For some time now, laptops have become powerful enough for even ambitious hard disk recording thanks to high computing power and powerful hard drives. Up to now, a powerful interface was missing though. USB is neither offering the necessary bandwidth, nor the desired compatibility. Available PCMCIA solutions at the moment are nearly always designed as 16 bit PC Card and therefore only make use of the ISA bus.
For the Hammerfall DSP System RME developed a world-exclusive PCMCIA type II card in Zero wait state CardBus Busmaster technology. With up to 130 MB/s transfer rate in both directions the same basic performance is provided on a notebook as a PCI card would offer on a desktop computer. Additionally the card offers highest compatibility by being 100% Plug & Play compatible under Windows and MacOS, and being able to share interrupts. The card itself will only use one interrupt (IRQ) for all functions (audio/MIDI.)
The connection between CardBus card and I/O box is established using ordinary firewire cable (closed LAN to IEEE 1394.) The data transfer does not use Firewire protocol, but our own proprietary bus protocol. The supplied cable is 4.5 m (15 ft.) long, a cable length up to 10 m (33 ft.) has been successfully tested. The CardBus card does not provide power to the attached I/O-box. Therefore a hi-tech switching power supply is included.
