Date:	Mon, 06 Jul 1998 15:36:30 +0100
From:	Matthias Paul <PAUL-MA AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Subject:	Re: NE2000 PCI NICs
To:	opendos AT delorie DOT com
Reply-to:	Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de
Message-id:	<3EC102E55DD@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de>
Organization:	Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen

On Mon, 06 Jul 1998 Mark Aitchison wrote:

> Newer NE2000 clones that are PNP PCI cards are significantly different
> to old NE2000 cards; I found this a problem for Linux lat last year too
> (now solved).  
Yes, at least the PCI cards are so different from the standard NE2000 
cards for ISA, that they can hardly be called NE2000 clones (they are 
still named NE2000 compatible merely for marketing reasons). 

Even if you can figure out PnP settings, for PCI you still need MLID 
drivers specifically for your NIC. That is, the generic NE2000 driver, 
that ships with PNW and most othe networking software does not work. 
So, if one doesn t have a driver disk for the card, s/he has almost 
lost the game. Fortunately, in our case with PNW, if you *have* the 
corresponding driver disk, in most cases you will find the proper 
driver on it (just look for MLID, or ODI, or NetWare 3.12+).

The bottom line is, that I cannot recomment any "NE2000" PCI clones
at all, especially if you re running more than one OS. Either use 
NE2000 ISA clones, which is a well defined standard and fast enough 
for older machines. You can use them with any networking software. 
Or, on PCI machines, use other widespread cards like 3com s 3c90x 
NICs, which occupy similar low resources as the good old I/O driven 
NE2000. Especially for DOS users, I cannot recomment to use cards 
which use memory-mapped I/O (that is the communication with the card 
goes through RAM windows in the CPU s normal address room), as they 
often cause trouble with EMM386 and you d loose rare address room for 
DOS programs to load them high (EMM386 /EXCLUDE).

 Matthias
 
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