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Aleph One PC Cards User Guide

1. Check carefully that the bevelled corner of the chip mates with the same corner of the socket before pushing it home once fitted a special tool is required to remove it Aleph One Ltd PC card devices Second processor cards The Cyrix DX CPUs have a coprocessor built in that is the meaning of the DX appellation There is therefore no need to add an extra chip to perform this function eS RISC PC 6 5 PC memory It is useful to understand the the various areas of memory involved in the PC card There is the memory that the PC thinks it has the PC RAM This is the biggest block by far Then there is the memory used in the host by the PC application and supporting items such as video modes and device support modules Directparallel etc The PC RAM is described below The PC application itself uses about 420K in the host VideOoRAM is a minimum of 256K rising with big modes and space reserved for blitting See Allocating RAM for video modes on page 44 for details of the VideoRAM allocation PC expansion card memory The PC Expansion card does not share its PC memory with the X1 host computer It has its own on board which can only be used by the PC Expansion card The PC expansion card uses RAM in the form of a single 32 bit S1MM This must have the following general characteristics in order to operate correctly e 72 pin SIMM format e 32 or 36 bit memory width either will work 32 bit is cheaper ac
2. For bigger modes less is needed down to about 15 for big modes 1280x 1024 The percentage decreases because a typical dialogue box takes up less screen area in a bigger screen mode The PCConfig application suggests 25 extra by default and will not let you enter less than the minimum necessary e The UseWindowFE advanced configuration option Allow desktop operation in PCConfig must be switched on if it appears otherwise the Windows driver cannot claim this first 256K video area and thus cannot operate You will get a Windows driver needs at least nnnkK error if UseWindowFE is turned OFF no matter what value is given for VideoRAM 5 12 Using extended expanded memory from DOS 44 This section explains the way PCs and the PC card handle memory beyond the standard 640K and the different terms used by PC software to describe different areas of memory Modern version of DOS shield the user from memory allocation matter quite well so you shouldn t need to read this section unless interested or in case of difficulty If you have more than 1MB of RAM you will need either a memory manager to access the full memory All modern version of DOS 5 Aleph One Ltd Using your PC Card or later include such software and numerous third party utilities also exist The DOS installation process should install this into your CONFIG SYS file for you The rest of this section provides technical information about PC memory handling and
3. IDE connector ee audio connector 4 Fit the other end of the cable onto the host computer s Auxiliary Audio Connector This consists of two rows of five pins located on the main circuit board towards the rear of the computer The exact arrangement varies according to which kind of computer Aleph One Ltd 83 PC Cards User Guide 84 you have A400 or A300 A400 1 Headphone Headphone PL2 PL2 ipare 2 1002 OO OO input o Ground Input 4 G Ground OO OO 00 10 OO 10 A5000 ies Headphone a a LK3 D OLNI LK3 OO Ground 4 G Input OO 10100 Ground Rear of case Risc PC Power supply VRAM Simm or slot Gmund f DRAM Simm or slot DRAM Simm or slot Js Ensure that the Output of the PC card connects to the Input of the computer via the resistor and that the two Grounds are also connected together Now test your work You can use the file SNDTST EXE supplied on the PC disc after copying it to a DOS disk or partition or use a sound generating application under DOS or Windows Aleph One Ltd Index Symbols lEdit 32 34 73 Makemodes 54 Paint 32 PCconfig further options 73 WAV 59 Numerics 32 bit file access 38 486SLC 47 A Advanced configuration 25 Aleph One mouse driver 49 Allocating RAM for video modes Allow desktop operation 76 ARMDRV errors 70 ARMDRV
4. The enhanced parallel port allows greater throughput with parallel port devices and the enhanced serial port is buffered for improved high speed comms The second serial port will appear to PC software as COM2 This port uses interrupt three so you need to change the interrupt used by the mouse from its default of 3 You will need to use the Advanced configuration dialogue and possibly to edit the PCconfig file ConfData see A 2 Enabling advanced configuration options on page 73 and change the BUSMouselnt setting see Interrupt number for bus mouse on page 80 e Note that if you change this then your mouse driver must be able to use the new value 5 is a good choice unless this interrupt is already being used for networking 6 8 Floppy drives Normally PC will find and use the host computer s floppy drive without you doing anything Drive 0 will appear to the PC as drive A and drive if present will appear as PC drive B If you have a non standard size drive or have added external drives for example 5 25 it is possible that PC will fail to identify the size or density of the drive correctly In this case you must use the Floppy option in the PC config file to specify the drive capacity See Floppy drive size on page 80 Backup via floppy drive Because the floppy disk drive is hosted and has a different floppy Aleph One Ltd 57 PC Cards User Guide controller to a real PC software which tries to use
5. This value does not include the memory allocated for display VideoRAM or the memory used by PC itself Obviously you need enough RAM in your host machine to run RISC OS and PC and still allocate the VideoRAM and PCRAM values specified See PC memory on page 51 for details 4 Click OK to return to the main PC config window 4 4 Printing This option lets you set which if any logical DOS printer port will print via the RISC OS printer stream To set this Printing 1 Click on the Printing icon in the main PC config window The following dialogue box appears Printing options J ignore RISC OS Printer stream Use RISC OS printer stream for LPT _J Use RISC OS printer stream for LPT2 __ Allow PC Card to access parallel port directly Cancel b OK 2 Select one of the three printing options e For the second processor card the default of Use RISC OS printer stream for LPT1 is very likely to be correct allowing you to print to your normal printer from the default DOS LPT1 port RISC PC e PC expansion cards have their own printer port if you plan to use it as the main printer port you may wish to choose Ignore RISC OS printer stream or Use RISC OS printer stream for LPT2 The various possibilties are explained in Aleph One Ltd 19 PC Cards User Guide the chapter Printing from the PC card on page 64 3 Second processor cards have a further option Allow PC Card to access parallel port d
6. creating has a different name otherwise you will overwrite your existing file Start up PC Your old file is drive C the new one drive D 3 Use DOS s XCOPY or Windows file manager to copy everything from drive C to drive D 4 Quit PC 5 Use PCConfig to use NewDrv_C as drive C and not to use drive D 6 Run PC You should now have the new partition file as Drive C however it will not yet be bootable so you must boot from a DOS floppy run fdisk and make the primary partition active Aleph One Ltd 37 PC Cards User Guide 7 Once you can boot from the new drive delete the old Drive_C partition and if you had an earlier second partition drag it back to PCConfig 8 If you wish rename NewDry_C to Drive_C and update PCConfig to reflect this change 5 8 Using Microsoft Windows In order to use the Aleph One PC cards with Windows 3 1 or Windows 3 11 you must choose the Custom Installation option during the Windows installation process This allows you to select VGA version 3 0 or the Aleph One Windows Driver for the display driver The other defaults are correct with the possible exception of Keyboard Check Keyboard on page 48 for the correct setting for your host computer After making these selections you can proceed with the installation Windows may be used with the PC card in any of its modes supported by your hardware combination Note that at least 3MB RAM is required to run Windows in Enhanced Mode
7. see Installing the Aleph One Windows driver on page 39 There is a certain amount of complexity in the translation of PC video modes to RISC OS video modes Most of the time you need not concern yourself with this but for some software you may need to refer to this section to determine the capabilities of the PC Card host combination Aleph One Ltd 53 PC Cards User Guide Supported modes Under DOS the standard VGA modes including EGA and CGA are supported plus one SVGA mode and a couple of others A list of all the supported modes is given below Mode 27 is used for VGA 640x480x16 graphics display in DOS Mode 31 is used for SVGA 800x600x16 graphics display in DOS DOS mode 6Ah The standard DOS text screen 80x25 is actually 640x400 pixels There is no such mode under RISC OS so 640x480 is used instead This results in 40 unused pixels at the top and bottom of the display making it a bit more letterboxy than a typical PC display e Note that the default definitions of modes 27 and 31 for the AKF60 monitor give a slow refresh rate 60Hz and thus a flickery display We recommend that you edit the monitor definition file to comment out the slow 640x480 and 800x600 modes Contact Aleph One if your are unsure about this RISC PC Matching modes IPC does it best to match DOS modes to RISC OS modes but is limited to the modes that can be displayed under RISC OS 3 1 If the host is a Risc PC then PC has more flexi
