Zorro II or ISA Ethernet card

[Motormouth]

I have kinda of a good problem on my hands.

I have only one slot left open in my A2000, I want to put an Ethernet card in it, but  Should I put the Ethernet card on the PC side or the Amiga Side?

I have my A2000 almost fully expanded out.
The A2000 has a Fusion Forty with 32megs ram
it has  all four 16 bit ISA cards extension.

The computer currently has a the following Zorro boards:
Trumpcard Pro Scsi
A2058 with 2 meg
Picasso II+
and a Bridgeboard with 8 Megs and with a Rev to 486 75 Mhz 486BL3

On the ISA side I have the following:
the Bridgeboard
a Cardinal SoundVision 16 bit ISA with SVGA-Sound-SCSI, and Game port
An IDE-floppy-serial-parallel 16 bit ISA card

This config leaves one open slot, either a Zorro II or ISA card, I would like to have Ethernet available for both the Amiga side and the PC side

the Ethernet cards I have available are
Zorro II a2065
NE2000 ISA
or Etherlink III ISA

Any Ideas?

[Motormouth]

Use the 2065. it can be shared on the pc side side. the A2386 can share almost everything. A diamond speedstar 64 isa video card( i think it was) will overclock the isa bus and speed everything also.finally ditch janus and look at SXSERV on aminet,its way better replacement.. .i think most old stuff was most compatible with a soundblaster.. been too long. this is all from memory when i was pushing a 386sx board to the limit long ago
Oh worst case, ditch the ide card and use the sound cards scsi,that would free up a slot for the NIC .It would also give the possibility of 100Mbit.Use a realtek compatible card if poss.

good luck

Mech

Thanks for all the responds.
@Mech,
How would you get the Bridgeboard to use the a2065.  This would be the my preferred route
I guess I have seen programs out there to use a ISA ethernet on with AmigaOS, do they work well, haven't attempted to use them?

[Motormouth]

Was about to offer some advice, but this guy clearly knows his stuff.

Therefore all that remains is for me to call you a jammy bastard for having such a premium setup.

Good day Sir.

*sigh*  
Well I really haven't been able to get Ethernet working yet, or I would not have posted.

It is a nice setup but compared you guys with AGA, Uber Towers, 060, PowerPC, PCI slots, and OS 4.1, it is not really that up to date.

This computer has only been together for about a month.  I have had several frustrating configuration issues particularly getting the Trumpcard SCSI working with the Fusion Forty, and getting the OPL3 sound on the Cardinal soundvision to work properly.  Oh and the IRQs on the PC Side; I remember why I bought an Amiga in the first place.

The last place I am stuck on is on the ethernet, I have never setup ethernet on a dos system this old or attempted to get A2065 ethernet working with the PC or visa versa....

[Motormouth]

Two links that might be useful especially for the A2386sx Bridgeboard users out there
One:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/sandy55/Interposer/386_upgrade.html

it explains all the 386sx upgrades that are out there......
They occasionally come up on ebay.

Also the ISA bus overclocking, using the approprate video board, that many of you had referred to, and general overclock can be found on:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~davem2/overclock/a2386.html

[Motormouth]

Now see I'd go this route because it is cheaper and that lets you free up the Zorro slot for any half length card you may want to get like a USB thingy ma bobber.

Really, since you are dealing with A2000 architecture can you'r miggy really take advantage of more bandwidth?

@Crumb and J-Golden
I see your point about half length Card.

I will attempt both etherbridge and EmuNet.
It looks like etherbridge is dos only

Does anyone know if EmuNet works with Windows 3.11 or 95?

[Motormouth]

Hmmm, Most of the sound cards from that day had proprietary IDE/SCSI connections on them that only allowed them to connect a CD-ROM so I don't know if using that for the primary PC-HD would work as a solution.

The scsi controller on the Cardinal SoundVision was put there for Cdrom usage.
However, tt does appear to be bios-shadowing and bus mastering.  I will attempt to mount and use a hard drive with it......
i will post results....

[Motormouth]

A couple of points....

I don't think you can run an Amiga Ethernet card from the Pc side, but you can do it the other way round. Would be interesting if I'm wrong though!

I do know however, that you cannot use a sound card for a hard disk. Not only is the bus not standard IDE (they'd not standardised ATAPI yet) but the BIOS wouldn't understand it anyway.

Nice setup though - you found a SL3 chip!

The IDE controller is in a  kouwell 556N IDE-Floppy-Serial-parallel and works well with the BB.  although, I had one hard time getting all the IRQs and addresses working.

[Motormouth]

It must have been the machine he saw when he sang the song. "Only Amiga, Hoo Hooooo!."


But that is one mean machine.  486 75 Bridgeboard.  I thought they stopped at 386.

Do you run "Gulp" Windows 95 on it ?

Actually it is a A2386sx which is has a 386sx processor and 387 co-processor.  There is a rev-to-486 plugs on top of the 386sx which which has a 486BL3 which is triple clocked from 25 to 75 mhz.

The A2386sx with the 486 upgrade can run windows 95, but albeit it is slow because of the bridgeboard's 16bit bus.  (not 32 bit like 386DX or 486DX)

Vortex did however make a Goldengate 486slc2 @ 50 mhz.  I would love to have one the vortex boards

[Motormouth]

@crumb

I was able to get etherbridge.device working with dos.

