Mac68k Forums

Hey techknight,

I don't know if you're still following this, but I revisited this issue today and finally got it working. You don't need to change the firmware at all. I too was struggling to make my EtherWave Printer Adapter work with the TCP/IP stuff. I'm going to turn this into a little story as I describe my journey.

First of all, I installed the Farallon driver version 2.2.2. I mounted this disk image. I opened the "For Macintosh Cards/Adapters" folder and ran the Installer. I don't remember everything I installed, but I'm pretty sure in Customize I installed EtherTalk for Farallon Macintosh Adapters and EN Driver for Farallon Macintosh Adapters. I may have done an Easy Install during testing too; I just can't remember. Sorry.

Next, in the For Adapters Only folder, I copied Adapter Setup 2.2.1 to my computer. Just for testing purposes. It's not really necessary for anything, but I didn't know that at the time.

After rebooting and all that jazz, I made sure the Network control panel was set to LocalTalk built-in and ran Adapter Setup 2.2.1. It found the adapter but told me it's not serialized, contact Farallon, blah blah blah. I cheated and disabled the serialization check by replacing it with NOPs. It checks to make sure two bytes are both not zero. It told me that my firmware is out of date. I canceled out of the update procedure though...didn't want to screw up my adapter. It turns out the firmware is available as a binary blob in a 'HEX ' resource in Adapter Setup. So you might be able to flash it manually if you ever feel like it. I'm too afraid to try the update, but it looks like I don't need it anyway.




It became blatantly obvious what is meant by "not serialized" -- the MAC address ends in 00:00. Those are the two bytes it's checking. I don't know how to set a new MAC address for it though, unfortunately. There's probably a command you can send it, but it's undocumented and I don't see anything in the Adapter Setup program's resources that looks like a screen for setting it. Oh well, not a huge deal as long as there's only one on a network. Anyway, the Adapter Setup interface is pretty boring. It lets you select an AppleTalk zone and turn on some kind of printer mode. I made sure the printer mode was OFF (it was already off by default, which I guess is surprising considering that it's the printer adapter version).




At this point I started fiddling with different settings in the Network control panel and MacTCP control panel as well as reading the included ReadMe file. I finally got it working and now TCP traffic is getting delivered correctly! Here's the magic combination.

The Network control panel has to be set for "PB Adapter". (It has to be set to LocalTalk in order to use Adapter Setup, but it has to be set to PB Adapter for the TCP/IP forwarding to work). Any other additional choices are for other weird situations. If you don't see PB Adapter, then something isn't installed correctly.

The MacTCP control panel has to be set for "Ethernet". This is somewhat surprising, but the ReadMe file says that the "PB Adapter" choice in MacTCP is if you want to use a different MacIP server and not the one built into the EtherWave. Either use the patched MacTCP 2.1 that doesn't suck, or if you're feeling particularly masochistic, stick with MacTCP 2.0.6 and calculate the network and node addresses yourself. In my experience, MacTCP's DHCP support (if you select Server under Obtain Address) didn't work with my router, so I had to manually assign an IP address.

OK. After this, I may have had to reboot, but I can't remember. If it doesn't work, then reboot and try again. Anyway, after setting everything up like that, the Printer Adapter works perfectly fine as a Mac/PB Adapter! I can ping stuff on my network with no trouble and I was able to test telnetting into my router. Definitely awesome.

Edit: I figured out how to set the serial number/MAC address. If you change the RAM that contains the MAC address and then do something in the program that causes a save, it saves the new MAC address to the EtherWave. I just added some instructions in the code I NOP'ed out earlier to set those bytes to something nonzero. Now I can run the original unpatched version of Adapter Setup with no troubles.

Yeah...I've heard it's only compatible with MacTCP, and I've also heard that it's not tested past 7.1. Haven't tried anything other than 7.1 + MacTCP. Maybe I'll try it with 7.5 or 7.6 someday.

If we ever figure out how to create a custom LocalTalk-Ethernet bridge, my hope is it'll be compatible with all OS versions.