NE2000-Compatible ISA NICs

Most NE2000 compatible cards available today are Plug and Play. These cards are not equipped with jumpers to set the base address and IRQ. Instead, software controls the assignment of hardware resources used by the card. These cards can usually operate in two modes: true Plug and Play mode or jumperless mode. In true Plug and Play mode, the resources used by the card are set by the vendor-specific Windows driver software supplied with the NIC. In jumperless mode, the card acts as if its hardware resources had been set by jumpers, but, in fact, the resources are set by a special utility run once after the card is installed on the system.

This release of RTX64 supports NE2000 compatible ISA Plug and Play NIC cards, and no special configuration is required.

RTX64 provides a mechanism for converting an existing ISA Plug and Play NIC card from a Windows device to an RTX64 device. Once the NIC has been associated as an RTX64 device, it can then be used as a NIC dedicated to RT-TCP/IP. See Converting a Windows Device to an RTX64 Device for more details.

Assigning Hardware Resources

NE2000-compatible cards can usually be configured for most IRQs, but a limited choice of I/O base addresses. The NE2000 compatible will use a 0x20 block of addresses starting at the configured I/O base address. Typical choices of base address and range are given in the following table.

The IRQ and I/O base address chosen for the NIC should not conflict with resources currently in use by your system. There are various techniques for determining which hardware resources are in use.