I cannot get it working with win95, will update......

[Motormouth]

pc side ethernet is always easiest,and u can do 100Mbit speed.

The os3x hdtools will work on the trumpcard,its rdb compliant. just be sure to change the device in hdtools in the icon info to the trumpcard one(IVSscsi.device depending on the card) NOTE the case it may be important.

The 2000 will easily handle a load of isa cards and won't break a sweat  doing it.overclocked isa  will about the same speed as zorro3 bus on the  3000/4000.

You are right, IRQ's are a pita.. thank god for Autoconfig on the amiga

there were combo board thats had ide,floppy,sound all in 1 card but they are hard to find.

all of the above i have personally done in the past.. the cdrom share tool is amicdex22.lha off aminet.

use SXSERV16.lha its so so much better and a reliable janus replacement.

look into amems152.lha this would allow you to use amiga ram on the bridgeboard side! (its a ems driver but sadly needs a key.. anyone know the author or have a key?) if you run a good accelerator with 128MB or so,adding some of that to the pc side does wonders.

you can share the miamidx connection from the amiga side

check out atutilities.lha on aminet,some goodies in that too!

its also possible to read/write to the pc side hd from the amiga side, i dont recall the utility name,but it may be in the above i mentioned.

pcexecute.lha allows you to start programs on the pc side from the amiga.

it was incredible what you could do with these old boards and back in the day it gave access to quite alot of additional software,as well.They are slow as dirt today but its a fun? thing every amigan should try.

I actually had windows 98 running on this super clocked setup as a form of torture for myself. don't believe any faq's that say w98/se will not run on it,because it will. With ems memory,bus overclocking and the diamond speedstar it was almost tolerable and spec'd right with/above some 486 machines on bus test results.
Another option was to solder a 486slc2 cpu in place of the 386 cpu.
enjoy! they are pin for pin compatible.

  Mech

@Mechy
Thanks!!

"you can share the miamidx connection from the amiga side
check out atutilities.lha on aminet,some goodies in that too!"
This is exactly what I am looking for.  I currently have amitcp/genesis on the amiga side, but I will attempt to try miamidx and atutilities

This will sound crazy, but the problem I had with the Trumpcard Pro and the Fusion Forty was the slot I was using, When I put the A2058 (again with 2megs) in the left most zorroII and the Trumpcard in the second to the left.  the scsi gets weird and autoboots sometimes.  If I flip them, that is the trumpcard in the left.  It works significantly better.
The Fusion Forty can often be very fussy....

I tried out sxserv16, it works well, much better than Janus 2.1,  I had to write down the keyboard short cuts....

I am having problems getting amicdex working with my config, I suspect this may be the fusion forty interaction with the trumpcard, I am going to try another scsi.  I have a spare dataflyer (same scsi chip as the trumpcard, both are PIO) or borrow a friends GVP scsi (a true dma card).  I have a scsi cdrom connected to the PC side cardinal scsi controller, However I would like to remove this, so I can close my case.

I have not tried amems152.lha as my Fusion Forty has 32 meg, I might spare 8 meg for the BB. will update that progress.

I tried out pcexecute.  Very cool....

@mechy and crumb thanks for the ideas!

[Motormouth]

@Jeff and Xanxi

Does the Vortex allow you to use all the bridgeboard tools like amicdex that mechy was talking about?

[Motormouth]

@Spirantho
Aren't the zips that A2386sx the same 1Mx4 chips that the A3000 uses?

Am I seeing things, Are your zips not socketed?
Maybe mine is odd, but my bridgeboard has sockets for all the zips.

I don't know if this works, I was thinking about attempting to making one.
The following guide on aminet:
http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/A2386_16MB
Says there is a way to make a zip to simms adapter for the A2386sx, similar to the zip to simm adapter for the A3000.
And even better is supposedly can handle 16 MB

[Motormouth]

Good Luck man!  We are all rooting for ya!:banana::banana::banana:

@Spirantho

+1

[Motormouth]

I too plan on adding a ethernet to my A2000. What would be recommended if I stick to Zorro II? or would an old ISA NIC work in an A2000 without a bridgeboard? Will Workbench be able to sonfigure it

With the help of all the people in this thread, I was able to get both ISA NIC to work and the Zorro II, to work with the Amiga side.  You could possibly use a A2088 as the bridge and an old ISA NIC, both they are typically cheap with etherbridge.device the only issue I had was finding the ISA NIC dos drivers.
Edit *only problem with this is the a2088 can only use 8bit ISA NIC*

I still have not gotten the Zorro II to work with the PC side......though I think it is user  configuration error, (the ATUtilities is in German, my German is a bit rusty, has been 20 years since I used it regularly)

[Motormouth]

I am having problems getting amicdex working with my config, I suspect this may be the fusion forty interaction with the trumpcard, I am going to try another scsi.  I have a spare dataflyer (same scsi chip as the trumpcard, both are PIO) or borrow a friends GVP scsi (a true dma card).  I have a scsi cdrom connected to the PC side cardinal scsi controller, However I would like to remove this, so I can close my case.

Update:
I was able to get amicdex to work with the GVP scsi card/Fusion Forty.   before I condemn the trumpcard it could be the Fusion Forty/trumpcard PIO that could be the issue.