It was 44 years ago this week that the Ethernet standard was first proposed. That makes today a good day to talk about what I do to bring mystery jumperless plug and play ISA Ethernet cards back from the dead.
The NE2000 doesn’t have the best reputation, and that may not exactly be deserved. Today, the biggest problem with them is getting a jumperless NE2000 card configured when you don’t have the disks that came with it, and you can’t find any identifying marks on the card that point you to a manufacturer. Furthermore, even if you identify the card, the setup disk may or may not be available anywhere. So it’s not exactly a wonder that most retro Youtubers just use 3com and Intel cards.
But there is one advantage to the NE2000 clones today. If you want to use an XTIDE ROM, it’s easier to get them working in an NE2000 than in a 3Com or Intel card. Just configure the image to write the necessary checksum to it, write a 27C128 EPROM, plug it into the socket, and as long as you can get the ROM socket enabled, it works. That’s not always the case with the big name brand cards.
The jumperless NE2000 clone cards only used a few different chipsets. That works to our advantage today. The configuration utilities from one card often work on another.
The first thing to try is to download the BSDwall network card support disk. Write the disk to a floppy, or just open it up with 7zip and move the executable files over to a functioning PC with ISA slots.
Using the software to configure your mystery NE2000 NIC
With the software running on a suitable machine, it’s just a matter of installing the card, then booting to DOS with no memory management and as few drivers loaded as possible. Holding down shift while booting is a good method. Then try one of the following executables to try to configure the card:
- Setup.exe
- AutoNic.exe
- NicSet.exe
- Diag.exe
- DLink220.exe
If the first executable you run can’t find a card or finds it but can’t configure it, move on to the next one. All of the cheap plug and play NE2000 clones used one of five or six chipsets. That means one of these executables will probably work.
I was able to use this method to get all of the NE2000 clones I had laying around configured to 0x300, IRQ 10, and a boot ROM at c800. With that done, using them from DOS is really easy.
Now that it’s hard to find any ISA Ethernet card for less than $20, it’s nice to have an option to bring back those mystery cards and make them usable again.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.