8. the configuration software suggests a suitable amount of memory to use You can increase or decrease this amount by using the arrows in the Memory to use for video KB option Note that there is a small speed gain to be had by devoting extra memory beyond what is actually required in the range 15 to 60 extra Only do this if you have memory to spare the Suggested memory allocation box will give a typical maximum figure Note also that the value given here is not related to the amount of Video RAM in your machine see page 44 6 Click OK to confirm your choices and return to the main PC config window e Changes in this area are likely check the Win_readme and Readme files for the latest information 4 7 Start up options This option defines what happens when you start the PC application It can start up to the icon bar ready to be clicked on to actually start the PC card booting or it can boot the PC Card straight away either in single tasking Full screen or multitasking Window mode To set this option 1 Click Select on the Start up icon in the PC configuration Start up 22 Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig window The following dialogue box will be displayed ie Start up Start up options Start up on icon bar _ Start up in full screen J Start up ina RISC OS window 2 Choose the option you require 3 Click OK to confirm your choices and return to the main PC config window 4 8
9. 34 transferring between RISC OS and DOS 34 Floppy drive and backup utilities 57 high density 58 G Games under DOS screen modes 54 Generating trace files 67 Grabbing screens 32 H High memory 45 High density floppy drives 57 58 I IDE drives using direct 25 Initialise in monochrome 77 Installing expansion cards 8 Risc PC second processor cards 7 support software 10 Windows 40 Installing the card 7 Installing the PC Card software 11 Interrupts busmouse 80 networking 80 K Keyboard 48 L Low resolution text 77 M Making a sound cable 59 Matching screen modes 54 Maths Coprocessor present 77 Aleph One Ltd MDA 77 Memory expanded 44 expansion cards 51 extended 44 second processor cards 52 video modes 44 Memory to use for Video 21 Microsoft Windows driver software 39 Enhanced Mode 38 installing 38 quitting 33 running DOS programs under 38 Modes CGA and EGA 76 DOS screen 55 matching screen 54 odd 56 SuperVGA 55 switching between 32 Monitortype auto 55 Monochrome operation 77 Mouse and Windows 49 bus mouse emulation 80 interrupts 80 multi tasking 49 setting up 49 Moving files between RISC OS and DOS 34 MS DOS 5 45 Multi tasking using mouse 49 Multi tasking operation 32 enabling 76 N NE2000 63 NE2000 interrupt 80 Aleph One Ltd Index Network cards 60 Networking interrupts 80 Networks printing 66 Novell Netware 60 0 Obsolete options on update 25 Odd modes 56 OS 2 38 P
10. 71 Windows 69 TurboDrivers 66 U Updating configuration 24 Updating your system 10 Upgrades ports 57 Upper memory 45 Use low resolution font for text modes 7 Use powersaving features 78 Using Setup after Windows is installed 4 Using Setup when installing Windows 4 Using the PC card 13 Vv VGA 75 Aleph One Video 53 Video modes memory 44 Video retrace emulation 76 W Windows 38 driver software 39 errors 69 exiting 33 installing 40 manual installation 42 printer drivers 65 updating with Setup 41 using mouse with 49 Windows 3 11 38 Windows 95 38 Windows driver 76 Windows for Workgroups 3 11 38 60 Aleph One Ltd Index 89 Aleph One Limited The Old Courthouse Bottisham Cambridge CB5 9BA Telephone 01223 811679 Fax 01223 812713 Email support alephl co uk
11. PC RISC OS The option allows you to decide which of the mouse or keyboard functions can be used to switch between single and multi tasking modes See Switching between PC Card modes on page 32 for details of the switching process 1 Click Select on the Start up icon in the PC configuration z window E ames PC RISC OS The following dialogue box will be displayed A PC RISC OS Switching from PC Card to RISC OS Normat either J Middle mouse button returns to RISC OS J Alt Break returns to RISC OS _ Do not allow return to RISC OS 2 Choose the option you require Aleph One Ltd 23 PC Cards User Guide e If you disable both switching modes by choosing Do not allow return to RISC OS then there really is no way back once you are using the PC in single tasking mode e You may want to disable the mouse switching by choosing Alt Break returns to RISC OS so that inadvertent middle mouse button use will not pop you back to RISC OS 3 Click OK to confirm your choices and return to the main PC config window 4 9 Booting This option must be on when you install DOS the first time you use the card as DOS must be booted from a floppy to install it After that set it OFF for convenience and for virus protection To set this option 1 Click Select on the Booting icon in the PC Card configuration era window _ Booting The following dialogue box will be displayed E a Boot Boot opt
12. ROMs and sound cards also will be e On the second processor card everything except the coprocessor is hosted hardware e On the Expansion card the memory serial port s parallel port and optionally the coprocessor and local hard drive are real hardware We will describe all the hardware options here Particularly we describe anything that differs from a typical PC because it is hosted In general devices can be treated exactly as they would on an equivalent PC so if there are no specific instructions here just follow the instuctions in your DOS or device documentation 6 1 PC cards themselves PC expansion cards The PC expansion card consists of a 486SLC or 486SLC2 processor a single chip PC motherboard RAM and several peripheral interfaces IDE connector serial port parallel printer port and the Acorn computer interface Several hardware upgrades are possible they are discussed below Aleph One Ltd 47 PC Cards User Guide Second processor cards Second processor cards consist of a CPU and an ASIC which includes the functionality of a PC motherboard chipset and the interface to the Acorn Open Bus It also has level 2 cache RAM on board RISC PC e The Mark I Aleph One second processor PC Card uses a Cyrix DX40 DX2 66 or DX2 80 CPU These CPUs are used in write back cache mode and operate at 5V Note that the write back cacheing is extremely important to the performance of the chip and other CPUs which do no
13. The Old Courthouse Bottisham Cambridge England CB5 9BA Telephone 01223 811679 Fax 01223 812713 Email support aleph1 co uk WWW http www aleph1 co uk com aleph1 Contents 1 Introduction 5 1 I Late breaking information 5 1 2 Registering your card 5 1 3 About this User Guide 6 1 4 Contents of the PC Card package 6 2 Installing PC Cards 7 2 1 Installing Risc PC second processor cards 7 2 2 Installing PC Expansion Cards 8 3 Installing support software 10 3 1 Installing DOSFS 10 3 2 Installing the PC Card software 11 4 Using PCConfig 13 4 1 Configuring your PC card 13 4 2 Disc setup 14 4 3 Memory 18 4 4 Printing 19 4 5 Serial port 20 4 6 Display 21 4 7 Start up options 22 4 8 PC RISC OS 23 4 9 Booting 24 4 10 Updating your configuration 24 4 11 Using direct IDE drives 25 4 12 Direct SCSI access 27 4 13 About PCConfig 28 5 Using your PC Card 30 5 1 Starting the PC Card 30 5 2 Using the PC Card 32 5 3 Closing down the PC 33 Aleph One Ltd PC Cards User Guide 5 4 Resetting the PC card 33 5 5 Configuring your PC 33 5 6 Moving files between RISC OS and DOS 34 5 7 Changing partition size 36 5 8 Using Microsoft Windows 38 5 9 Using DR DOS with Windows 3 1 39 5 10 Installing the Aleph One Windows driver 39 5 11 Configuring the Windows driver 42 5 12 Using extended expanded memory from DOS 44 6 PC card devices 47 6 1 PC cards themselves 47 6 2 Keyboard 48 6 3 Mouse 49 6 4 Numeric coprocessor 50 6 5 P
14. and more is recommended No special setup is required to run Windows 3 0 simply follow the Windows installation procedure you will need to have about 4MB of disc space free If you have Windows 3 11 or Windows for Workgroups 3 11 then we recommend that you turn on 32 bit file access in the control panel 386 Enhanced See your Windows manual or Help This gives a very significant improvement in disk cacheing performance e For details on installing Windows 95 or OS 2 please see the Readme file e If you have an A300 or A400 series machine which does not have a high density floppy drive you will need to use 720K floppy discs to install Microsoft Windows Contact Microsoft on 0181 614 8000 to exchange your discs 38 Aleph One Ltd Using your PC Card 5 9 Using DR DOS with Windows 3 1 If you are using the DR DOS operating system and you wish to run Windows 3 1 you must ensure that you have a copy of DR DOS dated April 1992 or later Contact Novell the publishers of DR DOS directly for information on how to obtain a DR DOS upgrade if you do not possess the relevant version From the UK phone 00 353 145 909 55 for upgrade information If you are running an older copy of DR DOS you will see the following error message if you attempt to run Windows 3 1 Fault in extended memory manager 5 10 Installing the Aleph One Windows driver The enhanced Windows Driver provides a substantial increase in speed for many common Microsoft Wi
15. drive PC hardware directly and games are the most notorious culprits While we have made every effort to support such software it is impossible to guarantee that every program in the world will work If you do have a problem with software first read the Limitations section on the Readme file supplied with your software to check that what you are trying to do is possible 8 1 Using trace information Often if you have a problem you can use the PC card s trace information to work out exactly why it won t go eg Direct SCS1 support PC Card did not reset error 1 3 Aleph One Ltd To enable this error reporting you need to select the Generate Debug information option using PCConfig s advance configuration window The output from this will appear all over the screen so it is best re directed to a file You do this by editing the PC Run file The last line starts the PC application with something like Run lt Diva Dir gt Runimage Put a char at the beginning of this line to comment it out and remove the comment from the beginning of the line above Run lt Diva Dir gt RunImage gt lt Diva Dir gt TraceFile Now rerun PC to repeat the problem you had Then close PC and examine the Tracefile inside the PC application to see if it contains any useful error reports The presence of messages there does not automatically mean that something is wrong it 67 PC Cards User Guide will always contain status r
