6 DOS and Other Operating Systems
The QSC-100 is not a direct drop-in replacement for a legacy serial port because its base
address and 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 QSC-100 must be able to
accommodate any valid assignments of these resources
For Windows 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 QSC-100. Older applications, as
well as some custom software, may use hard-coded standard legacy serial port addresses. These
applications will require modifications if they are to use the QSC-100.
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.
6.1.1 QTPCI.EXE
Quatech's "QTPCI" utility supplies the information required when modifying the serial
port settings of the application. This program should be run from real DOS, not in a Windows
DOS box.
Figure 13 shows the Basic Mode display for the QSC-100 after the "Q" key has been
pressed. In this example, the QSC-100 uses I/O base address FF80 hex and IRQ 11. The
hardware revision of the QSC-100 is also displayed. Pressing the "N" key will show similar
information for all non-Quatech PCI devices in the system, including those devices integrated on
the motherboard.
The QTPCI program is capable only of displaying the PCI configuration. It cannot be
used to make changes.
Quatech QSC-100 User's Manual
20
