Ok, found a open source generic packet driver for Intel PRO/1000 PCI cards:
https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/fr … l/e1000pkt.html
Tried it and it works. Unfortunately, if i load the driver in the upper memory DHCP tool from MTCP fails to acknlowdge received packets. The driver takes 11k in memory, but since networking in DOS is a rather every now and then activity, this is not a problem at all. I still get more than 610K in base memory.
By the way, the package includes source code, so this driver could be eventually improved. There's no way to configure buffers and such, you can only do that by altering one of the include files and then compile again. Perhaps all the things that are nice to be configurable could be put in a CFG file and then make the program read the config values from there.
In the end of all this i'm pretty happy. I just upgraded from downloading at 900Kb/s from my home server to 4.5MB/s. Not too shabby.