View ISA IRQ assignments in XP?

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buzzweetman

I am working with a PC running XP Pro that has two ISA cards in it.
The PC is integrated into an industrial machine, so it is difficult to
open.

When I look at Device Manager-->View-->Resources by Type-->IRQ, the
cards are not listed.
Start-->All Programs-->Accessories-->System Tools-->System Information
does not show these cards either.

I have another PC with one ISA card in it, and it is working fine, but
it does not show up in the IRQ list.

Does anyone know how I can view which IRQs XP thinks these cards are
assigned to?

Buzz
 
Sorry, I don't know the answer to your question. However, I am
fascinated that a device old enough to have ISA slots is able to
successfully run XP. Can you tell me a bit more about this machine? Many
thanks.
 
Wow ISA lol, i havent had to deal with that for ages. Two ideas come to
mind; one you could DL Lavalys's Everest and see if it can give u the info
needed to diagnose the IRQ's, and two try checking the BIOS. But other than
that ur options seem pretty limited. :)
 
Do the cards themselves show in the device manager? If they do select Properties of the cards and
the IRQ will be listed on the Resources tab.
 
The machine tests how well two gears mesh together.
I work at the company that makes them

I fairly new to the company and the project. The PC in the machine ran
Windows 98. But now they want to move to XP. But for some reason they
refuse to upgrade to a PCI version of the encoder counter card at the
same time. So I'm picking up where other developers left off...
building and testing an XP driver to do what they want.

I've suggested that in the future it might not be worth it to use these
old ISA cards. For one... the money it is costing to get them to work
in XP is too much. Plus, they may have to pay a premium to obtain the
PCs they want with ISA slots. Legacy hardware ends up costing more.

Buzz
 
Fascinating...thank you.

While Windows can be made to do things it wasn't really designed for,
eventually it just becomes too much trouble to make it work that way.
 
Thanks for the suggest Trevor. I gave Everest a try.
But it doesn't show the IRQ for the card I have.
Part of my problem is probably that this is the only windows driver
work I've ever done, I'm trusting much of the driver code handed to me,
and I don't know how the OS looks at an ISA card's IRQ.
I know the board has a jumper on it putting it at IRQ 5. And dip
switches defining the port address.

Does the OS just ask the ISA card which IRQ it uses? Or maybe it
doesn't care.
Maybe the OS just assumes the user will set the ISA card jumper to an
IRQ that isn't used.
Then when software/driver uses that IRQ, it just better be mapped to
the correct IRQ. Otherwise bad/unintended behavior will occur.

I already used the BIOS to force the IRQ 5 to be reserved for ISA. It
was on PCI... another I/O card (a PCI card) was using it.
But even with that change I'm not having the same success as I do with
a development pc.
On the development pc, I load my driver and start it. Then I look in
the Device Manager resources I/O addresses. I see the resources I told
the driver to use. A test application I wrote confirms it is working.
(I collect some valid data) On the machine pc, I load and start the
driver, but it never shows up in the Device Manager resources I/O
address list.

I don't see a conflict... and the board is jumperd/switched for the
port address and IRQ. And it is VERY difficult to change it. (Not to
mention the machine PC is being used with a removable drive for
development... and boots from a 98 drive or an XP drive. So I can't
easily change the jumpers... or only one OS will work)

Buzz
 
I'm certainly open to correction on this, but AFAIK if you're setting an IRQ
choice with a jumper, it means your card isn't PnP, and so the system won't
be involved in the question--it's hardware--the jumper choice makes the
selection to monitor that IRQ. As far as the system is concerned, it's
always a problem keeping such an IRQ available, as the system will tend to
assign them where it wants. Reserve it when you have the system reassign
the choices, then you should have it come out where you want. Drivers
written for such cards must have had some means of checking, but I have no
idea what. Suggest you look into the Driver SDK for something like NT, or
perhaps, even W95, since there was some cross-polination there.

HTH
Joe
 
I believe that if the card is jumpered for IRQ 5, and the BIOS shows IRQ 5
reserved for ISA, you can be quite sure that's what it's using. Keep in
mind that the actual IRQs (in the first 15) physically map to a circuit
trace on the bus. When you set the switch on an ISA card it literally tells
the card to use the pin in the ISA slot corresponding to the physical IRQ
line. These cards are not Plug and Play so the OS (and utilities like
Everest) can't map them. Windows does know, per the BIOS setting, that an
IRQ excluded in the BIOS is not to be mapped to Plug and Play devices
creating a conflict.
--
 
I gathered from a coworker that the driver code is supposed to reserve
the IRQ with the OS. He showed me a driver he was involved with that
does this, and shows up in the IRQ resource list. (Mine currently
doesn't).

The driver code I'm working with was 90% written by someone else. I've
never written windows drivers... so it was easier for me to assume that
the fundamentals had been taken care of.
So, I'll be looking at reserving the IRQ in the driver.
Maybe this will make things work better... or show a conflict that I'm
not aware of.

Thanks for the commments thus far.
Buzz
 
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