my two cent about how to use this card and micro8088 to surf the web

[giobbino]

Hi all,

hoping it could help somebody, I wish to leave here some instructions about how to connect your micro8088 (or any other XT clone) and the Sergey's LAN card to the internet.

Note: I'm using MS-DOS 6.22; I'm also using USE!UMBS.SYS and DOSMAX.EXE to free some conventional memory, however everything should work without it too.

• Download the MTCP .zip file from this site: https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/ (see the download section)

• use the RSET8019.EXE diagnostic (https://github.com/skiselev/isa8_eth/blob/main/software/RSET8019/RSET8019.EXE) to discover IRQ and hex address of your card

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• load the patched driver NE2000.COM (https://github.com/skiselev/isa8_eth/blob/main/software/driver/NE2000.COM) with the right parameters.

In my case, since I have IRQ=2 and Hex address = 260h, the syntax is
NE2000.COM 0X60 0X2 0X260

Note: if it returns an Ethernet address = FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF it means some of the parameters for NE2000.COM are wrong.
If everything is OK, the Ethernet address is the correct one.

Note: I also experienced some issues in one case about jumperless vs. plug and play: my boards have all jumpers set to OFF. I had to run the RSET8019 utility and change the settings, from Plug and play to jumperless and save the settings, or the address wasn't correctly detected (note that after entering in the RSET8019 utility, opening the "show settings" choice and simply exiting, the NE2000 started to work correctly until the next reboot, so don't be fooled by that and check everything after a cold reboot).

The RSET8019 utility also helps to identify a free IRQ, just in case (you then need to update the NE2000.COM parameters).

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• Unzip the MTCP zip file; in this tutorial I will assume it was unzipped into the C:\MTCP folder.

• copy the C:\MTCP\SAMPLES\SAMPLE.CFG as C:\MTCP\MTCP.CFG
  (if you want you can change the hostname, however probably it's useless - see below).

• set the environment variable: SET MTCPCFG=C:\MTCP\MTCP.CFG

• Launch DHCP.EXE
  Note: don't care about a Warning message telling the Assigned hostname is "".

If everything is OK, you should see a valid IP address, gateway, etc.

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You can try to PING some site (i.e. PING GOOGLE.COM) to check if everything is ok.

Then you can surf the web using MICROWEB (https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb/releases) that works with XT clones and almost every possible video card; I experienced some crashes, but sometimes it works. Another web browser (text based) is Doslynx (http://macall.net/info.htm ) but I didn't test it. Please leave a message with the link if you know any other web browser DOS based.

Since the modern sites aren't suitable for microweb, use http://frogfind.com from inside microweb to "purge" the pages enough to obtain some kind of usable result (no images, though).

Hope it helps!
Cheers,
Giovi

[skiselev]

Giovi, thank you for this writeup!
If you don't mind, I'll convert it to a documentation page, and link it from the index.md in the repository.

[giobbino]

You're welcome!

I should also say I have an issue I'm trying to solve on my 386SX, and I don't understand why:

the NE2000.COM driver always returns FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF, but if I access the RSET8019.EXE utility and simply open the "view current configuration" page, then exit and load the NE2000 driver again, it returns a valid ethernet address (and then the DHCP works too).

So, the RSET8019 changes something somewhere, even if you don't make any setup from it.

As told before, the card works fine in the 8088.

Both cards have all jumpers set to OFF, the one that works has IRQ=2 (as told before), the one that shows the issue has IRQ=3 (as suggested by the RSET8019 utility) since the IRQ 2 is used by the Sound Blaster card.

EDIT: SOLVED ----------------------------

I discovered the RSET8019 was set as plug and play, while the cards were set as jumperless (all jumpers to OFF). I changed the setting as jumperless too from inside the RSET8019 setup mode, and now everything is working fine.
I already updated my "pseudo-tutorial" above.