[Freedos-user] Issue: FreeDOS on PCem emulating a NE2000

[Brandon T. <don...@ho...>]

I've discovered a neat little low-level emulator called PCem and have installed FreeDOS on a virtual machine using that program. There is, however, a weird little quirk. Whereas I can have PCem emulate a network card such as an NE2000, and configure FDAUTO.BAT to load high the appropriate packet driver (NE2000.COM), trying the next command -- "call %dosdir%\bin\fdnet.bat start" fails with the message "Physical hardware networking is not supported at this time."

Now, from what I've read in previous posts, it sounds like others have had success by replacing "start" with "try," such that the line now reads "call %dosdir%\bin\fdnet.bat try", so I tried that fix, but now I get another problem, saying "Error: Your DHCP server never responded and no packets were seen on the wire. Check your cabling and packet driver settings, including the hardware IRQ. Network is unreachable/unavailable."

Inspired by the example provided in the FreeDOS Wiki (for a 3Com 3c589 PCMCIA card -- not important), I entered the following line into FDAUTO.BAT:

lh %dosdir%\drivers\crynwr\ne2000.com 0x60 10 0x300

and that's when I got the error. Looking up at the top of the screen, I saw something very weird: The IRQ for my emulated NIC was being set to 5 instead of 10! So I went into C:\FREEDOS\BIN\FDNET.BAT and changed the line that read

ne2000.com 0x60 0x5 0x300

to instead read

ne2000.com 0x60 0xa 0x300

and that didn't work either (although it seems PCem forks its network configuration routines from QEMU). Finally, I reverted the change and tried setting the IRQ from within PCem, but that didn't work either.

Brandon Taylor