Win95 drivers for Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet \ VOGONS

Win95 drivers for Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet

Topic actions

Post a reply

First post, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2022-03-27, 16:43

wbahnassi Offline

Rank Member

Rank: Member
Posts: 325
Joined: 2020-06-03, 00:45

Hi, I'm trying to make my Windows 95B recognize the on-board Ethernet chipset on my HP Z400 motherboard. It's a "Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet" as Windows 11 identifies it, and I've captured its compatible Ids as follows:
PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_1684&REV_10
PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_1684
PCI\VEN_14E4&CC_020000
PCI\VEN_14E4&CC_0200
PCI\VEN_14E4
PCI\CC_020000
PCI\CC_0200

and these are the hardware Ids:
PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_1684&SUBSYS_1309103C&REV_10
PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_1684&SUBSYS_1309103C
PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_1684&CC_020000
PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_1684&CC_0200

I took the most modern Win95 ethernet drivers I could find for Broadcom (forgot which ones specifically), and modified the INF to support the above Ids, but Win95 still refuses to do anything beyond a generic fail message. The device status in Device Manager has a yellow mark and says: "This device is not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers instaled. See your hardware documentation. (Code 10.)".

I was expecting the driver to kick in and probably crash the system if it wasn't able to deal with the hardware, but the above makes it seem as if I wasn't able to make the driver even get installed in the first place. Any hints to a good driver or steps to make this ID spoofing work?

Reply 1 of 6, by Tiido

Posted on 2022-03-27, 16:47

Tiido Offline

Rank l33t

Rank: l33t
Posts: 2996
Joined: 2018-01-14, 04:40
Location: Norway (used to be Estonia)

You need WinME for the Broadcom driver that supports these to work properly. Win98SE will also work but with a hang during shut-down on all the hardware I have had, win95 will not work.

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
Newly made 4MB 60ns 30pin SIMMs ~
mida sa loed ? nagunii aru ei saa 😜

Reply 2 of 6, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2022-03-27, 18:23

wbahnassi Offline

Rank Member

Rank: Member
Posts: 325
Joined: 2020-06-03, 00:45

Sorry for the noob question, but would it be possible somehow to get the Win98/WinME driver to install on Win95? I mean given how usually drivers say "Win9x" in general?

Reply 3 of 6, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2022-03-28, 00:34

wbahnassi Offline

Rank Member

Rank: Member
Posts: 325
Joined: 2020-06-03, 00:45

I actually went ahead and installed WinME, but it was still unable to identify the ethernet card. The available drivers list has only one Broadcom driver for iLine, not NetXtreme, and it didn't work when I tried it anyways.

Reply 4 of 6, by Horun

Posted on 2022-03-28, 01:11

Horun Offline

Rank l33t++

Rank: l33t++
Posts: 6025
Joined: 2019-09-19, 02:19
Location: USA

You need specific driver for it. Think it would have been easier to keep Win9x if it ran OK, and use a more generic PCI 10/100 ethernet card since it has 2 PCI slots from what I read....
No you cannot just take WinME drivers and make them work in Win95 or 98 that easy, there are some OS subsystems that not the same between Win9x and WinME...
Can you look at the Broadcom chip and read the chip number ? If a BCM5764 series it is an advanced ethernet PHYs not a stand alone full ethernet chip so no way to make it work under Win9x AFAIK.
just making some guesses :p

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 5 of 6, by Donovan V.

Posted on 2022-03-28, 01:32

Donovan V. Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 40
Joined: 2022-03-25, 21:01
Location: Guatemala.

Quick question(s). Are you running Windows 95B on that board, on bare metal? If so... why? I mean, seriously. This is extremely overpowered for a Windows 95 build. I am honestly curious...

Reply 6 of 6, by wbahnassi

Posted on 2022-03-28, 03:01

wbahnassi Offline

Rank Member

Rank: Member
Posts: 325
Joined: 2020-06-03, 00:45

Horun wrote on 2022-03-28, 01:11:

Can you look at the Broadcom chip and read the chip number ? If a BCM5764 series it is an advanced ethernet PHYs not a stand alone full ethernet chip so no way to make it work under Win9x AFAIK.
just making some guesses :p

It is (and I quote from the HP official manual):
"Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Plus NIC (PCIe). This is a PCI Express card based on the Broadcom 5761 chip."

The machine's slots are fully populated so I don't have much space to add one more PCI ethernet card unfortunately.

Donovan V. wrote on 2022-03-28, 01:32:
Are you running Windows 95B on that board, on bare metal? If so... why?

Oh, this is a big can of worms. This is actually my combo workstation+real DOS machine all-in-one.
Would you believe me if I tell you that this machine is currently hosting MSDOS 6.22+Windows95B+Windows 11 ? I use it for real DOS gaming (I don't like DOSBox) as well as my pay job (game programming on Windows and consoles).

Since all OSs reside in the same machine, transferring data between them is easy (just access the HDD). Only Win11 is connected to the Internet, so any retro downloads are done in Win11 then transferred to the DOS/Win95 HDD. I was hoping I can activate the Ethernet adapter in Win95 to expand the convenience of file access in that OS.

Go to top of page Go to top of page

Back to General Old Hardware

Main menu

Common searches