I decided to flesh out my old Magnavox Headstart/SX. This has consisted of "disable the 1Mb onboard RAM and stick in an 8MB SIMM", "disable onboard VGA and stick a 512K WDC 90C30 card in", and "replace the 40Mb IDE hard drive with a SD adaptor".
The latter required the introduction of the XT-IDE Universal BIOS to fix some weird behaviour. I originally borrowed the XT-IDE card from my V40 machine, but decided a more permanent solution was to buy a cheap NIC with a ROM socket. (The specific card was https://www.ebay.com/itm/134203476277?hash=item1f3f268935:g:LswAAOSw6kJi64kU, advertised pretty explicitly for use as a ROM carrier)
The ROM part works fine-- I configured it to enable the socket at C8000, and the BIOS works a charm. (Well, aside from the original Philips BIOS crying about about the hard drive not being ready even though no drives are specified there)
But I figured, while I have it open, let's use the networking facility. This has gone poorly.
I can load the packet driver-- either the native "PNPPD.COM" driver, or the Crynwr "NE2000.COM", and they detect a card and report back the MAC. I recall the prefix is 00-50-something, but I'm not in front of the machine now.
However, mTCP's DHCP client never seems to be able to pull an IP address. Sometimes it mentions not seeing any inbound packets.
Things I've tried:
Different network cables. Including bypassing the 8-port hub normally used in the room with the machine.
Disabling IPv6 on my router, in case it was trying to trigger DHCPv6 on the connection and confusing the poor 386.
Experimenting with the config utility (both the old one that came on disc with the card, and a recent RSET8019) to tweak the config. I've tried setting IRQ 4, 5, and 7, and switching on and off full-duplex or "link detection". I also tried launching NE2000 with numerous different IRQ values (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) since I had heard claims sometimes the autoconfig is wrong, and none of it brought DHCP to life.
I tried running PKTTOOL and it reports seeing a few packets inbound from a few different MACs that start with 86-60-00. These seem to be short and repetitive. However, no devices on my network have that prefix to my knowledge.
The other weird thing I noticed is that both RSET8019 and the old disc setup utility (I suspect it's basically an older RSET8019 because the basic features look identical) report the card is in an 8-bit slot. It's clearly not, and I tried two different slots. It seems to pass its internal diagnostics, but I don't have the matching setup to test the network response stuff.
Has anyone seen symptoms like this? I almost wonder if there's some hardware issue resulting in both symptoms-- a stuck bit that convinces RSET8019 it's in an 8-bit slot and is also garbling network data. But the fact the boot ROM works makes me think it can't be too damaged, unless the fault is not on a common path with the ROM socket.
The latter required the introduction of the XT-IDE Universal BIOS to fix some weird behaviour. I originally borrowed the XT-IDE card from my V40 machine, but decided a more permanent solution was to buy a cheap NIC with a ROM socket. (The specific card was https://www.ebay.com/itm/134203476277?hash=item1f3f268935:g:LswAAOSw6kJi64kU, advertised pretty explicitly for use as a ROM carrier)
The ROM part works fine-- I configured it to enable the socket at C8000, and the BIOS works a charm. (Well, aside from the original Philips BIOS crying about about the hard drive not being ready even though no drives are specified there)
But I figured, while I have it open, let's use the networking facility. This has gone poorly.
I can load the packet driver-- either the native "PNPPD.COM" driver, or the Crynwr "NE2000.COM", and they detect a card and report back the MAC. I recall the prefix is 00-50-something, but I'm not in front of the machine now.
However, mTCP's DHCP client never seems to be able to pull an IP address. Sometimes it mentions not seeing any inbound packets.
Things I've tried:
Different network cables. Including bypassing the 8-port hub normally used in the room with the machine.
Disabling IPv6 on my router, in case it was trying to trigger DHCPv6 on the connection and confusing the poor 386.
Experimenting with the config utility (both the old one that came on disc with the card, and a recent RSET8019) to tweak the config. I've tried setting IRQ 4, 5, and 7, and switching on and off full-duplex or "link detection". I also tried launching NE2000 with numerous different IRQ values (2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) since I had heard claims sometimes the autoconfig is wrong, and none of it brought DHCP to life.
I tried running PKTTOOL and it reports seeing a few packets inbound from a few different MACs that start with 86-60-00. These seem to be short and repetitive. However, no devices on my network have that prefix to my knowledge.
The other weird thing I noticed is that both RSET8019 and the old disc setup utility (I suspect it's basically an older RSET8019 because the basic features look identical) report the card is in an 8-bit slot. It's clearly not, and I tried two different slots. It seems to pass its internal diagnostics, but I don't have the matching setup to test the network response stuff.
Has anyone seen symptoms like this? I almost wonder if there's some hardware issue resulting in both symptoms-- a stuck bit that convinces RSET8019 it's in an 8-bit slot and is also garbling network data. But the fact the boot ROM works makes me think it can't be too damaged, unless the fault is not on a common path with the ROM socket.
