may the ISA-Plug'n'Play Bios configure NE2000 ethernet adapters automatically with i/o-Adress $300?
(Entschuldigung, das ist zu viel und zu kompliziert für mich auf Deutsch zu schreiben)
ISA_BIOS can configure the card in any way you want but it will not do any kind of auto resource allocation to avoid conflicts, like Windows does for PnP cards but MS-DOS didn't.
Unless told otherwise by editing ISA_BIOS.INF, it will put all cards and devices in what the vendor has specified as default, and then also activate them.
When you have multiple cards, especially multiple soundcards, this will no doubt require you to configure them in a way to avoid resource conflicts.
It's on my wishlist to make a GUI for configuring devices but for now you have to enter your settings in ISA_BIOS.INF, using ISA_BIOS.LOG as a guide on what cards and devices you have, and what settings they will accept.
ISA_BIOS.INF that comes with the software package should be fairly well commented and have some examples so I would start by reading that.
But generally what you want to do when putting a new PNP card in the machine is:
1) look at ISA_BIOS.LOG to see what it configures to by default.
If that's not the settings you want, then find the card/devices further up in the log file to find out what settings it will accept.
It will show each card it found, and for each card it will show each device on that card.
Each device can have one or more 'base configs' that you can choose.
And each 'base config' will finally list the IO/IRQ/DMA settings that you can pick if you choose to use that base conf.
Personally I think the PNP concept of those 'base configs' are only confusing people, back then in MS-DOS as well as now, but it is what it is
Some vendors use them and some instead use only a single one with a wide range of IO/IRQ/DMA selection.
These concepts and settings are exactly the same as in MS-DOS and Windows so knowledge of that is a bonus but not a must. The main difference here is that you'll have to use a textfile to change settings whereas in DOS each card vendor usually provided their own more or less user friendly PNP configuration program.
2) Using the information you gathered from ISA_BIOS.LOG, now add new entries in ISA_BIOS.INF to make sure the card gets configured in the way you want.
As an example, this is what I have in my ISA_BIOS.INF for my network card:
dev.KTC2000.RTL8019.io = 300
And this is the information about the card provided in the log file:
CARD1 : KTC2000 : Kingston EtheRx KNE20 Plug and Play ISA Adapter
DEV0 [02:00] : RTL8019 : RTL8019
COMP0: PNP80d6
CONF0:
IO0: 00000240-00000380 : 00000020
IRQ0: 00019e38
From that log we can tell:
- The card ID is KTC2000
- It has only one device, with and ID of RTL8019
- It has only one 'base configs' so no need to worry about selecting that.
- It has only one selectable IO range, and it allows a value between 240 to 380 in steps of 20
- It has only one selectable IRQ. the lowest 16bits of that number is a bitmask describing valid selection. In this case: 1001111000111000, which means the card will accept IRQ 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15.
I would personally put the network card on 3 if it isn't already defaulting to that.
And yes, I realise now I will change the log to print the actual numbers instead of a bitmask
Also note that Raven only supports the following IRQs: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14 - It doesn't have any selections for DMA otherwise it would have said so too.
(but even so, DMA settings can be ignored because Raven doesn't do ISA-DMA anyway)
Cards can have multiple devices, and sometimes multiple IO ports to configure.
Here's the config I used for one of my soundcards:
dev.ESS1868.ESS1868.conf = 2
dev.ESS1868.ESS1868.io0 = 220
dev.ESS1868.ESS1868.io1 = 388
dev.ESS1868.ESS1868.io2 = 330
dev.ESS1868.ESS0001.conf = 1
It has what appears to be the main sound device with customisable ports for Soundblaster, OPL and MPU.
- Here I though base conf2 was a fit, and then I customised the IO ports.
And then they decided to put the joystick port as a second device.
- Here conf1 was a fit and no further customisation was needed.
And I'm pretty sure I did so to avoid IO collision with the joystick port on my GUS card.
