[MiNT] Re: Riebl card info needed (fwd)

[tlang@dialup.becom.net (Torsten Lang)]

> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 08:39:49 +0300
> From: Martin-Eric Racine <q-funk@pp.fishpool.com>
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st.tech
> Subject: Re: Riebl card info needed
> 
> > J17-23
> > closed all=TT open all=megaSTE
> 
> Weird, mine came as (I have used it yet...):
> 
> J17-21  closed
> J22-23  open
> 
Hi MArtin-Eric,
AFAIK only one of those jumpers was for selecting addresses.

Unfortunately you didn't write if the driver found the board at all. When the
board is setup correctly and if it is not broken the driver should install
with a message like:
AM7990: driver v?.? (rle?) for RIEBL VME (TT) (<hw address>)
If the driver doesn't find the board at all there may be something wrong with
the setup or the board itself. Boot single-TOS, load a monitor like templmon
and try out if you can write (and read back) the board's memory interactively.
Then you can also try out if you can access the lance itself: Do a word-write
of 0xFFFF to the rap and try if you can read back 0x0003. Then the board should
be ok. BTW, you find all necessary addresses in lancemem.h. If you want to know
more about the LANCE chip simply ask AMD - I got the data sheet for free!

If the board is found but the hw address is invalid (since the original ANS
software put the init block with the hw address into a really braindamaged
location so that you really got a braindamaged memory layout and needed some
braindamaged code to access the packet buffers of the board I use another
memory layout so that you cannot use the ANS software to initialize the board)
you have first of all to use ifconfig with the -f option to load the hw address 
from a file. Then - with a second ifconfig call - you can setup the interface.
The file should contain:
hwaddr 0x0:0x0:0x36:0x4:??:??
where the first four bytes are always fixed (this is the official(!) hw address
range for VME Riebls, for MEGABUS Riebls use 0x2 instead of 0x4. You will find
the complete hw address on a label on your board where you find the data to
replace the ?? with.

I hope this information will help you and possibly other Riebl users. Please
understand that I offer no or only very limited support for these drivers since
these are free and there are other projects I also need time for (and earn money
from ;-)!

I will add some more complete documentation to the next official release but by
now I'm waiting for some diffs to integrate so that Guido can start to split
the package... So the next release will still take some time...

With best regards,
           Torsten Lang