flash cards, are generally device mode cards, but some better ones can also be used in memory mode, and those are the cards which work in the 95LX. However, these cards require a special driver, sundrv.zip (see Software section for download link). The highest capacity card the 95LX can handle is 32MB, since the MS-DOS 3.2 in ROM can only handle partitions up to 32MB.

 

The original "Sundrv" driver is made by Sundisk (which is now Sandisk), and thus only works with Sandisk or Sundisk flash cards. The link above also points to a modified version of that driver, which doesn't check for the card manufacturer anymore, so it will also work with other cards, but still only with cards which support that memory mode, of course.

 

There is a further problem with using flash cards in the 95LX: SRAM cards always need a power supply to keep their data, and as long as they are inserted into the 95LX, they get their power from the palmtop, so the battery of the card lasts longer. The 95LX is designed to always supply power to the card which is inserted, no matter which type of card. Thus it permanently supplies power to flash cards, too. But flash cards need way much more power from the 95LX than SRAM cards, and the 95LX, thinking it is an SRAM card which needs the power, supplies power even during it is switched off.

Leaving the 95LX switched off with a flash card inserted will deplete the batteries within days or even hours! So always pull out the flash card if you don´t use the 95LX!

 

Christian Felique tried a hardware hack to solve this problem, and it was successful. He writes:

The PCMCIA interface has three voltage lines: Vcc, Vpp1 and Vpp2. Vcc is always powered, Vpp only when reading from or writing to the memory card. If you cut the Vcc line, the power problem with Flahs cards is solved. However, it may be that you cannot use SRAM cards anymore.

Another problem with Flash cards is that they need much more power for read/write operations, which can make the screen flicker during such operations. This is not dangerous, but it can be annoying.