Using Your Board with DOS ApplicationsThe NI serial driver installation program installs the bootup utilities ni-pnp.exe and nisboot.exe on your hard disk, and it adds entries to your autoexec.bat file that execute these utilities. The nisboot.exe program assists DOS programs in accessing your AT serial board. One of its tasks is to copy information about the base I/O addresses of your serial ports into the BIOS RAM data area, where many DOS applications look for information about serial ports. Notice that a maximum of four serial ports can be stored in this manner, due to limitations inherent in the BIOS. nisboot configures the transceiver control mode for your AT-485 boards when it is executed from the autoexec.bat file. Thus, if you change the transceiver control mode (wire mode) from the Windows Control Panel, you must execute nisboot before the new mode will take effect in your DOS applications. If you cannot get some DOS applications to access your AT serial board, use SerialConf to set the base addresses of your AT serial ports to the standard base addresses. Some DOS applications may only require their serial ports to be at certain standard addresses. In addition, some applications that use serial port interrupts may require standard IRQ settings for their COM ports. The table below lists the standard base addresses and IRQ settings for your COM ports:
|
