Norton Commander wrote on 2026-01-02, 16:24:

Title says it all. 86Box-Windows-64-b8200. Here's the list of cards I can select for my 486 DX33 machine in 86Box:

The attachment 86box NIC.png is no longer available

I hit the search engines but found mostly links to drivers but no info on any of those other than NE2000 (10 Mb 0nly).

I know nothing about 86-box but of those cards listed in your photo, none are 100Mbit.
They are all 10Mbit or lower in real life cards.
The only option I see that might be viable is the NE2000 compatible.
Since this is an emulated environment it all depends on how true to reality the emulation is.

Also, 100Mbit cards tend to be extremely rare for ISA or VLB. They are more available for PCI systems. FYI.

edit: forgot I did have 86box unpacked. and indeed when a pci system is selected a 100Mbit ethernet card is available.

Thanks for replying but that's a bummer. The last pure DOS machine I owned was a 486DX 33MHz. I didn't have a network card in the machine but I did call a lot of BBSes with Procomm Plus 3 for Windows and I was hoping I could get 100Mb in WFW as well as DOS.

Maybe a future build of 86Box will have 100Mb NICs for 486 machines.

Edit: Bahh, looks like I'm chasing a unicorn. A search on Ebay for 10/100Mb NICs only results in PCI so no go on a 486.

If you go for a 486 mainboard that has PCI you can use one of the PCI 100Mbit nics.
And there are, I think, at least 2 100Mbit cards for ISA and VLB.

I did see a few Fast E cards when I selected 486 w/PCI. The 486 I had at the time had ISA8/16 slots and one VLB slot with a Cirrus Logic GD5426 1MB. If I have time this weekend I will create a new 486 w/PCI and try to get 100Mb networking going in DOS 6.22/WFW 3.11.

Well I didn't have time last weekend but I did have a little to devote to my pet project.

In 86Box I selected [ALi M1489] AMI WinBIOS PCI w/i486DX/33 16MB RAM as machine type and selected PCI Realtek RTL8029AS as the NIC.

Here are the drivers.
https://archive.org/details/realtek-rtl-8029as

In PCEM16 machine type [486] Award SiS 496/497 486DX/33 16MB RAM with NE2000 transfer speeds were similar so looks like my 86Box machine is set to 10Mb instead of 100Mb. Will have to dig a little further.

FYI, RTL8029AS is a 10Mbit NIC

Windows 3.x and 9.x network stacks not optimized and can not get full speed of 100mbit cards too.

So 100Mb in Windows for Workgroups 3.11 is a waste of time?

Norton Commander wrote on 2026-01-10, 20:23:

So 100Mb in Windows for Workgroups 3.11 is a waste of time?

Yes

Oh well, at least I was still able to try WFW on a different motherboard.