16. examples of manual CONFIG SYS settings for typical extended memory use e Conventional memory is memory from 0 to 640K 00000h to 9FFFFh This is the RAM used for DOS and for programs e Upper memory is memory between 640K and 1MB A0000h to FFFFFh This area is used for video memory A0000h to BFFFFh although it is not all used if you do not use VGA graphics modes and for the BIOS F4000h to FFFFFh High memory is the first 64K 16bytes above 1MB 100000h to 10FFFOh This can be accessed only if you have more than 1MB of RAM and needs a memory manager such as HIMEM SYS which can control the a20 address line e Extended memory is memory above MB This obviously only exists on cards with more than 1MB of RAM and needs a memory manager to make it available to programs that can use it e Expanded memory is not directly acessible by the CPU it can only be accessed by additional hardware although some memory managers Expanded Memory eMulators can make extended memory available as expanded memory to programs that need it If you have a version of DOS earlier than 5 and more than 1MB of RAM you will need a third party memory manager or to upgrade to either Aleph One Ltd e MS DOS 5 and 6 PC DOS 6 which have two primary memory managers HIMEM SYS and EMM386 EXE HIMEM SYS is an extended memory manager which simply allows the RAM above 1M to be accessed EMM386 EXE allows this memory to be used as expanded memor
17. for the number of drives SCSI_Op Read failed device X SCSI_Op Write failed device X PC has been unable to read or write to the drive using the SCSI_Op SWI It will always use standard 10 byte SCS1 Read or Write commands you should check that the drive supports these SCSI Initialise 2 failed on device X The device did not respond to the SCSI Initialise SWI This Aleph One Ltd 71 PC Cards User Guide 72 uses the SCS1 Inquire command to read parameters about the drive It usually indicates a basic problem with connections to the drive Warning SCSI device X is type d not direct access IPC checks the device type found using the Inquire command If this is not type 0 direct access usual for hard disks it gives this warning but continues to attempt to use it Using non direct access devices is not tested and not guaranteed to work SCSI device X has bad sector size NNN For use with MS DOS SCS1 disks should be formatted to a sector size of 512 bytes Unfortunately RISC OS uses 1024 byte sectors The drive needs a low level format to change this this will need to be done on a PC or using special software under RISC OS Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting Appendix A Configuration A 1 Advanced configuration options PCconfig includes a wide range of options for customising your PC setup In most cases you will not need to change these but you may have specific requirements or a set of hardware which mak
18. pin I of the JP1 connector at the top right of the connector nearest the 486 chip on the card match up otherwise both card and drive may be damaged Ensure that the link in the block of 3x5 pins furthest from the SIMM is not to the right that is it is either not present or set to the left Run PCConfig Enter the drive characteristics in the window which appears Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig You may need to consult the drive datasheet or your supplier for the relevant information Note that your version of DOS may restrict the sector size to 17 and the number of cylinders to less than 1024 Specifying start up time You may need to specifiy the option Start up time for IDE drives if your drive is slower to start up than average And if you have a quick drive then you can probably reduce the default to save a bit of time This gives the time in tenths of a second that the PC card waits on power up before trying to access the drive This is because the drive only starts to spin up the first time PC is started and it cannot be used until it is up to speed If this value is too low then you may see error messages such as Drive not working orNo boot drive available before it boots and it may not boot at all e Go to the line in the PCconfig window Startup time for IDE drives x 0 1 sec e Enter a revised value The value must be a number between 0 and 140 that is between 0 and 14 seconds The default value is 21
19. processor cards only must be on if a TI486SXL2 processor is installed ASIC features disable Config line ASICoptions 0 1 2 Default setting 0 RISC PC where 0 normal 1 disable small write buffer 2 disable large write buffer Aleph One Ltd 79 PC Cards User Guide This option for second processor cards only can be used to disable ASIC features Any setting other than normal will slow down your PC card Floppy drive size Config line Floppy0 1 360 720 1200 1440 Default setting 0 autodetecting These settings specify the type of floppy drive fitted Default lets the PC application work it out for itself This works in all except exceptional configurations If this does not work then you need to give one of the other values 3 5 double density 720K 720 3 5 high density 1 44M 1440 5 25 double density 360K 360 5 25 high density 1 2M 1200 Interrupt number for NE2000 card Config line NE2000Int n Default setting 5 This option specifies the interrupt that the NE2000 Emulation will use if you are using the network drivers See the network driver documention for details and Network cards on page 60 Usual value is 5 Enable bus mouse emulation Config line Busmouse on off Default setting on This enables or disables the emulation of the Acorn mouse as a DOS bus mouse It should be left on unless you wish to use a serial mouse plugged into the PC card or need to release the interrupt for some other us
20. set the options for PC specifically to suit your installation PCConfig reads and writes to a text file called Config inside PC It is possible to edit this directly see A ppendix A Configuration on page 73 If you have more than one configuration file 28 PCConfig normally finds the Config file itself but if you have more than one copy of PC or don t follow these instructions or have an unusual setup it is possible that it will get it wrong PCConfig finds the config file it wants by using the environment variable Diva Dir This is set by the Boot and run files of PC This means that if you have more than one copy of PC on your system the one that will be configured is The last one run or if PC has not been run Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig e The first one seen by the filer This is why you must reset after copying PC and PCConfig to the hard disk as the one on the floppy was the first one seen but not the one you want to configure Further configuration options Finally the advanced options displayed by PCConfig are controlled by a file called ConfData inside PCConfig Normally only options that people are likely to need or want to change are displayed but there are many others e For details of these options and how to display them see Appendix A Aleph One Ltd 29 PC Cards User Guide 5 Using your PC Card Once you have e Installed the PC Card hardware e Installed the PC and PCC
21. the floppy controller directly will not work This means that floppy protection schemes involving strangely formatted sectors will not work and neither will backup applications This includes MSBackup Fastback Norton Backup and PCTools Backup which all require direct floppy control We recommend that you use PKZIP v2 for floppy backup instead Other programs that attempt to access the floppy hardware directly are operating systems other than DOS Windows such as OS 2 Linux and Windows NT High density drives If your Acorn computer is equipped with a built in high density disc drive eg A5000 and Risc PC you can format read and write high density 1 44MB DOS discs directly Other models of Acorn computers can neither read nor write such discs without a hardware upgrade Suitable upgrades that have been tested are high density drives from Beebug RISC developments and The Serial Port Arxe 6 9 Sound There are two distinct types of PC sound output hardware e The basic PC speaker e A sound card such as SoundBlaster These are achieved in different ways The most basic possible PC beep is actually passed over to the host in software so this needs no additional hardware although if extra shells are loaded in DOS you will not hear it Second processor cards RISC PC 58 For second processor cards the best results are obtained from the Minnie 16 bit audio card by ESP and adding the SoundBlaster Emulation sof
22. we recommend that you buy one of the many books available on the subject in addition to the manuals supplied with those products 1 4 Contents of the PC Card package Your Aleph One PC card package should consist of the following items in addition to these instructions e PC card in anti static bag either an expansion card or second processor card as labelled on the box e Floppy disc containing PC support software e User Guide e Registration card In addition the expansion card package contains the following e Bag containing blank back panel T piece and screws If any of these items seem to be missing or damaged please contact your supplier Aleph One Ltd Installing PC Cards 2 Installing PC Cards This chapter describes the installation procedures for both types of PC cards Please follow the relevant section for your card e Remember to check the README file on the software disc for details of changes to the installation procedure 2 1 Installing Risc PC second processor cards The PC second processor card fits in the vacant processor slot inside your computer If you are not confident about installing the card please contact your supplier for assistance Note that neither Aleph One nor Acorn Computers accept any liability for damage done to your computer during the installation of internal upgrades RISC PC e Switch off the computer and unplug it from the electricity supply at the wall before starting th
