• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Debugging Farallon Ethermac NuBus Card in Macintosh IIci

NF6X

Veteran Member
Joined
Sep 9, 2013
Messages
1,534
Location
Riverside, CA, USA
I have a Macintosh IIci, running System 7.1. My dad got me a Farallon Ethermac NuBus NSC PN590A for Christmas, and I'm having trouble getting it working. He had the foresight to pick out one that came with a driver diskette. It didn't come with a manual, so I guessed that plugging it into an available NuBis slot and installing the provided software is all that is necessary. The diskette appears to be sealed in its original shrinkwrap license envelope, and it is marked:

EN Installer Disk
LC/NuBus Cards
...
5000303-00-01 v 2.3​


The software installed without error, but the card isn't being seen by it. When I run the Farallon EN Diagnostics program, it complains: "Could not find a Farallon Ethernet card or Adapter".

My Macintosh IIci had leaky electrolytic capacitors and resulting PCB corrosion. I've replaced all of the electrolytic caps, cleaned up and repaired the corrosion, and desoldered/cleaned/resoldered a couple of chips which were particularly badly hit with corrosion. Doing this got both the power control and the internal speaker audio working, and I do not see any other issues with the system so far, but I can't rule out the possibility that there's still further damage that I haven't found affecting the NuBus slots.

Being a NuBus noob, I tried installing the card in all three slots in case the slot used is important. This didn't help. The LED on the back of the card lights up when it is powered with a network cable attached to a switch, and the switch sees it as a 10Mbit/s interface.

So, do any of y'all have any suggestions before I ask my dad if the seller has a return policy? Maybe I missed some step in installing it? Maybe my Macintosh IIci still has problems? Maybe the card was bundled with the wrong software? Maybe I need to run a different system software version?

IMG_3337.jpg IMG_3339.jpg IMG_3334.jpg IMG_3340.jpg IMG_3336.jpg
 
One possible debugging thought is to (although this probably requires starting from scratch) install the driver before installing the AppleTalk drivers. If I'm not totally mistaken that is a requisite for System 6 with one of the ethernet cards I have. [But I don't recall it giving an error that the card itself couldn't be found.]

The only other long shot thought (which involves way less effort) is that maybe it'd give that message if the AppleTalk settings were set wrong, but that seems pretty unlikely.
 
Well, I don't have a way to start from scratch yet. I have the OS that was already on the hard drive when I bought the machine a couple months ago, and I don't have any OS install media. I eventually plan to install 7.5.3 on it, but I was sure hoping to be able to use the network card to get the 7.5.3 installation image files (a 19-piece split archive) over to the existing hard drive, so I could unpack it there and use it to install onto a SCSI2SD drive. Then I would switch to using the SCSI2SD drive, and unplug the original hard drive.

I get that message when I try to run the Farallon ethernet card diagnostic program. I don't see any way to enable EtherTalk in the AppleTalk settings, which just show LocalTalk as an available option.
 
That actually suggests to me that my theory might have merit; it still might not. But I'm afraid I'm not sure how to solve that issue other than reinstalling the Network Software Installer (I think is what it's called; it's been a while) - because I'm guessing it still wasn't bundled with 7.1 but I honestly don't remember. I think you need to install the OS, then the network card drivers, then the NSI package.

It's probably possible to manually remove all the components of the NSI (and card) and then reinstall the card and then reinstall the NSI. Assuming you can write to floppies (which will be necessary for all of this) you can find full OS disk images on Apple's server: https://ia800501.us.archive.org/8/i...11/download.info.apple.com.2012.11.zip.ls.txt

**Actually as a quick and dirty step 1, why not try reinstalling the card drivers again.
 
I've reinstalled the card drivers a few times already. I blindly assume that the card diagnostic program ought to be able to work with the card at a lower level than the network drivers, but I may be mistaken.

