Ampro Corporation 486E manual Software

Introduction

Software

The Little Board/486e CPU can use most commercial and public-domain software developed for the IBM PC and PC/AT. Software development tools such as editors, compilers, and debuggers can be used to develop application code. System requirements can be quickly tailored to your needs using these standard tools with the utilities and drivers supplied with each Little Board/486e CPU.

The board’s SETUP function can be used for all system configuration tasks. SETUP can be invoked using the (CTRL-ALT-ESC) hot-key combination or by selecting the SETUP.COM utility program from the DOS command line. SETUP.COM is available on the Common Utilities diskette. Table 1–1 summarizes the configuration parameters you can modify using SETUP.

Table 1–1. Summary of SETUP Options

!Date and time in the battery-backed real-time clock

!Floppy drive quantity and type

!IDE Hard disk drive quantity and type

!Video controller

!Serial port enable/disable

!Parallel port address/disable

!Byte-wide socket

!Serial console option

!Video BIOS Shadow RAM enable

!DOS hard disk map

!Choice of default boot drive (hard disk or floppy)

!Enable/Disable hot-key access to SETUP

!Watchdog timer startup time-out

!Serial loader enable/disable/port selection

!POST speed options

!POST screen display and blanking options

SETUP information is stored in both the battery-backed CMOS RAM-portion of the real-time clock, and in a configuration EEPROM. A complete discussion of SETUP is provided in Chapter 2.

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