Old Skool Saturday....
"Soooo....what ya' been up to today?", "It being a Saturday, y'know that day of freedom and no work?"...
a quick test to see if we can actually call out to the inter-webs and there we go....
job done!
Actually, if this were back in 1995/1996, in a short while from now it would be time to go out for a beer or two with Frank..... unfortunately, he's now in Munich, but I suppose there is no issue with having a beer and pretending Frank is here.... no, the Covid Lockdown stuff is not having an effect on me in anyway, nope, don't know what you're talking about..... lol
or zoom forward to the interesting parts about mTCP and "doing stuff":
Well, working, but playing, if that makes sense. Okay, so I decided that today was going to be a day of "going back Marty, going back.... to 1995/6"
I have burnt a LOT of time trying to get the IBM PC 110 laptop device to work with a vast array of WiFi cards - yes, I know I'm asking a lot to get it to run from MS-DOS, but, y'know, my other device, the HandBook 486 doesn't seem to be having any trouble with the config/setup.
I've narrowed it down to the hardware. I had to have a bit of a refresher on the device, I'm glad this guys website is still up and running (I'll leave links here for the future, also if they every disappear the WayBackWhen machine can be used to go fetch the archives, if they have been archived)
Pressing F1 on the physical device (with the external keyboard/mouse unplugged) gets you into the BIOS config/setup, which is rather cute, I especially like the wing flapping bird mouse icon that is not needed at all, but adds a cute Japanese style touch:
Okay, so I thought that as this was set to be COM1 = Modem and COM2 = IR, I'd change this so that PCMCIA = COM1. Apparently this can also be done in the command-line via the 'ps2 pmodem 1' command, 'ps2 imode disable' disables the modem, just running 'ps2' gives a list of commands.
That didn't seem to work either. This next page is specific about the PCMCIA slot setup and usage:
and look at that, I didn't appreciate that setting the keyboard to the US got me back the '\' symbol:
Not that I've changed it to be 'US' format, as if I use the external keyboard & mouse, I get that correct key mapped, it's only when using the device keyboard that key is not available, you'll be surprised how little you need that key, once you've set everything up. It's mainly adding values in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT where you are inserting PATH values.
Anyway, after going through all the above I decided to move my BOOT CF Card to the dedicated CF Card reader and not the PCMCIA slot (to avoid any conflict) and changed the boot up order to boot from there. Yep, that boots up okay now. I placed the CISCO AIRONET card in the bottom PCMCIA slot and rebooted. No joy. when I call the WEPDOS command I get an 'Error: 8903, IO Port not available' and then it all locks up. to me that is why I believe it is a hardware / BIOS level blocker.
Okay, I might need to explain the DOS config / setup a little more. It is based upon what I'd setup on the Handbook 486 many years ago - either there was a lot more info about this on the internet back then, or I've become very poor at being able to find stuff on the internet, or it's just full of more noise?...
I found this page from CISCO:
Whilst not being exactly the same, it's 95% close to the existing setup I had for the Handbook 486.
I also found this PDF and around the Page 32 mark might be useful:
Within the \EZPLAY folder there is indeed a file called ssdpcic1.sys
so, I added this into the CONFIG.SYS as described, when booting I get:
DOS Card Services Driver, Version 2.22
PCMCIA Card Services Release 2.10
Copyright 1993 - 1995 IBM Corp.
Socket Services is not available.
Well, that sucks.
Page 57 in the document above explains the params for WEPDOS.exe and Page 58 explains the PCMCIA.exe command
Hmmm...I think I'll have a little bit more of an investigation, it's going to be a combination of these events, both hardware & software that just needs to be juggled into the right order...
HA!HA!HA! After having a bit of a play around...and moving the WiFi card into the TOP slot, I think I have it all working now!
As you can see in this video, I'm now calling the same/similar commands as the Handbook 486, albeit with a minor tweak to the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files. (will document that content shortly - I'll also be backing up the whole CF Card now for safe keeping!...actually, once I have a valid IP, I can back up the files directly from the machine itself!)
You can see the output here.....flashing blinky lights! yay!
(Yes, I appreciate that the first character is missing from the UI when I plug in the VGA cable to flip the LCD screen to the Samsung TV, I don't know why...it is set to PC VGA mode, it should in theory be fine... as it's only DOS/text I'm living with it for now)
Here's a screenshot of the output from the various commands:
As you can see the call to PCMCIA ON -BOOT, followed by RADINFO shows the info about the PCMCIA Wifi card, that's the correct MAC address etc...
Then the call to WEPDOS is working as it should, no that I'm passing the extra -p180 (and I did not execute the PCMCIA OFF command).
Then the call to the Packet Driver> CSCPKT.COM 0x65, returns a success, so it does indeed look like it's working now!
Okay, the "Your DHCP lease has expired! Please run DHCP.exe" message is probably due to a mis-match of it assuming we're using DHCP, when I actually wanted to have a fixed IP address, but that's just a case of fiddling with the tony.cfg file.
All-in-all, thanks to the past hour, I am now a very happy chappy!
Okay, after "remembering" that I had locked the WiFi router down to the MAC addresses and adding the new one:
Then a quick reboot....and run the DHCP.exe command and there we go, we've been assigned an IP Address!
job done!
Here's a backup of the CF Card (a whole 9MB!), just incase I ever need to get back to a baseline again.
Ah, darn it - blogspot thingy won't let me attach files only URLs....
- Here's a LINK to the zip file
- Here's a LINK to the whole CF Card folder contents
Yes, I know...I have an old Netgear router that is WEP enabled and I'm using it to allow connection between the machines. There's nothing super-secret going on between these old devices so I have no issue keeping this router on whilst playing around. If you scoff at me having a WEP router broadcasting, then I double-scoff back at you, as I bet you haven't disabled WPS on your brand spanking new WiFi router, have you?...."huh, what now?", yeah, you know that quick & easy way to connect to your router by pressing that button on the front of the router...that has a 4-digit access code! yes, that's like having 128 locks on your front door for security and then leaving a spare key under the welcome mat. go, go and check to see if you have it enabled, if so, disable it now!
My current view if I pan my head left to right:
Ah, you get what I mean.... maybe I should attempt a poor panoramic version:
Well, that was going well, until the last double-jump part, anyway.... this is all just distraction whilst I think about how to "solve my self-induced WiFi card problem".
...and we've got, probably a whole year to go before we can get back to any form of normality. I might have figure out this WiFi card by then ;-)
EDIT: As you can see above, I believe I cracked it...so I'll now use the following year to figure out how to do something "useful" with these networked devices.....and my newly acquired Network Programming in C skills....
That didn't take long to find on good old YouTube an video of how to go to the next level:
You can watch the whole video here:
Glad you found the site useful. Forgive me for being extremely rusty on this, but it looks like your DOS setup was missing card & socket services - SSDPCIC1.SYS is just one of the three drivers you should be loading - socket services, card services (IBMDOSCS.SYS), and the resource mapper (RMUDOSAT.SYS). Have a look at the following for the original 4MB Flash drive set up, which illustrates the full DOS card & socket services driver setup:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.basterfield.com/pc110/original/4mb/4mb-cfg.htm
Enjoy!
Dan.