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Likely safe settings for an 8-bit Ethernet card?

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southbird

Experienced Member
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Sep 11, 2009
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So I have a really old D-Link DE-100TP card

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/network-cards/D/D-LINK-Ethernet-DE-100TP-for-PC-XT-AT.html

... and its default settings are port 300h, IRQ 3, and memory D0000h.

Now I'm trying to fit this into a 386 (just because I happen to have this as opposed to a proper 16-bit ISA card, heh), and I know from running the supplied hardware test on an XT that the card is good in all respects. But currently on the 386 the test, only going as far as to ask the port number, immediately declares "I/O Failure." I imagine there's possibly a conflict, but I'm rusty with 386 era and just can't think if anything on a relatively empty system would be using port 300h or what memory ranges should be dodged. I know IRQ 3 would be for a COM2, but there's only one serial port in this system, so it should be free. I arbitrarily bumped it up to 320h, but still got the I/O Failure message.
 
southbird said:
So I have a really old D-Link DE-100TP card
... and its default settings are port 300h, IRQ 3, and memory D0000h.
Click to expand...

I don't know anything about memory settings and D0000 is listed in my little book as "User PROM, normal LIM location for Extended Memory." I guess that's OK. Running MS-DOS 6.22 the other settings are what I have for a standard 16 bit card. I can't see why 8 bit would be any different. Yes COM2 should be free but why don't you check the assignments anyway. Sometimes they are out of whack because DOS takes the _first_ one as COM1 even if it's not set for 03F8.
 
Try IRQ 5 if it's available--that's more typical for 16-bit NICs. D0000h should be okay, depending on what other cards you have installed (that would be very useful to know!). 0300h should be fine, but 0320h may get you into trouble with your sound card.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Try IRQ 5 if it's available--that's more typical for 16-bit NICs. D0000h should be okay, depending on what other cards you have installed (that would be very useful to know!). 0300h should be fine, but 0320h may get you into trouble with your sound card.
Click to expand...

Well I don't think we've gotten as far as IRQ being a problem. (And IRQ 5 is preferred non-conflicting SoundBlaster anyway, isn't it? Although there isn't a soundcard YET.) At this point it's a typical low profile 386 with an onboard floppy, single IDE, serial/parallel, and VGA, but nothing else. 320h was just an arbitrary guess to see if something was sitting on 300h, but I can't think of anything off-hand that normally sits there. A more advanced sound card would use 330h for MPU-401 I believe? Again, not that there IS a sound card yet!

Jorg said:
Are you running MS-DOS 6.22 with EMM386 loaded?
Click to expand...

Running DOS 5.0 and I don't believe EMM386 is loaded at this time. Is there a potential problem with that?
 
I just looked at the DE-100.EXE fle and yes, the "I/O error" occurs when it first tries to probe the NIC's I/O ports. Given the age of the card, I wonder if there's a dependency on CPU spee involved--i.e. a CPU-timed loop.

Can you slow your 386 any to test that? You might want to disassemble the DE-100.EXE driver (it's not large) to check.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I just looked at the DE-100.EXE fle and yes, the "I/O error" occurs when it first tries to probe the NIC's I/O ports. Given the age of the card, I wonder if there's a dependency on CPU spee involved--i.e. a CPU-timed loop.

Can you slow your 386 any to test that? You might want to disassemble the DE-100.EXE driver (it's not large) to check.
Click to expand...

386 does support "Turbo" and not-so-Turbo, so I'll clock it down and try it when I get a chance later tonight
 
Okay, never mind! When I reseated the card after putting it back to 300h, it decided to start working perfectly. Even the test works at 25MHz. Go figure. :p
 
So, what's next for this card? What are you planning to use it for?
 
Well after that I got it working under WfW 3.11 (first time I've ever networked in WfW), though like most old PCs with an Ethernet card, that limits its usefulness to simple Internet connectivity and a modern Internet that's just a bit too much for it to reasonably process. Good for FTP and other simple services though.
 
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