I don't know, but since you didn't mention it explicitly I have to ask if you tried another cable.

other usual suspects would be driver or indeed some card configuration for which a suitable setup program should be found together with the driver on the original driver disk... 😀

weedeewee wrote on 2022-02-27, 21:48:

I don't know, but since you didn't mention it explicitly I have to ask if you tried another cable.

other usual suspects would be driver or indeed some card configuration for which a suitable setup program should be found together with the driver on the original driver disk... 😀

I've tried with multiple cables...
The driver I'm using was developed for a 10Mbits PCMCIA card, the Accton EN2216, which is a 10Mbits card, but it works with many other NE2000 compatible cards.

I don't know if any other DOS drivers will work on the HP 200LX, most 200LX PCMCIA drivers need to be developed specifically for it,
so many standard DOS PCMCIA drivers simply won't work on the HP 200LX's PCMCIA interface...

Maybe there is a DOS tool/executable that allows you to set your card's settings (for NE2K compatible cards) from MS-DOS ?
Can't find anything with google though...

Has anyone that reads this ever had to change network negotiation settings for ANY network card under MS-DOS ? And if so, how did you do it ???

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the official drivers for the Netgear FA411 from the Netgear website only comes with an NDIS2 driver for MS-DOS, it doesn't have a packet driver, so they are useless for my setup/use with mTCP.

Cheers,
Radiance

radiance32 wrote on 2022-02-27, 21:57:

I've tried with multiple cables... The driver I'm using was developed for a 10Mbits PCMCIA card, the Accton EN2216, which is a 1 […]
Show full quote

weedeewee wrote on 2022-02-27, 21:48:

I don't know, but since you didn't mention it explicitly I have to ask if you tried another cable.

other usual suspects would be driver or indeed some card configuration for which a suitable setup program should be found together with the driver on the original driver disk... 😀

I've tried with multiple cables...
The driver I'm using was developed for a 10Mbits PCMCIA card, the Accton EN2216, which is a 10Mbits card, but it works with many other NE2000 compatible cards.

I don't know if any other DOS drivers will work on the HP 200LX, most 200LX PCMCIA drivers need to be developed specifically for it,
so many standard DOS PCMCIA drivers simply won't work on the HP 200LX's PCMCIA interface...

Maybe there is a DOS tool/executable that allows you to set your card's settings (for NE2K compatible cards) from MS-DOS ?
Can't find anything with google though...

Has anyone that reads this ever had to change network negotiation settings for ANY network card under MS-DOS ? And if so, how did you do it ???

Cheers,
Radiance

I could be wrong about this, but AFAIU, NE2000 is essentially a hardware reference platform that is limited to 10Mbps . To get more than that out of a card, you will need to use a driver compatible with your card's native mode, rather than its NE2000 compatibility mode .

EDIT: Additionally, even if the laptop's PCMCIA controller is hanging off a 16-bit internal ISA bus (could it be 8-bit in spite of the 80186 ?), you are likely not going to to get that much more throughput due to

a) ISA bus contention ( disk controllers shares ISA bandwidth with the network card)
b) CPU overhead (even running a 10Mbps NIC at full speed may not be feasible on that slow a CPU

Consequently, I suggest trying to bench test the current network throughput at 10Mbps and if you are not close to theoretical 10Mbps Ethernet limits, don't bother with 100Mbps as you likely have other bottlenecks in that system that would make it pointless.

See also Fast Ethernet on ISA

darry wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:16:

radiance32 wrote on 2022-02-27, 21:57:

I've tried with multiple cables... The driver I'm using was developed for a 10Mbits PCMCIA card, the Accton EN2216, which is a 1 […]
Show full quote

weedeewee wrote on 2022-02-27, 21:48:

I don't know, but since you didn't mention it explicitly I have to ask if you tried another cable.

other usual suspects would be driver or indeed some card configuration for which a suitable setup program should be found together with the driver on the original driver disk... 😀

I've tried with multiple cables...
The driver I'm using was developed for a 10Mbits PCMCIA card, the Accton EN2216, which is a 10Mbits card, but it works with many other NE2000 compatible cards.

I don't know if any other DOS drivers will work on the HP 200LX, most 200LX PCMCIA drivers need to be developed specifically for it,
so many standard DOS PCMCIA drivers simply won't work on the HP 200LX's PCMCIA interface...

Maybe there is a DOS tool/executable that allows you to set your card's settings (for NE2K compatible cards) from MS-DOS ?
Can't find anything with google though...

Has anyone that reads this ever had to change network negotiation settings for ANY network card under MS-DOS ? And if so, how did you do it ???

Cheers,
Radiance

I could be wrong about this, but AFAIU, NE2000 is essentially a hardware reference platform that is limited to 10Mbps . To get more than that out of a card, you will need to use a driver compatible with your card's native mode, rather than its NE2000 compatibility mode .

Thanks for replying, I was thinking the same but was not sure of it...
That's why I downloaded the official drivers from Netgear but unfortunately it does'nt have a packet driver for DOS, only an NDIS2 driver...