23. Aleph One PC Cards N e Disk Tree View Options Window Help i aintbrush WINLOGO BMP User Guide Aleph One PC Cards for Acorn computers User Guide Copyright 1995 Aleph One Limited Cambridge England Issue 6 September 1995 Neither the whole nor any part of the information contained in or the product described in this manual may be adapted or reproduced in any material or electronic form without the prior written consent of the copyright holder This product and its documentation are supplied on an as is basis and no warranty as to their suitability for any particular purpose is either made or implied Aleph One Limited will not accept any claim for damages howsoever arising as a result of use or failure of this product Your statutory rights are not affected Aleph One PC Cards are not intended for use in any medical appliance device or system in which the failure of the product might reasonably be expected to result in personal injury The Aleph One PC Expansion Card was created by Laurie van Someren Alex van Someren Project manager Nick van Someren Ian Harvey Senior programmer Dean Murphy Programmer Carol Atack Documentation Wookey Documentation and technical support Dave Knell Hardware engineer expansion cards Fred Dart and FTDI ASIC design second processor cards Made possible by VLS11 Technology Inc Cyrix AMD United Microcircuit Corp All trade marks acknowledged Aleph One Limited
24. C memory 51 6 6 Video 53 6 7 PC Expansion card serial and parallel ports 56 6 8 Floppy drives 57 6 9 Sound 58 6 10 Network cards 60 6 11 CD ROM 60 6 12 Other devices 63 7 Printing from the PC card 64 8 Troubleshooting 67 8 1 Using trace information 67 8 2 Common problems 68 Appendix AConfiguration 73 A 1 Advanced configuration options 73 A 2 Enabling advanced configuration options 73 A 3 Editing advanced configuration options 74 A 4 Advanced configuration options 75 Appendix BExpansion card sound 82 Index 85 4 Aleph One Ltd Introduction 1 Introduction Congratulations on your purchase of an Aleph One PC Card for your Acorn RISC Computer These cards allow your Acorn computer to execute programs designed for IBM compatible computers efficiently There are two different types of PC cards e Expansion cards are suitable for all Acorn computers with a vacant 16 bit expansion slot including the A7000 A5000 A540 A300 and A400 series and the A3000 with an external box They have their own memory IDE hard drive interface and parallel and serial ports and use a 16 bit bus Software for expansion cards has the suffix e e Second processor cards are suitable only for RiscPC computers and are fitted in the second processor slot They use the Open Bus to share resources and devices equally with the host machine and have a 32 bit bus There are two versions of the second processor card Mark I and Mark II Software for seco
25. CDROM driver AICD SYS are best put into your DOS directory or the Aleph One Ltd 35 PC Cards User Guide root directory so that they are easily found by DOS Utility files like SNDTST EXE can go wherever you like General file transfer It is convenient to be able to transfer files from R1SC OS to DOS and back on the Desktop However there are some restrictions to what you can do It is always safe to read files drag files out from DOS but you must never write into drag files into the DOS partition whilst PC is running You will corrupt your disc To read files from DOS you must 1 Close the PC window or choose Freeze from the PC icon bar menu before opening the DOS partition 2 Copy files in the usual way Note that you must copy a file not move it as this involves writing to the DOS drive when the moved file is deleted To write files to the DOS partition you must 1 Close your PC applications 2 Quit PC before opening the DOS partition 3 Move copy or delete files in the usual way Note that these restrictions do not apply to floppy discs which can be freely written to both from the desktop and from DOS although the directories in DOS and RISC OS may not stay in sync e When using floppies take care to dismount DOS format floppies by choosing Dismount from the floppy drive icon bar menu If you do not dismount the disc in this way it is likely that some data will not be written to it as expect
26. CGA EGA VGA 40x25 text Mode 2 CGA EGA VGA 80x25 text Mode 3 CGA EGA VGA 80x25 text Mode 4 CGA EGA VGA 320x200 4 colour graphics Mode 5 CGA EGA VGA 320x200 4 colour graphics Mode 6 CGA EGA VGA 640x200 mono graphics Mode 7 Mono EGA VGA 80x25 text Modes 8 0Ch are not officially defined Mode 0Dh EGA VGA 320x200 16 colour graphics Mode OEh EGA VGA 640x200 16 colour graphics Mode OFh EGA VGA 640x350 mono graphics Mode 10h EGA VGA 640x350 16 colour graphics Mode 11h VGA 640x480 mono graphics Mode 12h VGA 640x480 16 colour graphics Mode 13h VGA 320x200 256 colour graphics SuperVGA modes Mode 6Ah SVGA 800x600 16 colour graphics Aleph One Ltd 55 PC Cards User Guide Unusual modes 360x480 256 colours Obtained when programmers edit the VGA registers On RISC OS 3 5 PC will also support other modes obtained by messing round with VGA registers provided they are supported by the display and fit into one of the following categories e 16 colour graphics using 4 video planes as VGA up to 524288 pixels e 256 colour graphics based on mode 13h up to 65536 pixels e 256 colour graphics using Plane Mask Read Plane Select registers as 360x480x256 mode up to 262144 pixels Many games use unusual screen modes achieved in unusual ways so there will still be some software that will not work 6 7 PC Expansion card serial and parallel ports Second processor cards This card does not have its own ports
27. DRV 39 ASIC features disable 79 Auto monitortype 55 AUTOEXEC BAT 33 34 B Back up via floppy drive 57 Buffers disabling 79 Bus mouse emulation 80 Busmouselnt 80 C Cables sound 82 Cache configuring 78 Aleph One Ltd Index Cache size 79 CD ROM device drivers 61 drivers 61 errors 70 extensions 62 CGA 76 Checking installation 7 Choosing modes 32 Closing down the PC 33 ConfData 73 CONFIG SYS 33 46 errors 70 Configuration 33 advanced 25 expansion cards 25 updating 24 Configuring the cache 78 Conventional memory 45 Coprocessor 50 Coprocessors 77 numeric 50 D Desktop operation 76 Device drivers CD ROM 61 Direct laser printing 66 Direct SCSI access 27 Direct SCS1 problems 71 DOS editing text and system files 3 games on screen 54 screen modes 55 DOS boxes and Windows 38 85 PC Cards User Guide DOS partition files 17 DOS software monochrome 77 DOSFS 15 35 DR DOS 45 and Windows 39 Drivers Windows 76 selecting printer 65 E Editing configuration 24 DOS text files 34 EGA 76 Emulation bus mouse 80 Enable boot from floppy 25 Enable VGA mode support 75 Errors CD ROM 70 SCS1 71 Windows 69 et TCP 60 Exiting Windows Quitting Windows Shutting down the PC 33 Expanded memory 44 45 Expansion cards configuration 25 coprocessors 50 installing 8 memory 51 printing 64 serial and parallel port upgrade 57 Extended memory 44 45 Extensions CD ROM 62 F File transfer 36 86 Files editing DOS
28. ISC OS 3 5 or later of the form x640y480c 16 Note that unlike the RISC OS Display Manager spaces aren t allowed and currently neither are the optional eigen and refresh values Here are the strings used to represent the different colour depths BitsPerPixel Palette Colours String 4 Fixed 16 c16 8 Fixed 256 c256 8 Definable 256 c256p 16 Fixed 32 thousand c32K 32 Fixed 16 million cl6M For example x640y480c16M denotes a 640x480 display in 16 million colours On pre Risc PC Acorn computers you just specify a mode number If you have extra hardware such as a colour card fitted then you can specify the extra modes supplied by this hardware Some example modes Memory Memory Modes Resolution Colours needed recommended 12 640x256 16 80K 256K i5 640x256 256 160K 256K 28 640x480 256 300K 400K 31 800x600 16 235K 300K 39 896x352 16 154K 256K 40 896x352 256 308K 400K Aleph One Ltd 43 PC Cards User Guide Allocating RAM for video modes You must allocate enough RAM for a mode To find out how much memory a mode uses 1 Change to it on the desktop 2 Use the Task Manager to display the Screen Memory value Note that e You can allocate more than is needed for the specified mode The extra is used to speed up blitting by keeping the data in ARM memory Blitting happens when the screen is repainted on removing a dialog box or menu in Windows For small modes 640x480 then up to 60 extra is useful
29. It must use the host machine s In general these will behave exactly as the equivalent ports on a normal PC but in a few instances it is possible for the hosted nature of the ports to cause different behaviour Timing critical devices using interrupts may find that the increased interrupt latency is a problem and serial performance may not be as fast as expected In practice parallel port devices such as network adaptors sound adaptors IDE interfaces can be expected to work and serial devices at speeds of up to 28 800bps To use the host serial or parallel port you must specify these options in PCConfig See Printing on page 19 and Serial port on page 20 for details Expansion cards serial and parallel interfaces These interfaces behave exactly like The Aleph One PC Expansion cards are equipped with their own R1 the first serial port COM1 and parallel port LPT1 on a PC 56 Aleph One Ltd PC card devices You can send and receive data over both interfaces allowing dongles and modems to be used straightforwardly Be sure to select Single tasking full screen mode when using the serial or parallel interfaces to achieve reliable operation In multi tasking mode it is possible for other RISC OS applications to interfere with the PC application and cause errors Serial and parallel port upgrade for expansion cards It is possible to fit a second serial port and enhanced serial parallel R1 controller to expansion cards
30. Parallel port 56 Partition size 15 PC quitting 33 resetting 33 starting up 31 PC Card modes 32 PC card package contents 6 PC expansion card hardware 47 PC speaker sound 59 Powersaving 78 Printing direct lasers 66 from expansion cards 64 from second processor cards 65 network 66 selecting drivers 65 TurboDrivers 66 PrintScreen 32 Processors 486SLC 47 TI486SXL2 79 Producing trace files 67 Q Quitting the PC 33 87 PC Cards User Guide R Resetting the PC 33 RISC OS 57 returning to the desktop 32 Risc PC installing cards 7 S Screen grabbing 32 Screen modes matching 54 Screens capturing 32 SCSI errors 71 Second processor cards CPU 48 installing 7 memory 52 printing 65 using host ports 56 Second processors cache 78 Serial and parallel port upgrade 5 Serial port 56 Shrink PC window to fit screen 77 Shutting down the PC 33 SIMMs choosing 51 Single tasking operation 30 and using ports 57 switching to 32 Size DOS partition 15 Size of PC window 77 Software installing 11 Sound constructing a cable 82 PC speaker 59 Sound cable 59 88 SoundBlaste 63 SoundBlaster adaptors 59 SPEAKER DRV 59 Starting the PC expansion card 30 Starting up the PC 31 SuperVGA modes 55 Support software 10 Switching modes 32 System files DOS 34 T Text files DOS 34 TI486SXL2 clock doubling enabled 79 Trace 78 Trace information 67 Transferring files between RISC OS and DOS Troubleshooting 67 CD ROM 70 SCSI
