When installing the SPEA SHOWTIME PLUS, you should beware of possible hardware conflicts with other adapter cards in the computer. It is possible that two or more cards in the computer are contending for the same resources. These conflicts can involve:
- IRQ line (Interrupt Request)
- DMA channel (Direct Memory Access)
- I/O port address (Input / Output)
Devices to be wary of:
When setting up IRQ, DMA and I/O ports, be especially aware of the following hardware: Scanner card, SCSI drive, Tape Streamer, additional sound card, hard/floppy disk drives, modems, serial ports, mice, networks and others.
In a PCI computer, these are set using the system BIOS setup for each expansion slot. Below are details of the various settings:
IRQ settings
The computer is likely to be using various IRQ lines already, through hardware handlers for disk drives, printer ports, keyboard, co-processor, and others. MS-DOS 6 ships with the utility MSD, which you show you what IRQs are/aren't being used. Once you know this information, you can set the IRQs of the SPEA SHOWTIME PLUS correctly. Here is an example to likely IRQ usage:
IRQ 4 active serial port
IRQ 3+4 two active serial ports
IRQ 7 print spooler or SoundBlaster
IRQ 2 or 3 mouse
Q: INSTALL terminates with error 'Wrong IRQ'
A: This is a known problem caused by a BAT file used by the installation. The error message will occur no matter what you do, but you should ignore this error, as it will appear whether there is a problem or not. This fault should be fixed in a forthcoming release of the software.
DMA channels
This is used for board initialistion and digitised sound transfers (recording and playback of WAV files). These are set for eachadapter in the computer. You will need to check each card in the computer to establish whcih DMA channels are in use. This may be set by a jumper on some cards. Be very thorough when allocating DMA channels, and be sure DMA usage is unique to each adapter that uses them.
I/O port address
This is the address at whick a particular driver of device can be communicated with.