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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!
