I used NE2000s with my DOS systems and Novell (Personal) NetWare (Lite) in the past. With a NE1000 and EtherLink II for 8086s. I now use LapLink.

Dreamer_of_the_past wrote:

3Com 3C595-TX is a 10/100Mbps PCI card that was released around 1995

Grrr. I have one of these, but I'll be damned if I can get Win98 to recognize it as more than 10Mbps.

Dreamer_of_the_past wrote:

Funny you should mention the 3Com 3C515-TX. I have one of these running in a P200 system. Be careful with these, because they aren't actually 100-Base cards. They are actually 10-Base cards with "100-Base compatibility", whatever that means.

You probably meant to say that the theoretical speed limit for the ISA bus is only 16.6Mbps.

Yep, I knew there was a reason for its reduced performance, but I couldn't remember why.

Top left, Intel Etherexpress Pro 100.
10/100 ISA nic.
I got it for my P-Pro restore.
System recognizes it I have yet to actually benchmark it, but it is supposed to be a full 10/100 ISA Ethernet card. Getting a 100 signal on my switch with it. If thats true it will saturate the ISA bus when I try to transfer files over from another machine, just waiting xmas sales for a cheap TB WD drive.

borgie83 wrote:

Most of the time, I use Intel Pro GT 1000 PCI network cards. Fairly fast and have drivers available for Windows 3.11 all the way through to Windows 8.1. The Windows 3.11/95 drivers have since been taken down from Intel's website but are still available for download elsewhere. The Dos drivers for this card are also regularly updated with the latest official Intel 19.5 update being dated 10/28/2014. Latest Windows 98 10.3 update is dated 3/15/2006. Strange how they keep updating the Dos drivers though. Anyone know why?

Any idea where I can find the Win95 and 3.11 drivers? I've scoured the internet for the 1000 GT but can only find the Win98 drivers?

Have you tried Intel's own website?

Yeah I have. They only offer 98 drivers. I tried using the drivers manually, but the card wouldn't initialize correctly in device manager. Kind of why I'm looking for Win95 specific ones.

I almost exclusively use 3COM 3C509 or 3C905 cards for my retro builds. Though for my next build I went with a CNet E2000C plus which uses an UM9007F chip. It has Windows 3.x/9x/NT4 drivers available so it should be fine.

@oeuvre me too.

Also I like to use the network boot capabilities of the 3C905 (using PXE) with my raspberry pi, that way I can run memtest, start up a DOS floppy that has a connectivity to my network share so I can easily clone my HDD onto it using norton ghost 2003, install windows 3.x/95/98, etc ...

This saves up a lot of time and avoid the "where did I put that damn CD again ?" and it makes me less dependant from floppy disks which as we all now won't last as long as the rest of our hardware. Now I'm wondering if I can't make the Ultimate Boot CD to work over the network. That would be really awesome ! I'm also trying to make a functionnal Windows 9x to start up from the network.

I've also bough the boot ROM for 3c509B cards, but unfortunately it can only boot from RPL servers and some other things, but not PXE. That wouldn't be a big deal if there was enough documentation on how to do this on the internet, but I've never figured out how to make that thing to work. I really need to find some more documentation about this or someone that managed to do this as this would allow me to do what I said earlier on 286,386 and 486 computers (maybe even 8088/8086 computers ?) That would be really awesome

Deksor wrote:

I've also bough the boot ROM for 3c509B cards, but unfortunately it can only boot from RPL servers and some other things, but not PXE. That wouldn't be a big deal if there was enough documentation on how to do this on the internet, but I've never figured out how to make that thing to work. I really need to find some more documentation about this or someone that managed to do this as this would allow me to do what I said earlier on 286,386 and 486 computers (maybe even 8088/8086 computers ?) That would be really awesome

I have a realtek 8029 card that has a rom that can only boot from QNX servers. I have been looking at playing around with iPXE but I need to get some stuff to burn roms, but here is a floppy disk image I built that should allow you to PXE boot the 3c509, I also attach a ROM file that I built but it seems that it is too large to burn to a 512kbit rom.

