Comments on: Virtual Xenix & the internet

By: readmelast

readmelast — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:37:28 +0000

In reply to Oddsocks.

VirtualBox has 3C503 NIC support which works well with TCP/IP on Xenix 386 v2.3.4. However, 3C503 is only configurable from the vboxmanage CLI e.g.

$ vboxmanage modifyvm “SCO Xenix 386 v2.3.4” –nic-type1=3C503

I configured the NIC with the defaults and hwconfig shows the following:-
name=3comB base=0x300 offset=0xF vec=31 dma=- type=3c503 addr=02:60:8c:e1:cd:8a

This saved my SCO Xenix networking following the recent demise of my 486.

By: Alexander Voropai

Alexander Voropai — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 20:45:42 +0000

In reply to Oddsocks.

No, NE2100/NE1500 (8-bit) are totally different from the NE2000/NE1000. NE2100 uses DMA and built around AMD LANCE Am7990 while NE2000 is a simply I/O and built on a National Semiconductor NSC8390 chip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NE1000

By: Oddsocks

Oddsocks — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 08:50:56 +0000

VirtualBox emulates an ISA NIC based on the AMD Am79C690 which is apparently also known as the NE2100. Does anyone know if NE2100 cards are supposed to be backwards compatible with NE2000? I suspect not as far as I can tell. Otherwise would be nice to have a Xenix driver for this NIC

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 02:44:21 +0000

In reply to bbslovag.

I need to update my stuff on this shocking discovery… Lol

And get a ne2000 for my EISA box.

By: bbslovag

bbslovag — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 15:35:22 +0000

xenix386 had ne2000-compatible driver, which is supported by qemu’s ne2000 isa vNIC. Someone made an install floppy image, available at…

…see more at:
https://github.com/retrohun/blog/tree/master/dt/xenixtales

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 18 May 2016 19:09:01 +0000

In reply to neozeed. MBR and VBR should be the right term for it.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 18 May 2016 19:06:56 +0000

In reply to neozeed.

Hmmm all I know they all just “cook with water”, means there will be a description how this partition sector is structured, and even Xenix will read the size of the partition by reading this special sector. Because there is no tool obviously, I will try to decrease the size of the XENIX partition by manipulating the appropriate numbers of the related boot sector/partition record.
Will tell you what happened then 😉

By: neozeed

neozeed — Tue, 17 May 2016 07:15:16 +0000

In reply to Peter. I'm pretty sure that Xenix is nowhere that flexible. You'll have to backup & restore. And then deal with the licensing fallout.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 16 May 2016 22:04:03 +0000

Don’t know who I can ask, so that’s only a new try…. if I have installed Xenix and applications, but later I recognize that the initially choosen partition size was far too much, is there a possibility to “shrink” the Xenix partition without data loss ?

By: Akkroid

Akkroid — Sat, 01 Aug 2015 07:13:25 +0000

Hey, thanks for the info. I think it is interesting with the early x86 NexTStep’s with very limited hw compatibility like 3.1-3.2 you would think in theory they could install in Vmware with buslogic or in Qemu with the NCR scsi but those versions just won’t pick up on the adapter within Virtualization, well, in Vmware it does detect the drives but it stalls forever on probing. In the past I tried the NCR scsi for a secondary hard drive with Win95 under Qemu which worked & was kind of neat, but things were too unstable, don’t know if the situation has changed since.