I'm a closet hacker re-living some of my youth when I spent way too much time with a PCjr (hey, that's what my Dad bought!).
I've crafted a PCjr bus adapter that allows me to plug in standard 8-bit ISA expansion cards to my PCjr. I have a 3-slot backplane. The first card that I've plugged in is an IBM XT Fixed Disk Adapter (MFM controller) that allows my PCjr to bot and run off of a hard disk. Now I'm turning to ethernet.
I have an old 8-bit ISA twisted pair ethernet card - the SMC 3008TP. Unfortunately, the SMC supplied packet driver does not load. It exits with a "return code 3", and I have no further information.
I saw somewhere on the internet that the 3008TP is similar to the Tiara card (both based on the Fujistsu MB86950 ethernet controller chip). I tried the Tiara packet driver from Crynwr and it worked!
Sort of. I think. I'm using WatTCP applications to get out over the net. ping works no problem. htget (a HTTP requester) seems to work okay. My experience with a telnet client is mixed. The ftp client doesn't work (although that could be a PCjr compatibility problem).
I'm really trying to get telnet working first. The problem is that the characters sent from my computer are slow to come back and be updated on my screen. It's choppy, kind of like the data is fragmented or there's something funny with the card/driver buffering.
I'm not sure if the problem is in my use of the Tiara packet driver, or, if it's in these WatTCP applications. I'd like to eliminate any uncertainty with the driver.
I've got all of the Tiara driver assembler files for the packet driver from Crynwr, but I would need an SMC 3008 programmer's manual to confirm the driver code.
I've written SMC for a programmers reference, but thought it would be a good idea to throw a note out here. Does anyone out here have this kind of technical information?
Thanks, Matt e-mail (remove whitehouse and gov and replace with charter.net)