tgp1994

I was looking for a simple and efficient way to begin with... although I think I kind of self-limited my options down to this . I think it ended up being fun, and... faster than I thought. Granted, I was hoping for the 400/800Mbits transfer speeds Unibrain was promising, but what I had real-world wise (about 5Mbits tops) was OK for me considering what I had to work with

Thanks! I'm glad I was able to follow through on at least one project, that's a first for me

Hello everyone! A while back (a year to this day, I think it was), I embarked on a project to network an old Dell machine running Windows ME with a newer machine via just a POTS modem. Why would I do this, you might ask? Well, because I was out of options! Sure, I had an older netgear USB wireless nic which worked ok - but the UI was horribly glitchy. The machine did have a serial port, but I did not have the hardware... There was also a Parallel port, but again, no hardware... No NIC... You get the idea. Then yesterday, I pulled out the old computer, once again determined to get thing online. This time however, I had another approach in mind: Firewire. I remembered seeing this 1394 network adapter in my XP machine a long time ago, but never thought much of it until now. What if I can create a peer to peer network connection between this old Dell computer and a Vista laptop, both with Firewire ports? I had just installed a firewire PCI card into the dell machine to try this, and with my mini 1394 port in the laptop, I had the materials. A guy can dream! So, off I went on my journey. Much to my luck, it turns out that Windows ME comes with native support for 1394 networking, although this would end up being useless to me (more on that later). Vista, however, happened to be the OS Microsoft decided would not need firewire networking, thus they dropped all support for that (even Windows 7 comes with legacy drivers). So, here I was, all hardware and no software, yet again. To my aid came Unibrain's proprietary hard to use ubCore 1394 drivers, which would eventually end up getting my two computers connected. First off, the Vista laptop. Like I mentioned, this one has a Mini firewire port on it. It has a TI chipset, which wouldn't really matter since Vista does not have networking support for any firewire chipset. I downloaded Unibrain's latest (6.00) version of ubCore, and upon installing it, I was greeted with the lack of any 1394 network cards. Upon further inspection of their history tab, it turns out that, just like Microsoft, they decided to drop networking capabilities from their software. My luck strikes again! Their previous version, 5.80, was the last version to have this network support. After crawling google for a good while, I did manage to find it, after which I immediately uploaded it so others can use it (Download). I installed this on my Vista machine, and then created a network bridge between the new 1394 adapter and my wireless adapter. Now onto the Windows ME machine! This one was a little more tricky, mainly just because it involved trying to find older software. Right away, my firewire card showed up in device manager, along with a generic NDIS 1394 network card, which would seem to indicate that it was my card operating as a network adapter. However (and perhaps conveniently so for Unibrain), the generic adapter is not compatible with ubCore's adapter working on the other end. The moment I installed ubCore on my vista machine, a new, unknown device popped up on the WinME machine with the name "Unibrain 1394 Adapter". Pretty cool, but darn! Fearing that the driver included with the Vista installer wouldn't even be compatible with Windows 2K let alone 9x, I started googling again for an older version of ubCore (known as FireNet) to intall on Windows ME. Lo and behold, I did stumble upon an older version (3.2 I believe) intended for Foxconn chipsets. I did install it eventually however, with success (re-hosted here in case the other link goes down). After installing the program, all I had to do was RTFM. The installation procedure involved running the Add Hardware Wizard, choosing to install a network adapter, pressing Have disk, then browsing to the Unibrain program files folder, which had what I needed. After a reboot and an ipconfig release and renew, I had an ip address and I was pinging my network! Success! A slight disappointment is that the driver on windows me is not well built for handling the machine going to sleep - after resuming, you'll generally hit a BSOD whenever network traffic is generated. After a reboot, though, you should be ok. I just wanted to tell everyone about my success in getting two very different machines - Windows ME and Windows Vista - to communicate over a Firewire connection, and eventually get one on the internet from the other. I hope this will help someone else!