31. aled LPT1 and LPT2 Line PrinTer PRN is a synonym for LPT1 The Printing option in PCConfig allows you to control the connection between these logical printer streams amp physical printer ports Ignore RISC OS printer streamconnects the LPT1 print stream to the connector on the PC Card and disables LPT2 e Use RISC OS printer stream for LPT1 connects the LPT1 print stream to the RISC OS printer stream and connects the LPT2 print stream to the connector on the PC Card e Use RISC OS printer stream for LPT2 connects the LPT1 print stream to the connector on the PC Card and connects the LPT2 print stream to the RISC OS printer stream The port on the PC Expansion Card itself is real PC hardware and thus is bidirectional so any parallel port device can be plugged in here for example dongles sound cards Ethernet adaptors Note that some devices when plugged in here can cause the PC Card s self tests to fail thus disabling this port If this happens to you then you need to use the SETPRN utility in the Drivers Printer directory on the release floppy The Readme_prn file explains how to use it Aleph One Ltd Printing from the PC card The port on the host computer for some Acorn computers including A300 and A400 series and A3000 can only send data so it can generally only be used for printing not dongles etc However using this port has the advantage that you don t have to move the printer from one socket to ano
32. ame is the name by which MSCDEX will know the device driver it should be no more than 8 characters long If you do not have D name the name will default to MSCDO00 ERROR Cannot find Aleph One BIOS services Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting You are trying to run A ICD SYS on a system which is not an Aleph One PC card for example a normal DOS system or the Acorn PC emulator ERROR No CD ROM drives working The PC application has been unable to find any working CD ROM drives This may be because the drive is switched off or the Acorn CD filing system and driver CDFS is not loaded or you have not configured at least one CD ROM drive as noted above If you turn trace messages on then a reason for the failure should be produced see Using trace information on page 67 Direct SCSI problems First try turning on the trace messages see start of this chapter You should get a reason for the non appearance of the drive in the Tracefile Here is what the messages mean SCSI_ Reserve failed device X IPC has been unable to reserve the SCSI drive X is the device ID most often because it is in use by something else usually RISC OS You need to make the direct access drive the one with the highest SCSI ID apart from the host and then Configure SCSIFSdiscs n where n is the number of SCSI drives you have excluding the direct access drive Note that different interfaces may have slightly different names from SCS1FSdiscs
33. bility as the set of available modes is not fixed by the operating system but contained in a monitor definition file which is read at boot time It is possible to add modes to this file if you know the abilities of your monitor and the file format You will need a copy of the Acorn applicaiton Makemodes available from Acorn If a mode PC doesn t know how to handle is selected it will always check with RISC OS to see if such a mode can be displayed If the mode cannot be displayed then PC reverts to multitasking and displays the mode in a window of the correct size Games under DOS DOS games often select odd shaped modes thus causing problems with PC If you find that a game reverts to multi tasking and you have a Risc PC RISC PC 54 Aleph One Ltd PC card devices 1 Use the Save sprite feature see Switching between PC Card modes on page 32 to save a copy of the screen 2 Load this into Paint to find the size and colour depth of the screen 3 Create a suitably shaped mode to enable you to use the software in single tasking mode Auto monitortype If your monitor type is set to Auto then the PC card software cannot tell what modes it can single task in So if WinDrvMode is set to 31 and you are not already in mode 31 it will revert to multitasking To stop this happening change your monitortype to reflect the actual type of your monitor Standard DOS modes Mode 0 CGA EGA VGA 40x25 text Mode 1
34. ble The Audio port by Media Vision Inc The output is 8 bit mono 2 22kHz so the sound quality is not particularly high but sufficient for many applications It has an internal speaker and a 3 5mm jack socket a microphone socket for digitising sound and a Windows 3 1 device driver which gives SoundBlaster Adlib and ThunderBoard compatibility under Windows in Enhanced mode It supports DOS applications running under Windows but not DOS applications on their own It can be obtained from companies supplying the PC market at about 60 plus VAT The Logitech AudioMan is a similar 8 bit device with a built in microphone Aleph One Ltd 59 PC Cards User Guide This has instructions tailored for use with the Risc PC It has a built in unidirectional microphone and records at 11 Khz It is an 8 bit mono device and plays at 22KHz Drivers for playing WAV files under Windows are supplied There is no DOS support It costs 85 Desktop Laminations PO Box 332 BRISTOL BS99 7XL 0117 979 9979 The Port able Sound Plus from Digispeech Inc supports 8 or 16 bits per channel and filetypes such as DVIIMA ADPCM OK1 ADPCM and SoundBlaster ADPCM It can generate simultaneous synthesised music and digitised audio playback with multiple voices Sockets are provided for stereo audio output to headphones 3 5 mm audio input from CD ROM and a supplied mono loudspeaker plus microphone unit DOS and Windows device drivers are included It ca
35. cess time of 70nS or less e Memory capacity of 512K x32 2MB 1MB x32 4MB 2MB x32 8MB or 4MB x32 16MB e 8MB SIMMs must be of the 16 or 20 chip variety More modem 4 chip SIMMs cannot be used It is recommended that you fit at least 4MB in order to run Windows and applications Aleph One Ltd 51 PC Cards User Guide o o Jumper fitted o o No jumper 2 2MB gt 2MB o 2MB e 2 2MB 4MB 2 4MB 2 4MB gt 0 4MB k 16MB e 16MB f 16MB 16MB 512kx32 2MB 1MBx32 4MB 2MBx32 8MB 4MBx32 16MB To change memory first remove the existing SIMM by freeing the retaining clips at either end and prying up the SIMM Now alter the memory jumpers next to JP15 so that jumpers are fitted in the combinations in the diagram above Note that some S1MMs which have ICs mounted on both sides may require the jumper posts to be trimmed down with side cutters to allow the jumper to clear the rear of the SIMM You may prefer to have memory upgrades performed by your dealer If you perform the upgrade yourself you should take great care to avoid static electricity and not to damage the SIMM or the PC Card Thus a PC card with 4MB RAM using video mode x800y600c256 with an extra 250K for blitting will use 420K for PC application 472K for PC screen 250K for screen blitting 1142K host RAM and 4096K RAM on the PC Card itself Memory and second processor cards The second processor cards do not have thei
36. e Interrupt number for bus mouse Config line BusMouselnt n 80 Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting Default setting 3 This specifies the interrupt that the bus mouse emulation will use If you are using the supplied AMOUSE COM driver 4th Dec 1992 then you must leave this at 3 The MOUSE COM supplied with Windows can use interrupts 2 3 or 5 Aleph One Ltd 81 PC Cards User Guide Appendix B Expansion card sound Constructing a sound cable To make your own cable you will require 1 Qty Item 1 2 pin 0 1 female socket for example molex 1 10 pin 2x5 female socket 2 25cm lengths low voltage wire ideally Red amp Black 1 47K or 500K variable 0 25W resistor 1 Soldering iron or crimp tool Make up a cable with a socket at each end joined by the two lengths of wire Connect the resistor in series with the Red wire ie the signal not the ground 2 Twist the wires together along their length You should end up 3 82 with something which looks like this Resistor in red wire Connector Connector Fit one end of the cable over the sound plug on the PC card Attach Black to Ground furthest from the JP5 label and Red to Output closest to the JP5 label The location of the plug on the Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting PC Card is shown below oscillators aa SIMM n 25 way 5 parallel 9 way serial pi et a a E f way connector
37. e installation process Do not reconnect the electricity supply to the computer until you have completed the installation and replaced the computer s top cover Once you have switched off and unplugged your computer from the electricity supply 1 Remove the top cover of your computer following the instructions in Part 3 Inside the computer in the Welcome Guide 2 Remove the card from its packaging taking care not to touch any connector pins 3 Find the rear processor socket on the motherboard It is important that the PC card is placed in the rear socket of the two sockets for proper cooling and fitting If your ARM processor is in the rear slot move it to the front slot Aleph One Ltd 7 PC Cards User Guide 4 Push the card down firmly until it is seated on its socket 5 Replace the computer s top cover You may now reconnect the computer to the electricity socket at the wall Heat and power issues 486 processor chips generate a lot of heat Thus you should ensure that the cooling fan in your computer can do its job The airflow inside the computer goes from right to left viewed from the front so make sure that e The sides of the computer are kept clear so that air can circulate e If you are using the computer in tower configuration on its side the feet must be fitted and the surface must be hard ie not carpet The computer should be right hand side down so that natural convection assists rat
