A1200 PCMCIA NIC card - netgear fa411

[darksun9210]

morning all,
in throwing away all my junk mail, i found an offer for Sky Broadband. 16Mb hook up. Great! i only have a 10Mb wired connection on my A1200. not so great.
anyway, trawling through the forums, i found someone say they had got a Netgear fa411 PCMCIA 100Mb NIC card working with cnet.device. 100Mb networking juicyness! wonderfull!

anyway, i couldn't remember who had said it was working, or the forum thread name, just that it was a netgear FA411. that much was burnt into my tiny little mind.
so i ordered one on friday.
it arrived today.
it doesn't work.

i have installed cardpatch, cardreset, the latest version of cnet.device v1.9b1, configured amiTCP to use the cnet16.device, as mentioned on the below website, torn my A1200 to bits. still no work  :-(  have i bought a duff card?
GMB amiga compatability list tells me it works, i've seen someone on a forum say it works, card info tells me it is a fast ethernet device, prepcard tells me the same, the lights work. i must be missing something?

currently reduced system spec:-
A1200 1D4 mobo, Blizzard 1230IV, scsi kit, IDE fix-express, lots of ram, IDE disk, IDE Cd-rom, with a fresh 3.9+BB1&BB2 install

tested cards:-
Ethernet Gold II GCS2220 10Mb - working
Netgear MA401 wireless 11Mb - working
Netgear FA411 100/10Mb - non working

AHHHHHHHHHH  :crazy: i prostrate myself before the you gods of technology asking for mercy  :-)

feel free to point out my stupidity :lol:

[patrik]

Yeah, the compability chart says the FA411 should work, but I havent got it working with my A1200 either, disregarding what I do.

A friend of mine got a FA411 working on his A600 though with the regular cnet.device if I am not mistaken.

With a 030-card, you will not get out any more speed with a 100Mbit card anyhow. The TCP/IP-stack + driver + non-DMA nic just takes too much cpu time and memory bandwidth for it to saturate even 10Mbit.


/Patrik

[Amigadude]

I'm fairly sure I had a FA411 working with my 1200 + Apollo 040, I had another netgear that didn't work, I'll have to dig out the box full of Amiga gear to find out which was which... the one with the dongle (crappy short cable, RJ45 socket one end & summat that looks like a mobi connector the other end) is the one that worked (until I dropped the miggy & knackered the dongle)

(edit typo)

[darksun9210]

well, the FA411 doesn't have a dongle, so i'm guessing that wasn't the one

dayum. maybe i'll try with my PPC card. oh well, the quest continues. i did read somewhere that the FA411 isn't completely NE2000 complient, possibly hence the problems? what did puzzle me was the availability of a amiga M68K linux driver over a standard amiga driver!

the search goes boldly onwards. Thanks for your replies guys, i'll keep trying. maybe someone that has it working can let us know the secret  :-D

[ncafferkey]

darksun9210 wrote:

the search goes boldly onwards. Thanks for your replies guys, i'll keep trying. maybe someone that has it working can let us know the secret  :-D

Unless you can get about 1MByte/s from the Ethernet Gold II card, I wouldn't bother.

[Amigadude]

I had a look @ the Netgear FA411 and that is the one I had problems with... produced an error then reset the machine when I brought it online (with genesis) the FA410 is the one I used (till I broke the dongle) which is why I bought the FA411.

Regards,
  JohnN

[darksun9210]

i just get a requester when i try to start amiTCP that the card isn't cardreset compatable? i'll try to explore this further, but i've so far spent the day laying wood flooring, and there is a beer in the fridge with my name on it. so it'll have to wait

Thanks again,
Andy.

[littlemini]

Hi everyone, I am a new member.  I have just bought one of these cards after trawling Ebay for weeks.  I have an A1200 with an 030 accelerator and have the same issues.  I am new to this however, so it is quite possible I am doing something wrong.  I have an A600 also I could try it in, but before I do, do the 3.1 ROMS in the 1200 go into the 600?  What I want to do is get rid of my laptop, and use the broadband on the Amiga.  Simple request but hard for the novice like myself.
Has anyone had any of these cards working yet?  And... If I email my startup sequence can someone look at it for me and see if I have stuffed something up, or even better, set it up for my card.  I have AmiTCP installed, do I need anything else?
Regards,
Damien from Australia.

[cv643d]

They switch chips in these cards but keep the product name.

Some Netgear wireless PCI nics work in Linux and some does not, even though it has the same product name. Very lame!

[ncafferkey]

Since it seems most people can't get the FA411 to work in Amigas, you'd probably save a lot of trouble by going back to eBay and getting a 10Mbit card.

AFAIK, A1200 ROMs can't be used in an A600, but a wired PCMCIA network card should work with 2.x ROMs anyway.

[darksun9210]

just a quick update. one of the guys developing cnet.device
very kindly sent me a beta of what he was working on.
i am now online at the moment with a netgear FA411,
with a 100Mb connection to my router.

WOOOHOO!

[ncafferkey]

darksun9210 wrote:
just a quick update. one of the guys developing cnet.device
very kindly sent me a beta of what he was working on.
i am now online at the moment with a netgear FA411,
with a 100Mb connection to my router.

WOOOHOO!

A 100Mb connection that won't be going any faster than your 10Mb one. What's the point?

[pVC]

You'll need (probably overclocked) 68060 to get faster rates than 10Mbps anyway.

[darksun9210]

meh, well, its not so much that i won't get much more than 10Mb, but at least its not the network connection speed holding it back...

as for the overclocked 060, we'll see - if Amiga Centre France will be kind enough (while crossing their palms with silver) to solder the 060 chip i have to my PPC, plus solder the other relevant jumpers and traces  :-D
but no response to my request as of yet..   :-(

[Rabbi]

Has anyone gotten the Netgear FA411 NIC working in MiamiDX with an A1200?  I need help getting mine working.  I'm using cnet16.device.