Thanks ! But unfortunately, I remember a guy trying iPXE on his 486 computer and it didn't work, but using the same network card in a pentium II machine and it worked perfectly. Well that's the same thing for met : my 486 stays at the "loading rom" screen while my Celeron 300A setup keeps going. There must be something wrong in iPXE's code that need i586 CPU to work properly.

I tried it on my CompuAdd 316s and the system would reboot after the loading rom screen, I tried to run gPXE off an ultimate boot disk thing I found and it hard froze the system. It is possible that an old version of etherboot would work, I have found references to etherboot being compiled to run on 16bit systems using a compiler from the ELKS project(bcc), but some of the etherboot doccumentation makes references to 16-bit roms and bcc no longer being supported, so I don't know exactly which version of the etherboot source I need, or what I would need to make a suitable build environment.

Figures, that CNet card I bought is an NE2000 clone.

I've found that with NE2000 compatibles when running WFW 3.11 that the built in NE2000 driver works even better than manufacturers drivers at least when I was using 16-bit PCMCIA card in an old Winbook that I had, that I later accidentally fried by changing out the CPU while it was on, which happened because had removed the broken screen which housed the status lights, and I had the power cable soldered directly to the battery terminals and I did not realize it was still plugged in.

i486_inside wrote:

I've found that with NE2000 compatibles when running WFW 3.11 that the built in NE2000 driver works even better than manufacturers drivers at least when I was using 16-bit PCMCIA card in an old Winbook that I had, that I later accidentally fried by changing out the CPU while it was on, which happened because had removed the broken screen which housed the status lights, and I had the power cable soldered directly to the battery terminals and I did not realize it was still plugged in.

YES! At first I tried using the CNet driver and it was giving me some weird SYSTEM.INI error. Then I just let Windows networking detect the card, it saw it as NE2000 or compatible. Worked fine after setting the IRQ and base address.

My experience has been that pre-2000 (ish) definately the best supported and most reliable cards are 3Com and Intel. I have never had a problem with 3Com 509 or Intel EtherExpress 16 for ISA, and 3Com 905 and Intel Pro/100 for PCI. 3Com was definitely king of DOS with their ISA cards. One thing worth mentioning that I discovered recently is that 3Com 905A/B amd 3Com 905C is a different driver... that screwed me up for a while, and the 905A/B drivers for DOS seem to be easier to come by (not that C is terribly hard to find, just not as common). I would highly recommend either of theae manufactirers cards.

Intel & 3com

If I have to go looking for a special driver - it goes into the trash.

Nic's are just too common to waste time looking for drivers.

back then quality was intel and 3com and i think there was no such thing as performance, those were all just dumb devices without any autonomy or hardware acceleration (except in some circumstances i believe)

Huxy wrote:

Any idea where I can find the Win95 and 3.11 drivers? I've scoured the internet for the 1000 GT but can only find the Win98 drivers?

Okay, to be clear on this, I've managed to establish that Intel never released or supported the Pro1000 range in Windows 95. However, Win95 supports 16bit DOS drivers for backwards compatibility, so I was able to get the NIC recognised and running using the ODI and NDIS drivers. If I'm honest though, the transfer rates were reasonable but the CPU (PII 400) was hammered to the point where the OS becomes fairly unresponsive during transfers. It peaked around 8MB/s but averaged a bit lower. I did force the card into 10mbit mode hoping to see lower kernel usage but it made no difference (apart from being slower).

Out of interest, I tried the card in Windows 98 and performance/CPU usage was the same as 95.

So, in conclusion
1. Intel PRO 1000 NICs do not have 32bit Win95 drivers
2. They can use 16bit DOS drivers in Win95
3. Transfer rates are okay-ish
4. ..But CPU load is very high
5. 9x does not support any TX offloading to enhance performance

Hopefully that helps anyone who had the same questions as I did as the information in this thread makes it sound as if Win95 drivers are easily available for Gigabit Intel cards.

interesting. i have an intel in my dual p-pro overdrive on win2k. i got full pci saturation (~70MB/s) and only ~7% cpu useage. iirc.