38. ed 5 7 Changing partition size If you run out of disk space in your DOS partition you have three options e Use the disk compression software suppplied with DOS 6 or 36 Aleph One Ltd Using your PC Card later This has the disadvantages that the compressed drive cannot be usefully read from the RISC OS Desktop and that there is an increased risk of data loss if corruption occurs e Increase the partition size If you have only one partition simply create a further partition using PCConfig To increase the partition size you have to create a new partition file it is not possible to change the size of an existing partition file Unless you have space for both the old and the new partitions you must back up all your data delete the old partition create the new one and reinstall your data However if you have space for both partitions then it is much easier and quicker to transfer the data using DOS The details of this operation will vary according to whether you have one or two partitions and their names but here is the principle You create the new larger partition copy all the data from the old partition to it then make the PC card use the new partition Once this is done you can delete the old partition To create a new partition 1 Use PCConfig to create a new partition file of the required size as drive D but call it NewDrv_C If you have a second partition file already make sure that the new one you are
39. eports about the Windows driver mode SCS1 support etc 8 2 Common problems PC Card did not reset PC Card not found Sometimes you just get a completely blank screen on starting PC The first message means exactly what it says It can be caused by a number of things e Wrong PC application for hardware This sometimes also causes the second messageYou can check the version and expected hardware of the runimage file by changing to the PC directory on the command line and then typing runimage This will report 16 bit ASIC Elvis for an expansion card or Risc PC 486 Coprocessor Card for a second processor card e If the SIMM memory on an expansion card is missing broken not making proper connection or wrongly configured e A genuine hardware fault PC card not responding probably crashed Again this means exactly what it says The PC card and the host communicate regularly If the host gets no response when it expects one it waits about four seconds and then issues this messge This is the equivalent of a hang on a normal PC It is usually due to a software incompatibilty on the PC card In most cases a normal PC would also have crashed at this point HIMEM gives cannot control A20Gate error This will happen if you have the L1 cache option set incorrectly on 68 Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting a Mark I card It should be 2 See Appendix A for details and change the setting to be correct No boot drive
40. er Guide TurboDrivers If you have a Computer Concepts TurboDriver then it affects your PC Card printing With second processor cards you cannot use the parallel port for bidirectional work as both the dongled cable and its software are likely to corrupt data The TurboDriver queues data on the RISC OS print stream as opposed to data sent to a RISC OS printer driver which can make printing with the TurboDriver installed much slower than without it The best solution is to fit a printer switch so that RISC OS prints through the turbodriver cable and the PC Card prints through a normal lead Network printing Because of the differing ways in which DOS and RISC OS handle printing it is currently impossible to print from the PC card via RISC OS across a network As this User Guide went to press a solution to this difficulty was under discussion If you need to print in this way contact Aleph One for up to date information Direct laser printing Direct laser printers attached to the Acorn computer eg ArcLaser Laser Direct can be used when printing via the Acorn computer is selected and the direct laser printer is configured with an Epson compatible printer emulator Consult the documentation supplied with your direct laser printer for more information 66 Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting 8 Troubleshooting Like any 1BM compatible computer the PC card may fail to run some DOS applications perfectly Utility programs which
41. es this necessary A 2 Enabling advanced configuration options Should you want to add any of these options to the PCConfig advanced configuration window you will need to edit the ConfData text file inside the PCConfig application To do this 1 Shift double click on the PCconfig application icon in the filer window 2 Open the ConfData file using a text editor such as Edit You will see that it contains a list of options and settings Options are prevented from appearing in the PCConfig window by a character at the start of the title string 3 Removing the from an option will enable the option for configuration with PCConfig 4 When you have enabled or disabled the required settings save the updated file 5 Next time you load PCconfig the revised set of options will Aleph One Ltd appear in the Advanced configuration window Change the settings you want and click the OK button to confirm and save your changes 73 PC Cards User Guide A 3 Editing advanced configuration options To update your configuration options 1 Load the PCConfig program 1PGcontig 2 Choose Advanced configuration from the Open menu 3 A warning box will appear telling you not to change options without instructions from the Readme file Click OK 4 The advanced configuration window will be displayed and you can open any section to update or change your choices Advances configuration lt lt lt D in
42. extensions to DOS Set the number of CDROM drives Restart RISC OS and the PC Card to effect the changes made Copy the A 1CD SYS file from the Drivers CDROM directory on the release floppy to the root directory of your hard drive It doesn t have to go there but these instructions assume that for simplicity If your DOS is DRDOS any version or another DOS before version 6 then you will not have MSCDEX EXE and must copy that from the release floppy too Use the copy of MSCDEX EXE supplied with your DOS in preference where you have one e Novell DOS 7 is supplied with the alternative NWCDEX EXE which will also work it uses DPMI see your manual Adding the device driver To add the CD ROM device driver 1 Aleph One Ltd If you have PC Emulator PC Soft CD ROM support configured in CONFIG SYS then you must remove that driver as it is incompatible with the PC card Add this line to your CONFIG SYS file DEVICE A1CD SYS D name where name is the name of your CD ROM device It must 61 PC Cards User Guide be the same as that used in the MSCDEX line but can be something different if you like It is important to do this with a DOS editor or understand the potential difficulties of not doing so see Editing DOS text and system files on page 34 Note that the D does not imply that the CDROM will appear as drive D it will take the next available drive letter which is usually D if you have one partition o
43. f the disc still available to RISC OS e DOS format SCSI device This is a real DOS format fixed or removeable disk completely devoted to DOS that anormal PC could also read It is only really useful if you need to move very large files between your PC Card and a normal PC for example on Syquest discs It is no faster than a normal partition file e Local IDE drive This option is only available for the PC Expansion card It is a DOS formatted drive plugged directly into the PC Card and not accessible from RISC OS 16 Aleph One Using PCConfig at all For details on setting this up see the following section Using direct IDE drives on page 25 4 Select the type of drive you need then read the appropriate section below DOS partition files 1 Specify the complete filename for where you want the partition file The default is ADFS 4 drive C If you already have a partition just drag its icon to the filename window and then click OK or Save 2 To create the new partition click Create A further sub dialog will appear with the name of the file to create iE l iPCFormat File name adfs 4 drive c Wa Initialise ready for use Help Cancel Create 3 Make sure the Initialise ready for use option is ticked to format the partition when it is created If you do not do this you will need to format the partition using DOS before you can use it to store PC files 4 Speci
44. fy the partition size you want in megabytes Click the up arrows to increase each digit or the down arrows to reduce it 5 Click Create The partition will be created and formatted if required the Aleph One Ltd 17 PC Cards User Guide 4 3 Memory USC PC dialogue box will close and you will return to the Disc setup dialogue 6 Click OK in the Disc Setup dialogue box and Save in the main PCconfig dialogue box to confirm these settings You must do this for PC to be able to recognise the partition The PC Expansion Card has its own RAM onboard so it does not have this option This option defines how much RAM second processor PC cards can use that is how much memory the PC itself will have Note that not all values are possible and the PC card approximates to the nearest lower value see PC memory on page 51 To set the memory allocated to the PC card 1 Memory 18 Click Select on the Memory icon The following dialogue box is displayed lt Memory Configuration Memory in machine MB Free memory available now MB Memory allocated for dieplay KB Memory to allocate to PC Card MBI The configuration software examines your computer setup and shows you how much memory you have how much is free and how much memory is allocated for the display Click the Up or Down arrows to set the amount of memory the Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig PC card can use
