Bridgeboard with PicoMEM? Use same IRQ (5) for both board and NE2000 WiFi

[tiim]

Hi everyone.

To anyone using the excellent PicoMEM card in your Amiga, and wanting to also use the WiFi portion in addition to HDD, FDD and AdLib...

I had trouble negotiating an IP address via DHCP or static under an A2386SX Bridgeboard. Therefore, mTcp would not function.

After some discussion with FreddyV, the creator of PicoMEM, I was able to get it working on my WiFi network. I had to revert from the latest PicoMEM firmware (as of this writing: 11_16_25) to the (test) "Aug-25" version.

Simplest solution is to use IRQ5 for both PicoMEM board (via jumper) and also your NE2000 driver, inside the Pico "bios".
I was able to use the default resources of 0x300 and 0x60 for the NE2000 and not have a Bridgeboard conflict.

You cannot assign the same IRQ for board and NE2000 in the new firmware version, and this is not good news for Bridgeboard users. As you may know, the Bridgeboard has no conflict with IRQ5 (LPT2) and no conflict with IRQ's 10, 11, 12 and 15. The PicoMEM only allows itself and NE2000 to use IRQ's 3, 5 or 7. The Bridgeboard uses IRQ3 for the communications between the Amiga and PC. IRQ7 is for LPT1 redirection.

I recommend to load your AMOUSE driver and PMINIT AFTER you load the PM/NE2000 driver in Autoexec. Otherwise, I got errors.

Hopefully, a new firmware comes out allowing higher IRQ settings for the NE2000 interface. Until then, the August 2025 firmware with IRQ5 will work if you need to use the networking feature.

Hope this is helpful to someone.

 

[Xanxi]

Thanks for this information. I don't use the PicoMEM with my bridgeboard in my main rig because i only have slots for the BB, the STB Nitro SVGA and my audio card the MK8330, but will certainly in another setup with another bridgeboard and this information will be useful.
About the NE2000 interface, could it be used for the Amiga side with the old Etherbirdge driver and what speed do you get?

 

[tiim]

I'll investigate the Etherbridge sometime, but I fear the 8-bit bus would be a big bottleneck. I transferred an 11.8 MB file to my LAN file server, it took 88 seconds or ~136.343 KB/sec. (a hair over 1 megabit/sec) Not "fast" by modern standards, but immensely useful for such a vintage PC.

If I remember right, my original xSurf (16-bit Zorro) using the Roadshow stack on this 030-25 Amiga was topping out about 3-4x as fast as the PicoMEM. I think Etherbridge might still be fun to try, now that my xSurf is in another Amiga...

EDIT: I re-tried with the 486-SLC clock doubled to 50Mhz and the speed increased to 166.3 KB/Sec! Not bad!!!

Also, you cannot run PMINIT when using mTcp, there is a conflict (IRQ?) that will crash the PC. I only use it for the floppy image swap, still bummed out though.