ISA cards

ISA cards are either Plug-and-Play or not. You typically have to manually set up non-PnP ISA devices.

In order to identify your device, you need to have the manual for your device or have a way to contact your device's manufacturer (e.g., via their website). There isn't currently a QNX Neutrino utility that lists the ISA devices that are installed on a system.

Non-PnP-based
With non-PnP cards, you can manually start the driver and specify the I/O port, IRQ, and DMA channel. For example, this command starts the Sound Blaster driver:
io-audio -dsb ioport=port,irq=req,dma=ch,dma1=ch &
  

To find out what to set the I/O port and IRQ to, manually open the system and look at the card. Then, start the driver using the configuration settings that the card is set to.

Ensure that the I/O port and IRQ are reserved in the BIOS for non-PCI devices. If you're using a Sound Blaster card, check the following:

  • If the driver rejects the card, make sure that the I/O port doesn't conflict with another piece of hardware. Try changing the I/O port to see if that helps.
  • If you hear a bit of sound and then nothing, make sure that the IRQ isn't conflicting with another device and is reserved in the BIOS. You can also try changing the IRQ as well.
  • If the driver starts correctly, but there's no sound, check the DMA settings on the card and try changing them, if possible.
PnP-based
You might need to obtain a copy of isapnp, which is used to initialize ISA PnP cards. QNX Neutrino doesn't supply this utility, but it's freely available on the Internet and has been ported to the QNX Neutrino RTOS.