45. h very old software that uses CGA or EGA modes and displays extremly slowly then try changing this setting Also if you get division by 0 errors or other failures with games it is worth trying changing this setting to see if it helps 0 is most compatible while 1 and 2 may make DOS software run faster Allow desktop operation 76 Config line UseWindowFE On Off Default setting on Select Allow desktop operation if you want to be able to run the PC in multi tasking mode on the RISC OS desktop or if you want to use the Windows driver The default setting is On Turning it off disables the multitasking option where the PC card runs in a window on the RISC OS desktop It saves a few K of memory The only reason for turning it off is if you are very short of memory under RISC OS and only want to run DOS software Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting Shrink PC window to fit screen Config line ScaleToFit On Off Default setting off Select Shrink PC window to fit screen if you want to scale the PC screen to fit your screen e This option causes the window front end to attempt to keep the RISC OS window the same size regardless of PC display mode or RISC OS mode The best way to understand this effect is to try it in several PC and several RISC OS modes Maths Coprocessor present Config line Coprocessor on off Default setting on This option is auto detecting You may explicitly set this to Off to over ride the auto detection Use l
46. have placed the disk in a different drive 7 Select the driver 8 Continue with the installation supplying disks as prompted You may find that some files are not on the requested disk but on a different one as not all Windows releases have all the files distributed in exactly the same way see above If so insert the disk containing the required file rather than the specified disk You will have to restart Windows for the changes to take effect Installation by hand Note that you must have installed Windows with the VGA Version 3 0 video option before doing this otherwise DOS boxes in Windows will not work To install the driver 1 Copy the driver file ARMDRV DRYV into your PC s WINDOWSI SYSTEM directory 2 Load the file SYSTEM IN1 in your PC s WINDOWS directory into a text editor or SYSEDIT 3 Find the line in the boot section which reads display drv vga drv and replace it with the line display drv armdrv drv To change the description as well as the driver not necessary but recommended you also need to change the display dry line in the boot description section of the SYSTEM_INI file to display drv ConfigurableARMDriver 4 8 16 32bpp 5 11 Configuring the Windows driver You need to specify the mode for the Windows Driver to use This can be either a decimal RISC OS mode number for RISC OS 2 and 42 Aleph One Ltd Using your PC Card 3 machines or a Risc PC style mode specifier for R
47. her than opposes the airflow generated by the fan 2 2 Installing PC Expansion Cards The PC expansion card is a single width expansion card which may be fitted to any vacant expansion slot in your computer In all models except the A3000 the card fits within the computer s case the A3000 requires an external box to contain the expansion card please consult the fitting instructions supplied with the box e Switch off the computer and unplug it from the electricity supply at the wall before starting the installation process e Do not reconnect the electricity supply to the computer until you have completed the installation and replaced the computer s top cover To fit the card to computers other than the A3000 1 Remove the computer s top cover 2 Insert the card into a vacant expansion card slot Make sure that the card is firmly seated in its backplane connector 3 Once you are sure that the card is firmly connected to the backplane fasten the card to the rear of the case with the two 8 Aleph One Ltd Installing PC Cards screws supplied 4 If necessary use the blank panel and T piece supplied to fill any vacant space left in the back panel by fitting the card for example if the PC expansion card is the only card fitted 5 Replace the top cover and switch the computer back on If you are in any way unhappy about performing this task yourself then please contact your Acorn dealer for assistance Checking that ex
48. i 5 Click on each icon in turn entering your choices in each dialogue box You must enter details in the Disc setup section and you should check that the settings in Memory Printing and Display are suitable for your system other options are a matter of personal preference 6 When you have finished configuring each option click the Save button in the PC Card configuration window to save your choices Note that the window has different options for different PC Cards and future versions of the software may also look different from the examples here 4 2 Disc setup Now you are ready to set up a DOS partition file for your PC Card to use as its hard disc drive This involves allocating space on your Diso seut hard disc which looks exactly like a DOS hard disc to the PC Card PCConfig is used for this You can have a maximum of two of these partitions Note that these files are not really partitions in the correct use of the term but that is the word we will use in this document 14 Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig Deciding on partition size You need to spend a moment deciding how much space to allocate to the PC Card before creating the drives as you cannot change the size of the drive without losing all the data on it e If you will only be using DOS then a partition as small as 10MB might be sufficient although 30MB is sensible e If you are using Windows then about 40MB should be viewed as a minimum a
49. ions i Allow PC Card to boot from floppy dise 2 Click the button so that a tick appears to allow booting from a floppy disc You must tick this option in order to install DOS 3 Click OK to confirm your choices and return to the main PC config window 4 10 Updating your configuration As you work with your PC card you may wish to change the configuration you have to reflect changes in your computer setup or way of working 24 Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig There are also additional configuration options available In most cases you will not need to use them but if you have an unusual combination of hardware or experience problems with software you are trying to use it may be worth fine tuning your setup Some expansion card specific options are also accessed via this option Details of advanced configuration options and when you should use them are given in Appendix A Editing your configuration To update your configuration options 1 Load the PCConfig program 2 Click Select on the PCConfig icon on the icon bar or choose Main configuration from the Open menu 3 The configuration window will be displayed and you can open any section to update or change your choices 4 Remember to click Save when you have finished editing your choices and to quit and reload PC so that your changes come into effect Obsolete options on update Note that if you receive a software update some of the options may have become obs
50. irectly Tick this option if you want to PC card to use parallel port peripherals such as tape streamers network or sound adaptors which need to make unconventional use of the port Note that while PC is loaded the parallel port will not be available to RISC OS if you select this option RISC PC 4 Click OK to confirm your choices and return to the main PC config window 4 5 Serial port This option for second processor cards only enables the PC second processor card to use the serial port of the host computer for example to use a modem RISC PC To do this in a compatible way the PC must take complete control of the ports while it is loaded Note that while PC is loaded the specified direct port is not available to RISC OS To enable the use of the serial port 1 Click Select on the Serial Port icon in the PC config window Q The following dialogue box will appear Serial Port Serial Port IY Allow PC Card to access the serial port directly 2 Click in the box so that a tick appears if you want the PC card to be able to access the serial port 3 Click OK to confirm your choices and return to the main PC config window 20 Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig 4 6 Display Display The Windows driver ARMDRV DRYV can use any RISC OS screen mode for the Windows display This screen mode is set with this option The choice of colour depth and resolution may be restricted by the disp
51. l allow the PC pointer to be used To reconnect the RISC OS pointer click Menu When the mouse is connected to the PC pointer you will not be able to switch from multi tasking to single tasking mode by double clicking reconnect the mouse to the RISC OS pointer first by clicking Menu 6 4 Numeric coprocessor Some DOS programs using floating point numbers will require a numeric coprocessor to run many others will simply run faster if a numeric coprocessor is fitted There is no equivalent to the Floating Point Emulator for DOS programs so you may have to have one of these chips to run certain programs at all Coprocessors are automatically detected by the software and you need take no action to ensure their use PC expansion cards 50 An optional 387SX numeric coprocessor may be added simply by plugging it into the vacant socket on the PC card It must be inserted in a static free environment and in the correct orientation you should therefore ask your dealer to do this for you if you are in any way uncertain about the procedure e If you perform this upgrade for yourself be warned that Aleph One will not entertain warranty claims for incompetent fitting Be sure to use a 387SX numeric coprocessor rated at no less speed than the main 486 processor this will normally be 25MHz but a 33MHz or 40 MHz chip will also work These speeds will also work with the clock doubled 486 50 card because the PC Card speed is still 25MHz
