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Problem changing I/O Address (I/O Addr) on Intel Etherexpress 8/16 RESOLVED

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dmuntz

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Apologies in advance if there's a better place to post this.

TL;NGTR: I/O Address can't be changed with the card in an 8-bit slot. Need to have it in a 16-bit slot to do so.

Just posting this here so others can find it with google (as I couldn't). I was trying to get the Intel Etherexpress 8/16 board working in an IBM 5150 (only has 8-bit ISA slots). The default I/O Addr for this board is 0x300, which conflicts with the default for xt-ide. I had been putting up with the inconvenience of changing the xt-ide cards' I/O Addr, but this was painful in my case with swapping different cards and BIOSs around in different machines, and required repeatedly pulling one card or the other for various reasons. Trying to change the I/O Addr on the Intel card in the 5150, softset2.com complains that all other I/O Addr choices are in-use (they aren't) and refuses to change. However, if you can put the card in a 16-bit slot in another machine, you can change the I/O Addr, which is saved in some persistent storage, and then move the card back to the 8-bit ISA machine.
 
The RTL8019 has this same issue with having something at 0x300 fouling up the utilities to change the card settings. (It's also the default I/O range for 3com 3c509s?)

I guess I understand why the default for XTIDEs is 0x300, because they want to avoid there being a problem if you insert one into a machine that already has an XT hard disk at the default 0x320, but it does seem to be an unfortunate choice when it comes to conflicts with PnP network cards.
 
I've seen the same thing on 16-bit NE2000-compatibles--they'll work in an 8 bit slot, but the configuration utility won't work in one. They all seem to use an 8 pin NVRAM DIP, so it may be a task for someone to disassemble the configuration utility and get a datasheet to find out how things tick. That is, if it hasn't already been done.
 
On the RTL I ran into a thing where the "friendly" configuration utility wouldn't work even if I got rid of the 0x300 conflict, hung the computer, but there's an alternate command line utility that works fine to brute-force the configuration EEPROM. Not sure if that's a general problem or it just hated my Tandy 1000.

(Amusingly the alternate binary is intended for the manufacturing floor; it sources a config file and programs *everything* including the MAC address, which auto-increments after each run. Whatever MAC address my card came from the factory with is now lost to history because of that. Oops. But if you want something juvenile like DEADBEEFCAFE to show up in your tcpdumps, well, it's just the ticket.)
 
Leaving this here for future adventurers into Vintageland:

Attempting to use it in an IBM 5160 with a LoTech XT-CF card, rev. 2. The XT-CF card conflicts with the Intel 8/16 LAN card on the IO address of 300. The particular flavor of Intel 8/16 I have has an RJ-45 and AUI port. The default I/O address on this card is 300.

Re-flashing the Intel 8/16 LAN card: I popped the Intel 8/16 into a Pentium 1 box that has a few 16-bit ISA slots. Ran softset2 and re-flashed so it's using a higher address (360 to be precise). Then I put the 8/16 card back into the 5160 and ran exp8.com. The card was detected and I was able to use Brutman's mTCP DHCP.EXE to get an address, then fired up telnet and went BBSing.

The first parameter for exp8.com is "packet_int_no", which I think is the interrupt number. The error dialogue when running exp8.com will give you a range of numbers to try, from 0x60 to 0x70 (I think). Mine ended up being 0x6a. The second parameter is the IO address (io_addr), seems to be optional. (But you still need to flash it with softset2 to get it onto a free IO address.) So the line in my autoexec.bat file for loading exp8.com is literally this:

C:\intl816\exp8.com 0x6a
Click to expand...

Software download is available here:

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Intel_8∕16_LAN_Adapter

Hope this helps someone else!
 
Sounds like I have the same-ish Intel card.

I was able to config my Intel card in a 5150 (in a 5161) with softset2.com using the Manual mode option away from Port 300 to 260 without issue. Auto Mode didn’t work though.

I think I was still playing around with my MFM drives at that point and had XTIDE (from TexElec) running as Secondary controller @ D800.
 
Just wanted to chime in with my own experience with the exact same problem (XT-IDE and Intel 8/16 address conflict). I was able to configure my card in a 5150 by running the "e16disk.exe" file linked above which extracted itself to numerous files, specifically softset.exe (not softset2.exe). That allowed me to configure the card in an 8 bit ISA slot. Hope that helps someone!
 
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