Does the card work in any other mainboard?

Yes. Works great on a Slot-1 Pentium-3 machine under Win98.

Do you have the setup disk for the Linksys card? Most ISA network cards I know of can be set to PNP or non-PNP mode via via the setup disk. If your 486 BIOS is non-PNP as you say, your Linksys card will more than likely need to be set to non-PNP mode. The setup disk will more than likely give you enable/disable and address options for the ROM socket that you'll need to setup for the XT-IDE bios.

In general there is no way a program can detect a non-PnP ISA card if the program does not know it and has specific detection routines implemented.

From what I've gathered, the Linksys Ether16 is actually a DLink DE-220. Here is a link to the FTP site which has the drivers and setup program to set it to non-PNP mode as well as the user manual. ftp://ftp2.dlink.com/PRODUCTS/DE-220/REVA/

orcish75 wrote:

Do you have the setup disk for the Linksys card? Most ISA network cards I know of can be set to PNP or non-PNP mode via via the setup disk. If your 486 BIOS is non-PNP as you say, your Linksys card will more than likely need to be set to non-PNP mode. The setup disk will more than likely give you enable/disable and address options for the ROM socket that you'll need to setup for the XT-IDE bios.

Yes. I downloaded the setup disk from here:
http://download.modem-help.co.uk/mfcs-L/LinkS … ether16.exe.php

Here's the error:

The above error was my motivation for trying out NSSI & other utilities to search for conflicts.

The motherboard is a PVI-486SP3. The BIOS shows as Award Modular BIOS v4.05G followed by 03/24/95-SiS-496-497B-PVI-4SP3-00:

I read on another vogons thread here: Asus PVI-486SP3 BIOS issues that later versions of the BIOS should support PnP, BUT the later versions of the BIOS are 3.06, 3.05 & 3.01, whereas the POST screen seems to indicate I have version 4.05G, which is confusing.

orcish75 wrote:

From what I've gathered, the Linksys Ether16 is actually a DLink DE-220. Here is a link to the FTP site which has the drivers and setup program to set it to non-PNP mode as well as the user manual. ftp://ftp2.dlink.com/PRODUCTS/DE-220/REVA/

I had no idea. Thank you for the above link. I downloaded the software & gave it a try. It worked much better than the Linksys software. Go figure. I ran it through the card diagnostics & everything checks out. I'm one step closer. Now I need to figure out I/O base address & IRQ...

Still, it would be very helpful to figure out:
1. Why is there no ISA configuration options in the BIOS?
2. Why can none of the system utilities detect the presence of any ISA cards?

Unfortunately none of the non-PNP BIOSes I know of of have any ISA configuration options in them. Most PNP BIOSes allow you to reserve IRQ and DMA values for non-PNP cards but you still have to configure the card via jumpers or the setup utility to assign an address and IRQ/DMA to it. If you don't set your Linksys card to non-PNP mode, a non-PNP BIOS will never detect it as it hasn't been assigned any address or IRQ.

Set the Linksys card to non-PNP mode and I'd recommend setting it to address 260 or 280 and IRQ 10 or 11. Avoid address 300 or 330 as most soundcards have their MPU-401 set to one of these addresses.

Let me know how it goes.

zolli wrote:

The motherboard is a PVI-486SP3. The BIOS shows as Award Modular BIOS v4.05G followed by 03/24/95-SiS-496-497B-PVI-4SP3-00:

biosver.jpg

I read on another vogons thread here: Asus PVI-486SP3 BIOS issues that later versions of the BIOS should support PnP, BUT the later versions of the BIOS are 3.06, 3.05 & 3.01, whereas the POST screen seems to indicate I have version 4.05G, which is confusing.

The version is displayed on the POST screen below the copyright notice, above the CPU info. I can't quite make it out on your photo, but it seems to be version 2.02 (-0202).

zolli wrote:

orcish75 wrote:

Still, it would be very helpful to figure out:
1. Why is there no ISA configuration options in the BIOS?
2. Why can none of the system utilities detect the presence of any ISA cards?

1. In the non-PnP world resource settings for ISA cards in the BIOS make no sense, since ISA cards have fixed resources. Often jumpers are used to set resources on hardware basis. Some later cards allow to set resources with proprietary tools in an EEPROM, but this is just equivalent to setting jumpers by hand. There are only a few ISA cards that are full ISA-PnP compatible as this standard was very late implemented.

2. To find a non-PnP ISA card is a difficult task, because the software has to try detection on speculative resources, assuming that a certain card might appear there. A ISA card can have different resources jumpered and the detection poking may hit a different ISA card that starts to behave erratically or just freeze the system. Just as an example the Auto Detection of a music capable sound card for midi usually freezes a system if an Adaptec scsi controller is present because the SCSI controller is by default at the same resources as a MPU-401 port can be. So the routine that tries to detect a Midi device there writes actually to the Scsi controller, locking up the system. I think the most complete non-PnP ISA card detection is included in the Win95 setup when it reaches the Hardware detection.

You have two options here to try and get this working.

1. Put the card in a machine with a PnP BIOS and run the DOS setup program to switch the card into legacy mode and assign its resources. Then pop the card back into the 486.

2. Find a copy of Intel's ISA Configuration Utility for DOS. It can detect and configure any PnP compliant ISA card regardless of you having a PnP BIOS. Once again, use the utility to force it to legacy mode and assign the resources.

This card appears to be a NE2000 clone in legacy mode, so drivers shouldn't be an issue.

3. There are the isapnp tools for dos that allow to configure any ISA-PnP card.
ftp://78.46.141.148/driver/isapnp/