voytech wrote:
hi 
best PCMCIA card to use in an A1200.. there is'n any..
there are some good and better only 
If you want to buy one, you should make sure that the NIC
is:
-16 bit
-uses NE2000 standart
Just to elaborate on... "how you should think about what that means," the "NE2000 standard" means that the card literally 'acts' just like this one card -- called the NE2000 -- that happened to be produced by Novell. Between some confluence of popularity and reasonableness-of-supporting, it became the 'baseline' for generic ISA ethernet.
16-bit PCMCIA is basically just ISA in a different form-factor, so the same applies to it. Time has moved on, and 32-bit Cardbus (basically PCI) has supplanted PCMCIA on modern laptops, making it a bit of a chore to scrounge up an appropriate card.
There are some drivers for 3Com megahertz cards, but I've never tried it..
The 3Com designs are functionally similar, but their chips use their own 'interface' (in terms of how the cards appear; they 'act like themselves,' not NE2000s), so they require different drivers.
As to whether the NE2000 driver(s) or 3Com driver(s) for Amiga are particularly 'better,' I have no idea. Generally, recent NE2000
hardware has had the chance to improve to the full extent the NE2000 'standard' allows, while looking for a 3Com will get you 'exactly' that card and chip with the tradeoffs 3Com made at the time it was produced... this can bite both ways, as I'll illustrate below.
It's very hard to buy a good card for Ami, I myself bought about 8(!) cards before I fohund the one that works (it's Dlink DFE670TXD, works 10/100 (well that's what the LED shows)but sometimes hangs my Ami (very rarely), and it needs some work with the os3.9 romupdate config file..
Okay, that particular card is a NE2000 clone driven by, apparently, a "DL10019," "DL10022," or possibly an "Asix AX88190" chip. This would suggest that at least the first two were D-Link's own handiwork, and the fact that they went through two revisions may suggest there were probably bugs. (10/100 NE2000alike hardware is probably relatively rare, and when these used-to-be-'no-name' manufacturers start rolling their own, sometimes it's best to watch your step).*
I get the impression that particular design might've added "MII" features to the normally-simple NE2000 design, which could also open the door to side effects, depending if or how well they're supported, whether the driver accidentally bumps into them, whether the MII itself is flaky and doesn't always autonegotiate the right kind of link, etc.
Contrast this to, say, the Realtek 8019AS cards I used to use in my desktop PCs -- these didn't do much more than reimplement the NE2000 design with its regular 10mbit-only PHY, and included the maximum 16K of SRAM the NE2000 'spec' allows on the chip (for being made on a modern process, Moore's Law at work) -- I never had a problem with them, and they performed much, much better than some 'quality' 3Coms I had lying around, which were much more expensive back when they were new, but only had a piddly 4K buffer... Making the difference between saturating the (10mbit) link and getting a piddly 300k/s, off the same 'slow' 486.
I'm not sure if there's a moral to all this, but if there is, it's to be equally wary of having a loyalty to 'cheap' or 'brand-name.' When it comes to the sheer annoyance of getting an Amiga online, I'd resist the allure of trying to go 10/100 (especially after hearing this), and use the 'best' 10mbit card supported (see above for questions to consider in attempting to determine 'best') behind a cheap switching hub. (What's the peak throughput you can get off the 1200, anyway? I've gathered saturating 10mbit over the PCMCIA interface is hard enough?)
*At least when companies go off and do their own thing, their screwups get noticed and worked around. There are A Whole Lot of NE2000 clone chips on the market, and a driver for NE2000 cards is generally going to expect them to work properly as NE2000s, without special-casing any heinous conditions that might exist -- think "works exactly like an NE2000 except for this one situation** where the card locks up."
**Meanwhile, the manufacturer of a flaky clone chip is not exactly going to publish errata about it (if you're a Windows user, they might quietly include their own driver that works around it, if they're aware of the problem or a fix at all), while a company that goes off and does its own 'competing' chip design, with its own part number and brand, might 'have to' release that information to see the chip supported. The most common Realtek PCI chips are sort of a counterexample to this, where they went off and did their own thing that's still generally accepted to suck.