I guess it's 10Mbits for me then, unless someone here knows anything more, I'd love to hear of any possible fix..

Thanks for your time,
Radiance

radiance32 wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:22:

Thanks for replying, I was thinking the same but was not sure of it... That's why I downloaded the official drivers from Netgear […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:16:

radiance32 wrote on 2022-02-27, 21:57:

I've tried with multiple cables... The driver I'm using was developed for a 10Mbits PCMCIA card, the Accton EN2216, which is a 1 […]
Show full quote

I've tried with multiple cables...
The driver I'm using was developed for a 10Mbits PCMCIA card, the Accton EN2216, which is a 10Mbits card, but it works with many other NE2000 compatible cards.

I don't know if any other DOS drivers will work on the HP 200LX, most 200LX PCMCIA drivers need to be developed specifically for it,
so many standard DOS PCMCIA drivers simply won't work on the HP 200LX's PCMCIA interface...

Maybe there is a DOS tool/executable that allows you to set your card's settings (for NE2K compatible cards) from MS-DOS ?
Can't find anything with google though...

Has anyone that reads this ever had to change network negotiation settings for ANY network card under MS-DOS ? And if so, how did you do it ???

Cheers,
Radiance

I could be wrong about this, but AFAIU, NE2000 is essentially a hardware reference platform that is limited to 10Mbps . To get more than that out of a card, you will need to use a driver compatible with your card's native mode, rather than its NE2000 compatibility mode .

Thanks for replying, I was thinking the same but was not sure of it...
That's why I downloaded the official drivers from Netgear but unfortunately it does'nt have a packet driver for DOS, only an NDIS2 driver...

I guess it's 10Mbits for me then, unless someone here knows anything more, I'd love to hear of any possible fix..

Thanks for your time,
Radiance

I was editing my post while you answered. See also the edit .

EDIT: See also
https://www.palmtoppaper.com/ptphtml/43/43c0000b.htm

On the palmtop maximum measured speed is around 100KB (bytes, not bits) per second or about 8% of the theoretical maximum. This is probably mostly due to the palmtop's limited processing power.

So 100Mbps link speed woildn't bring much to the table anyway .

darry wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:28:

I was editing my post while you answered. See also the edit . […]
Show full quote

radiance32 wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:22:

Thanks for replying, I was thinking the same but was not sure of it... That's why I downloaded the official drivers from Netgear […]
Show full quote

darry wrote on 2022-02-27, 22:16:

I could be wrong about this, but AFAIU, NE2000 is essentially a hardware reference platform that is limited to 10Mbps . To get more than that out of a card, you will need to use a driver compatible with your card's native mode, rather than its NE2000 compatibility mode .

Thanks for replying, I was thinking the same but was not sure of it...
That's why I downloaded the official drivers from Netgear but unfortunately it does'nt have a packet driver for DOS, only an NDIS2 driver...

I guess it's 10Mbits for me then, unless someone here knows anything more, I'd love to hear of any possible fix..

Thanks for your time,
Radiance

I was editing my post while you answered. See also the edit .

EDIT: See also
https://www.palmtoppaper.com/ptphtml/43/43c0000b.htm

On the palmtop maximum measured speed is around 100KB (bytes, not bits) per second or about 8% of the theoretical maximum. This is probably mostly due to the palmtop's limited processing power.

So 100Mbps link speed woildn't bring much to the table anyway .

I'm getting approximately 300KB per second when transfering a large file served by mTCP's httpserv webserver program with the card in NE2000 10MBits mode as it's working now.
This palmtop does have a doublespeed upgrade crystal, so the 80186 runs at 16MHz.

However, i've got a raspberry PI acting as a HTTPS to HTTP (palmtop) bridge so the site can be accessed via HTTPS publically,
and all this has to go over the separate DMZ network these machines are on,
and I think having the card in 100MBits mode, might make things a bit faster, not on raw throughput, but maybe less lag and better response times for lots of small html and jpg/png files flowing through the linux HTTPS reverse ssl proxy on the PI.

Anyways,

I'm going to try the ODI to packet driver, i've checked just now and I have an ODI driver for netware in the official netgear FA411 driver download archive,
don't know if it works on the 200LX, but i'll give it a go tomorrow morning... I hope, if it works, that having 2 drivers ontop of eachother does'nt make the response times slower than when just running it directly with the NE2K packet driver at 10MBps... Let's find out tommorrow morning 😀

Cheers,
Radiance

By switching to this HP 200LX specific NE2000 driver: PD2212.COM,
I managed to get the 100Mbits link working in full duplex 😀

Throughput speed is the same, average of 250KB/sec with sometimes peaks up to nearly 300KB/sec (pretty good for a 80186 @ 16Mhz),
but the latency is much better. It's much snappier/responsive, especially when dealing with small amounts of data...

Cheers and thanks to everyone that helped me, thanks for your time! 😀
Cheers,
Radiance