> I _finally_ made it to the ethernet status page this morning (couldn't 
> connect before/after I sent the last message re: ethernet to the list.

Yeah...  The machine sufferred some disk corruption and finally died
friday night sometime.

> so, my problem remains....
> 
> ae0 at nubus0 slot a: failed to determine size of RAM
> ae0 at nubus0 slot c: failed to determine size of RAM
> ae0 at nubus0 slot e: failed to determine size of RAM
> 
> Brand           : Asante 
> Type            : MacCon for LC
> Apparent Chipset: DP83932BVF

Hmmm...  First problem is that the ae driver is picking it up.  Second
problem is that we don't (necessarily) know where the registers are for 
that card.  Third problem is that we don't know where on the card the
MAC address is.  Fourth problem is that the card is apparently showing
up on all three virtual nubus slots.

> How difficult would it be to add support for this card, so that I can add 
> this little guy to my little at home Network?

It shouldn't be too hard.  The first problem is pretty easy to fix
if you know the DrHW and DrSW values for your card (see
http://www.macbsd.com/macbsd/howto/video.html for a short description
of DrHW and DrSW--the info's the same for video and ethernet, but
the numbers are different...  ;-).

The second problem isn't too hard to fix.  Basically, you need to poke
around in nubus space until you find the card's registers.  Basically,
just dump memory in the range FA000000 through FAFFFFFF until you find
readable memory (look near the beginning and near the end of that space.
This will be a repeating pattern of values.

The third problem is about like the previous one, but there might be a
short-cut.  If you use the Slots program (mentioned on the video.html
page), the MAC address might be visible.  If so, we just need to make
sure that it's where we expect.  Otherwise, you'll have to locate the
MAC address in the card's RAM (same range of address as in problem #2,
but you're looking for a 6-byte repeating pattern (possibly repeating
every 16 or 32 bytes).

The fourth problem is a bit more interesting, and I'm not quite sure how
to fix it off-hand, without doing something to hard-code the number of
slots, etc., for each macintosh model, which would be kind of a pain
right now, and could possibly break other LC cards that drive the
address lines differently.

-allen

-- 
                    Allen Briggs - briggs@ninthwonder.com