GRG's Miscellany

 A good while back, I ordered an ISA network card for my socket-5 Pentium machine.  Finally today I managed to get it working with EtherDFS .  Finding the right steps involved a lot of web searching. First, I had to figure out exactly what model the card was.  Thankfully, it says it right on the chip: RTL8019AS .  I have spewed much bile about Realtek and their crappy audio drivers before now, but I was seriously impressed that they still had a page where I could download the packet driver for this ancient NIC. As far as I can tell, there are two types of NIC drivers for DOS-era machines: an NDIS type for Windows things, and a 'packet' driver with an open interface.  EtherDFS needs the packet drivers, and I don't care for Windows guff, so I'm happy with just that. I found a page at legroom.net which had the info I needed to install the packet driver.  That page has a whole wealth of stuff, but the bit I needed told me to save the packet driver (pnppd....

My C64 is still banjaxed, but now in a way that makes me feel it's closer to being fixed. I had thought it was just a dead PSU, so I ordered a new one.  When it arrived, I plugged it in and.....the same problems happened.  So that's the first potential fault ruled out. So I ordered a C64 dead test cartridge .  When this arrived, I plugged it in and powered on...and it gave me all sorts of crap on the display.  Still recognisable characters and border, but utter random garbage.  There was some screen flashing, which is the way the cart indicates dead-ram chips, but it couldn't decide which one - every time I switched the machine on it gave a different number of flashes. The internet had already suggested that garbage text meant a duff multiplexer, and with the cart encountering seemingly random errors across multiple chips, I decided to order a couple of spare multiplexers (there are two in the C64). So today I cautiously desoldered the U13 multiplexer and solde...