I'm still working on my Olivetti 386 but I've hit a road block.

To date I have successfully installed the ESS sound card, IDE cdrom drive (hanging off soundcard) and upgraded the ram to 10mb.

I also have a network card that I've been trying to get working but its clashing with the CD drive. The card is a 3com509b and its IRQ is set to 10 but my problem is that the CD controller on the sound card is also set to 10. I can change that to 11 or 12 but then the drive is not recognised. IRQ 12 conflicts with the mouse and IRQ11 should be free but seems to be conflicting with something as the CD drive doesn't work. MSD.EXE reports IRQ 11 as reserved bios. IRQ10 on the other hand is listed as reserved default handlers. The only other free IRQ I can see is 15 but the ESS config software will only let me select 10, 11 or 12 for the CD and there doesn't seem to be any means of changing the IRQ for the network card.

So any ideas?

I suppose I could ditch the CD drive but I'd really rather not as there are some old CD-ROM games I want to play.

Would another network card be an option or do they all default to IRQ10?

BTW the on board IDE is extremely limited by the BIOS and while I haven't tried it to be honest I don't see the CD drive working connected to the motherboard.