Quatech RS-485 user manual OS/2, DOS and other operating systems

6 Other Operating Systems

Device drivers for Windows NT and OS/2 are also available for the DSC-200/300. The board can be used under DOS and other operating systems as well in many circumstances. The software described below can be obtained from the Quatech web site if it did not come with the board.

6.1 OS/2

The OS/2 device driver supports up to 32 serial ports in a system. Installation is a manual, but simple, process. Please refer to the documentation included with the device driver for full installation and configuration details.

6.2 DOS and other operating systems

The DSC-200/300 is not a direct drop-in replacement for a legacy serial port because its base address and IRQ cannot be fixed at values such as 3F8 hex, IRQ 4 (COM1) or 2F8 hex, IRQ 3 (COM2), etc. Rather, the system BIOS assigns the address and the IRQ in a plug-and-play fashion at boot time. Software which is to use the DSC-200/300 must be able to accommodate any valid assignments of these resources.

For Windows 95, Windows NT and OS/2, the Quatech device drivers determine what the resource assignments are and proceed accordingly. In other cases, however, the user must intervene. The discussion below will center on DOS, but the concepts can be applied to other operating systems as well.

Many DOS applications support user configuration of the base address and IRQ of a serial port. Such applications can generally make use of the DSC-200/300. Older applications, as well as some custom software, may use hard-coded standard legacy serial port addresses. These applications will require modifications to support PCI devices.

Custom applications for which the customer has source code can be modified to make just a few PCI BIOS function calls to obtain all the necessary configuration information. The PCI BIOS specification can be obtained from the PCI Special Interest Group. Contact Quatech technical support for more information.

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