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NE2000 Packet drivers for 8-bit slots

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profdc9

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Hello,

I modified the packet drivers for the NE2000 card to work on 8-bit slots and have included the modified NE2000.ASM and the compiled NE2000.COM below. Use it at your own risk, and if you break your vintage computer, it is not my responsibility. It has been tested on my IBM 5160 PC XT computer. It only supports the IRQs available to 8-bit slots (2 to 7), and IRQ 5 is usually reserved for the hard disk controller on the XT. I have been using it with IRQ 2 and I/O base 0x300. For example:

NE2000 0x60 2 0x300

I have it working with KA9Q NOS and the lynx browser, though the lynx browser is too slow to be usable.
The NE2000 card I use is a jumpered UM9003 chipset card with a 10Base-T port. You probably can get it to work with a jumperless PnP RTL8019AS NE2000 ISA card, however, you will need to configure the I/O address and IRQ using a PC with 16-bit ISA slots so that you can access the PnP card functionality temporarily.

Disable the ROM also, you don't need it.

Hopefully this saves some effort keeping these ancient beasts alive.

Dan
 

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profdc9 said:
You probably can get it to work with a jumperless PnP RTL8019AS NE2000 ISA card, however, you will need to configure the I/O address and IRQ using a PC with 16-bit ISA slots so that you can access the PnP card functionality temporarily.
Click to expand...

There exists both the 8-bit slot PC/XT compatible driver as well as the configuration utility from manufacturer for RTL8019 card :-) It works for me very well.
 
Seems to have worked with my Microdyne Eagle NE2kPlus as well. (after i made the config changes on a machine with a 16 bit slot... the card has no jumpers except a 'default' one)
 
NE2000 again

NE2000 again

Do you by any chance have the unmodified ne2000.asm source available? I have a hard time finding it non the net ...

--HS

profdc9 said:
Hello,

I modified the packet drivers for the NE2000 card to work on 8-bit slots and have included the modified NE2000.ASM and the compiled NE2000.COM below. Use it at your own risk, and if you break your vintage computer, it is not my responsibility. It has been tested on my IBM 5160 PC XT computer. It only supports the IRQs available to 8-bit slots (2 to 7), and IRQ 5 is usually reserved for the hard disk controller on the XT. I have been using it with IRQ 2 and I/O base 0x300. For example:

NE2000 0x60 2 0x300

I have it working with KA9Q NOS and the lynx browser, though the lynx browser is too slow to be usable.
The NE2000 card I use is a jumpered UM9003 chipset card with a 10Base-T port. You probably can get it to work with a jumperless PnP RTL8019AS NE2000 ISA card, however, you will need to configure the I/O address and IRQ using a PC with 16-bit ISA slots so that you can access the PnP card functionality temporarily.

Disable the ROM also, you don't need it.

Hopefully this saves some effort keeping these ancient beasts alive.

Dan
Click to expand...
 
Look for the Crynwr packet driver collection - source code for it is available there. (Along with the source code for many old, classic Ethernet cards.)
 
Old thread, but, confirmed working on Novell/Anthem/Eagle NE2000T cards, ASSY # 810-000220-001. I think I have something going on with my test bench power supply -- works fine in the IBM 5160 PC/XT but had some stability issues in a 386DX-40 motherboard with an 8-bit slot.
 
As long as this thread has already been necromancer-ed I'll throw in that the driver seems to work for me on an RTL8019AS card. I've seen a few stability issues with an error-prone network upstream (long story) but I'm not sure if that's the fault of the packet driver. It seems to work great with the mTCP suite on a clean network.

The reason I'm using this driver instead of the factory PNP driver for the RTL card is the factory driver has an annoying bug that prevents you from using the card on IRQ2 in an XT. (If the card is configured for IRQ2, which is the same physical slot pin as IRQ9, the driver errors out and tells you you can't use IRQ9 despite correctly identifying it's in an 8-bit slot in an XT class machine.)
 
Actually thanks for bumping this old thread. I just tried it on a Tandy PLUS NIC I had made a couple years ago I never could get working. It works like a champ with this driver. It's a 2 chip solution with a AX88796B MAC, a 16v8 for address decode and interrupt routing, and a RJ45 jack with built-in magnetics. Going to test a few more things out tonight and hopefully post all the design files later tonight.

Thanks a lot

Now if I only had an RNDIS driver that worked in 8-bit mode I could get PC/NFS working! :)
 
eeguru said:
Actually thanks for bumping this old thread. I just tried it on a Tandy PLUS NIC I had made a couple years ago I never could get working. It works like a champ with this driver. It's a 2 chip solution with a AX88796B MAC, a 16v8 for address decode and interrupt routing, and a RJ45 jack with built-in magnetics.
Click to expand...

Hey, that's cool!

I was vaguely thinking about trying to lay out a Plus card with the full RTL8019AS because it seems to be semi-readily available for only around $4 a pop. It has decode circuitry built into it and I was kind of speculating it could be used to make a combo card with an XT-CF on it that used its built-in ROM decode. (I mean, it's there...) But if your version skips some its PNP shenanigans it may well be better.
 
For probably irrelevant comparison the generic ISA RTL8019A I have dangling precariously inside my 1000 HX-based mutant spdtests at about 73KB/s transmit, 87KB/s receive. Machine has a V20 if that makes any difference.
 
Ancient bug alert warning ...

M

Thread 'Bug alert: Patched NE2000 driver for 8 bit slots doesn't work on 80186 and later CPUS'

Just a little over 10 years ago somebody posted a thread (NE2000 Packet drivers for 8-bit slots) with patched source code for the NE2000 packet driver to let it run on 8 bit slots. This helped a lot of people and it has been good.

Just a few days ago I was crawling through this code, trying to find out why some PicoMem users could not use the emulated NE2000 function on the card. It turned out to be a bug in that original posted driver code. Here is the short story.

The patched initialization routine:
  • Turns off word transfer mode while initializing the card.
  • Doubles up...
  • Like

The short story: I'm pretty sure this patch is broken on 80186 or better CPUs. See the thread link above for the details.

If you are on an 8086/8088 or V20 you are not affected. But later CPUs with REP IN/OUT variants won't work if the application doesn't always word align the outgoing packets.
 
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