Thread by @RetroTechChris

Recently I picked up this SMC network card, that supports network boot via a boot ROM. I spent some time with it, and we had some misadventures together. But it did give me a chance to test out my new POST card too. How could all of this be related? Time for a 🧵

First of all, let's take some time to admire the property sticker on the back! This card was allegedly property of America Online at some point 🤣

Okay, so I got this SMC Ethercard Elite 8216T (say that five times fast) installed in my Pentium 233 MMX. I was able to pull up the boot ROM configuration page, but savings settings would freeze. That would be a bit of a metaphor for this card...

There are also a ton of different ways to configure this thing. You just saw the option ROM method, but there is also "ezsetup" and "ezstart". Did they design this thing via committee or something?? 🤣

Oh.. I forgot to mention... the first time I put this card in, the option ROM wouldn't detect. One of the pins was bent under, and eventually it broke. Fortunately I dumped the image before that happened.

Alright, so I really wanted to use this thing to network boot. I thought to myself, "this option ROM is really flaky." Maybe I can find a newer image out there. Sure enough. Let's load it up.

Great! Time to boot. Oh... ROMShield Data Destroyed... and we're stuck. What the hell does that mean? I did spend some time trying to bypass it with the help of Grok and Gemini. Unfortunately, we didn't make it far enough, and I gave up trying further!

For the curious by the way, this card uses an AM27C512. For my purposes, a Winbond W27C512 or even just a W27C257 is sufficient, since the ROM is only 32KB, I believe.

And I should also mention since I alluded to it in the beginning: I used my POST diagnostic card while I was fiddling with the ROM images. It produced a code of 0x97, which pretty much confirmed that my crappy patches were getting us stuck in option ROM code.

I did switch over to my Kehtron 486 for some more testing. I got the system to boot the original option ROM once without completely locking up! I also might have tried to hot swap the updated option ROM, and my HDD and NE2000 network card died soon after. Coincidence? Maybe😅

So, with the option ROM flaky and the NE2000 card now dead, I just assume leave this SMC card in the system and reload. I moved my XTIDE option ROM to this card for large disk support as well, installed a 4GB hard drive, and used LAN Manager to copy over files.

Oh, by the way, if anyone ever needs drivers for this card, here is what to search. Anyway, this system is now reloaded. Had I damaged components back in the day like I did today, I'd be ticked, but oh well! As always, thanks for following along!

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