I think my IIci just has an 800k floppy drive, so I can't write real floppies for it on my modern Macintosh. I can probably figure out something with my Floppy Emu, though. I cloned that whole archive of the old Apple support site already, and I plan to try installing System 7.5.3 from there on a SCSI2SD for use in my IIci. I figure I'll need to perform a laborious bootstrapping operation in which I copy each of the 19 installer image parts into a floppy image, put the images all on the Floppy Emu, copy the installer image parts onto the existing hard drive, unpack them, and finally use the image to install 7.5.3 onto the SCSI2SD.

My dad is working with the card seller to see if they can offer any help, and they have already been responsive. I suspect my motherboard more than I suspect the card, due to the corrosion I've already had to fix, so I'm not inclined to ask for a refund or replacement. But maybe the seller will be able to offer some debugging help. I would like to get my hands on detailed schematics of my IIci to help with hardware debugging.

I suspect I have a lot of hard work ahead of me to get everything working, but it'll be a really nice vintage system once I'm done.
 
I have an Etherwave in my 7.1 IIci, which is a similar card and is also Farallon. The driver does need to be installed, but if the software installer ran successfully, the diagnostic should be able to see the card. My suspicion is the card is okay and the NuBus controller might be whacked. A device like a Snooper should be able to determine.
 
...I think my IIci just has an 800k floppy drive, so I can't write real floppies for it on my modern Macintosh....
It should have a 1.44MB drive, unless someone swapped it out at some point in time, which would be an odd swap to do downgrading it. You should be able to write OS and Driver disk images from a modern PC or Mac, I have System 7.0.1 available in RAW IMA format (I do plan to upload other versions later on), you should be able to write it with DD, rawrite, winimage, or most other disk imaging software.


How much corrosion was there from the leaked capacitors in your machine? Bad caps alone should not stop nubus from working, my IIci has all its caps removed right now (waiting for slow-boat order of tantalum SMD caps to arrive), and it still boots and works with a nubus 24bit video card, but if the leaked caps corroded some traces, I would say all bets are off, I would look it over under some good light and magnafication see if any traces look damaged.
 
I made one attempt to write a Network Access Disk 7.5 from my modern Mac with a USB floppy drive. It wasn't recognized by the Macintosh IIci, and I just assumed it had an 800k drive in it instead of debugging further. Silly me!

There was at least one trace corroded open:

FullSizeRender 2.jpg IMG_3284.jpg

which I repaired:

FullSizeRender.jpg FullSizeRender 5.jpg IMG_3288.jpg

That particular trace does snake over to one of the NuBus slots. I didn't replace the affected 74ALS240 with a new one because I didn't have one on hand, though. I also desoldered, cleaned, and resoldered one of the audio driver chips. Those were the two worst areas of visible corrosion damage, but I may still have further repair and debugging ahead.

I found a set of Iici schematics for $25 here:

http://www.maccaps.com/MacCaps/Schematics.html

Those should be quite helpful when I dig in to the logic further.

If anyone can help me figure out how to tickle the NuBus slots with a debugger so I can see if things are twitching the right way with a scope or logic analyzer, that would be quite helpful. I found a document on the MAME site which describes a coarse memory map of the NuBus Macs, but I'd like to learn more about what a NuBus slot should look like from the processor's perspective.

I found a company whose web site claims they still have old stock of the NuBus extender cards they used to make. If they still have one to sell me, then that would save me the trouble of making one. It's pretty easy to get a PCB made these days, but mine wouldn't have the sexy sheet metal bracket. :)

Edit:

That area under the cap looked a lot worse before I snapped the first picture. That was after I already did a lot of cleaning. I replaced all of the caps with new ones, with the longest service life rating I could get my hands on (5k hours for most of them). I repaired that open trace with a bit of 30ga wire, and then made new solder mask over it with Kapton tape. The 74ALS240 is the same one I pulled off, though, as I was too impatient to wait for a replacement to arrive from Digi-Key.
 
use macsbug to probe the slot config rom address space.

dumping the config rom would be a good thing to do as well

Do you know where I can find information about where the slot config ROMs live in memory? I have located some incomplete sets of Inside Macintosh scans, but I don't think I've found anything with that level of detail about the NuBus hardware yet.
 
Back
Top