[MiNT] Announcement

[Torsten Lang <Torsten.Lang@bsk-germany.com>]

Hi there,
since the BIONET VME boards are based on the DP8390 chipset (like NE2000 
boards) I've started to port my commercial NE2000 driver for MiNT-Net to these 
boards. The actual state is that I can already transmit and receive data (ping, 
ftp etc.) but the driver isn't able yet to read the SAPROM where the hw address 
of the board resides. BTW, the driver should be somewhat faster than real 
NE2000 boards on slow systems since the boards have shared memory (NE2000: 
programmed I/O (PIO)).

To check out if it's worth to finish the driver and release it, I would like to 
know who owns or wants to buy BIONET boards and wants to buy licenses. A few 
BIONET boards will be available at AG Computertechnik in Germany.

The driver will cost ~25EUR if the number of orders is similar to the number of 
sold NE2000 drivers. Since the BIONET boards have even worse design lacks than 
Riebl boards or PAMs Net boards even porting of the NE2000 driver has been (and 
still will be) a lot of work. There will be no limited shareware version since 
I see no way how to do that for a network driver on a TOS/MiNT system.

This message will not be available on my homepage so please pass it to everyone 
who you do think may need it.

Regards,
      Torsten Lang
--
BSK Datentechnik GmbH
Kiesacker 14
D-35418 Buseck
Tel: +49 / (0)6408 / 9053-0
Fax: +49 / (0)6408 / 9053-55

Torsten Lang
Tel: +49 / (0)6408 / 9053-54
EMail: Torsten.Lang@bsk-germany.com
       Torsten@Lang.net (private - please use this one!)