Hi folks, Sorry for the very late bump, but I'm afraid I have some bad news... I won't be able to continue working on this project, as I no longer have access to appropriate hardware I'm sorry to let you guys down... I sure as heck wanted to get this working. Maybe I'll be able to pick this back up later, or someone else might make a break through Thanks for the support, everyone!

Thanks bphlpt, Isn't that for serial connections though? I'm not sure if that applies to me, I'm just trying to connect these computers with a phone line. Serial isn't really an option :\ You may have issues with the ringing/powering of the telephone line, but it's doable. See here: OP in there - as often happens - left as soon as the going got tough..... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/quotes?qt=qt0479926 jaclaz Hi jaclaz! You're right, I'm definitely having problems with ringing... It almost seems like I need that in order for these computers to pick up that automated process of establishing a connection. I was messing around in hyperterminal and managed to get my machine to start playing familiar sounds (with the ATA command), although getting both computers to do that didn't really seem to do anything. I tried following the guide referenced in that article, although I'm not really sure what program on the "server" machine is supposed to handle the incoming call...

Hi everyone, I know this sounds like a bit of a strange request, but I was wondering if it may be possible to get two machines to communicate/network over their modems while being directly connected with a standard RJ-11 phone cable? My reasons are fairly simple (albeit convoluted): To get a very old machine (with no ethernet port, and a crappy wireless card) to share my internet connection with a laptop, which just so happens to have a built in modem. That laptop is then wirelessly connected to my home network. I'm sure some of you are screaming "Do something else! Buy a network card!" But alas, I am cheap, and I think it would be cool to actually get this to work. I realize that connecting two computers with an ethernet cable may not be exactly the same as connecting two computer's modems, but I feel that since networking can be done over a modem, then why not to another modem? I'm just hoping that there may be some super hidden but really cool trick/hardware that allows for this. Either something that emulates the handshake occurring between a machine and an ISP when a dialup session is established (virtual phone network, anyone?), or some way that can somehow establish a serial connection over the modems. Thank you for any help!

Sorry for bumping an old thread, but it seems like it definitely is heat related. I installed an old version of Debian on the laptop, which seems to cause the laptop to run at colder temperatures than W98 did. So I guess that's my inexplicable answer

Absolutely. I actually took it apart about a year ago and did just those things, after which the laptop sat in the workshop until now. For another update, the laptop is once again booting up consistently and without error. All drivers are installed. How weird.

It's an ATI Mobility M6, driver ATI2DRAG.DRV at version 4.13.01.9066. But I guess I was misled by this mysterious issue again; after letting the laptop sit for awhile, I booted back up, reinstalled the same drivers, rebooted, and it booted up fine once again. This thing has at least three fans, but despite that, the laptop gets very warm. I'm almost beginning to think that this may be a heating issue.

Hey. I used to have a Compaq running Windows 98 too! The case was one of those form factors that actually gave meaning to the term "desktop", poor thing was supporting a gigantic CRT monitor. I tried step-by-step booting and skipping all .vxd's, although it still sits there after asking about msmouse.vxd. I'll try going into safe mode and doing the selective startup. EDIT: Not only selective booting, but diagnostic booting will not allow me to get back into the OS. (Diagnostic disables next to everything, right?) I was actually able to boot into the machine ok for a good part of the day today, but after installing the graphics drivers, I am once again experiencing issues. I suppose the obvious plan of action here would be to uninstall the graphics drivers, although I kind of want them... I'm finding it hard to deal with this 640x480 resolution

Greetings Windows 9x'ers, I've been having some trouble getting Windows 98 SE working on my (rather old) Gateway 400SD4 laptop, and I was having quite a bit of success up until I had to start installing drivers. After I had most of them installed, I was only able to boot into windows some of the time. If I did a step-by-step boot, the booting process seemed to have halted after loading the msmouse.vmx driver. Now, it doesn't boot into windows at all, with the same issue. I can still get into Safe mode ok, and if I look at the bootlog, the last thing mentions loading a RESERVED and ROOT device, then that's it. It just stops. If anyone can help with this, that would be great.