The PC Card Drive HPC-301 is still the only way to read and write Atari Portfolio memory (Bee) cards on a PC. Make that an old PC with an ISA slot for the interface card and DOS. The driver can be found here and here. In the PofoWiki (German), there’s more information about its usage and what needs to be considered when you have Windows 9x. For me, the DOS mode worked fine and I had less trouble accessing the card reader after loading the driver without parameters, e.g. DEVICE=C:\CD.SYS.

There seems to be another way to access the card drive: A software called Portfolio RAM-Card Reader by Digital Data Deicke (now Pentagon GmbH) is mentioned in the Atari-Home.DE forums here and here. It is reported to work even under Windows XP via Direct I/O.

Today, we’re only going to have a look at the hardware. Just look at this massive cable with 37-pin D-sub connectors that connects the card drive with the interface card:

The card drive

The card drive is just a small box:

There isn’t a lot inside:

A closer look at the PCB (labelled CARD DRIVER C103938-001 REV.):

The interface card

There’s more to see on the interface card: An 8-bit ISA card (labelled CARD DRIVER INTERFACE C103935-001 REV.1) full with 7400-series ICs.

Parts list

Short list of the most important parts. It will be completed one day.

CARD DRIVER	C103938-001	REV.
C1	47 µF / 16 V
CR1	(LED)
J1	DB37S
J2	?
Q1	2N3904
R1	?
R2	?
	
CARD DRIVER INTERFACE	C103935-001	REV.1
C1	220 µF / 16 V
C2-C23	?
C24	?
C25	1 µF / 50 V
D1	?
J1	?
J2	DB37P
R1, R2, R3, R4, R6	?
R5, R7	?
R8-R18, R19-R26, R28, R30-R34	?
R27, R29, R35	?
SW1	?
U1	HD74LS86P
U2	HD74LS27P
U3	HD74LS30P
U4	HD74LS02P
U5	HD74LS138P
U6	HD74LS11P
U7, U8	HD74LS245P
U9, U10	HD74LS32P
U11, U12	HD74LS75P
U13, U18, U19, U20	HD74LS244P
U14, U15, U16, U17	SN74LS191N
U21	HD74LS14P
U22	MC1455P1