52. lay capabilities of your computer If you cannot display 16 million colours in RISC OS you will not be able to do so in Windows either The PC display contents need to be stored in memory With the PC Card this memory actually resides in the Acorn host computer Here you can specify a value for how much memory you want to devote to this This memory is added to the Wimpslot used by the PC application Thus the total RISC OS memory used by the PC Card iS e For expansion cards PC Wimpslot VideoRAM e For second processor cards PC Wimpslot VideoRAM PCRAM To set the display options 1 Click Select on the Display icon in the PC configuration window The following dialogue box will be displayed Select a screen mode for video display Colours 256 colours H iv Resolution 640x480 1 v Palette Suggested memory allocation KB Memory to use for video KB 375 2 Click the list button at the right of the Colours option to display a list of colour depths Pick the one you want by clicking Select Aleph One Ltd 21 PC Cards User Guide on it bearing in mind the display capabilities of your computer 3 Click the list button at the right of the Resolutions option to display a list of screen resolutions Pick the one you want 4 Tick the Palette option if you want to use a redefinable palette in 256 colour modes This is recommended for compatibility 5 When you have made your choices
53. les from the Drivers directory on the PC software disc These are DOS files and can be copied to your DOS partition after you have set it up and decided what you need Read the later chapters on Windows sound support CD ROM support and using the mouse to determine which files you need and where you should install them Aleph One Ltd 11 12 PC Cards User Guide 5 Once you have copied the files you must remove the PC software disc from the drive and reset your computer before running PC This enables you to use the PCConfig utility to set up your PC Aleph One Ltd Using PCConfig 4 Using PCConfig Once you have pysically installed the PC Card and copied its software on to your hard drive you will need to e Set up a DOS partition on your hard drive to store PC programs and files e Configure the software for use with the particular system setup you have To do this you should use the PCConfig utility program 4 1 Configuring your PC card Setting configuration options To configure your PC card 1 Make sure that you have removed the installation floppy and reset the computer 2 Double click on PCConfig ee fs PCconfig The program will load on to the icon bar 3 Click Select on the PCConfig icon on the icon bar Aleph One Ltd 13 PC Cards User Guide 4 The following setup window will appear ial Dise setup Memory a Display Startup PC RISCOS Booting RRRA
54. ll install a suitable one for you usually called MOUSE COM Note that if you have previously used the Acorn PC Emulator PC Soft then you must remove all copies of the AMOUSE COM supplied with that as it is incompatible with Aleph One PC cards Aleph One mouse driver Only if you wish to save memory or if you do not have a mouse driver supplied with your version of DOS is there any need to use the supplied Aleph One mouse driver AMOUSE COM This is a simple driver with minimal functionality so it takes up very little DOS memory To install this 1 Copy AMOUSE COM from the Drivers Mouse directory on the PC software floppy to your DOS partition see Moving files between RISC OS and DOS on page 34 2 Invoke the driver by typing AMOUSE at the DOS prompt 3 Normally you would want to add the AMOUSE command to your AUTOEXEC BAT file so that it is always executed on startup Using the mouse with Windows To use the mouse under Windows you need do nothing more than accept the defaults when installing Windows Using the mouse in multi tasking mode When running in multi tasking mode you will see up to two mouse pointers on your computer screen the RISC OS pointer and the PC pointer either DOS or Windows depending on the software you are running The mouse can only drive one pointer at a time so you should Aleph One Ltd 49 PC Cards User Guide choose Connect mouse from the PC card menu inside the PC card window This wil
55. n be obtained from for example Innovative Communications Ltd Kinetic Business Centre Theobald Street BOREHAMWOOD WD6 4SE Tel 0181 953 0948 at about 120 plus VAT 6 10 Network cards If you have an Ethernet card in your Acorn computer then this can be presented to the PC software as an NE2000 PC Ethernet card using the Network Links software supplied by Aleph One This means that you can then run all common PC networking systems alongside your Acorn network over the same cabling if desired Novell Netware Windows for Workgroups and Internet TCP IP are all possible as well as some others Contact Aleph One to discuss your requirements 6 11 CD ROM 60 Any CD ROM attached to the host computer can be used by the PC Card All you need to do is install the supplied device driver AICD SYS and install the CD ROM extensions These are supplied with modern versions of DOS and are also supplied with our software in case you have an old version of DOS Aleph One Ltd PC card devices It is also possible to fit an IDE CD ROM drive to the expansion card s 1DE connector but note that the drive will not be available to the host computer Installing CD ROM extensions To install CD ROM extensions 1 2 3 4 5 CD ROM driver First you need to transfer the device driver to your DOS partition see section Moving files between RISC OS and DOS on page 34 Add the device driver to your CONFIG SYS file Add the CD ROM
56. nce DOS is running It is here that any standard programs which you always want to be run are started for example mouse drivers disk recovery utilities Environment variables are also specified here Setting up these files is beyond the scope of this user guide and will generally be done for you by the installation programs of DOS Windows etc The only reason that you are likely to have to edit these files youself is for installing a CD ROM driver on some versions of DOS Refer to your DOS manual or any book about DOS for further details Editing DOS text and system files Note that DOS and RISC OS use different line feeds in text files so you must be very careful if editing DOS text files with a RISC OS editor such as Edit The OD at the end of each line is required for A DOS to understand the file DO NOT JUST TYPE THIS IN These characters represent the control character lt CR gt which is hex OD not the four characters 0 D You should generally edit DOS files with a DOS editor Failing that use a RISC OS editor that can edit DOS files correctly If you must use Edit then copy the 0D from another line to the end of any lines that you add 5 6 Moving files between RISC OS and DOS Transferring supplied drivers A number of optional software items are supplied with the PC software The exact drivers supplied are likely to change with future releases but currently consist of e Mouse driver 34 Ale
57. nd 100Mb is typical The amount of PC software that you intend to install is obviously significant remember that PC software especially for Windows takes up much more disk space than RISC OS software e Aleph One PC cards allow the use of DOS partition files up to 512MB in size The version of DOS FS built into RISC OS 3 10 and 3 5 does not let the RISC OS Filer support partitions larger than 32MB so while the PC card can access larger partitions RISC OS cannot see them directly or display them on the desktop To view these larger partitions from the desktop you need to install an updated version of DOSFS version 0 49 or later This is built into RISC OS 3 6 See Installing DOSFS on page 10 Settina up vour PC storaae disc To set up your PC storage 1 Click Select on the Disc setup icon in the PC Card Disc setup Aleph One Ltd 15 PC Cards User Guide configuration window The following setup dialogue box will appear Disc Setu Hard disc setup Number of hard disc partitions i 1 Drive DOS Partition ADFS 4 Drive C Create Drive _J DOS format SCSI device Drive D Cancel 2 Enter the number of hard disc partitions you want you may have either one or two 3 You may keep your DOS partition in one of several locations Choose the option you require by clicking on its radio button e Partition is the usual option a big file on your RISC OS disk with the rest o
58. nd processor cards has the suffix 1 1 1 Late breaking information Supplied with your PC Card software is a text file README This contains information which was received too late to include in this User Guide Please read this file before you install your card it may contain information about changes in procedures or additional facilities which are not described in this document 1 2 Registering your card It is vital that you complete and return the registration card supplied with your PC Expansion Card YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE ANY SOFTWARE UPDATES UNLESS YOU DO All updates to the core Aleph One Ltd 5 PC Cards User Guide PC software are free simply return your program disc for updating regularly Some optional software extensions such as networking software are charged for 1 3 About this User Guide RISC PC This User Guide covers the installation and setup of both expansion and second processor cards and their software Where there are differences in procedures between the two card variants these are clearly marked in the text which follows with both text and logos in the margin e Information specific to second processor cards is shown by the RiscPC logo as only RiscPCs can currently host these cards e Information specific to expansion cards is shown by an Aleph One logo This User Guide does not attempt to teach you how to use DOS and Windows If you are new to using PCs and their operating systems
59. ndows drawing functions by using the ARM processor as a graphics coprocessor It supports 16 256 32 thousand and 16 million colours in any resolution that your system can display It replaces the standard VGA driver VGA DRYV It also gives full palette support on Risc PCs Note that the Windows driver cannot display modes beyond those normally available with your hardware For example Acorn computers older than the Risc PC cannot display more than 256 colours without additional hardware Also the 256 colours supported are not the same 256 colours that a PC would have so on these systems it is not always possible to reproduce colours accurately The driver supplied is called ARMDRV DRV The driver can be installed e Using Windows Setup For most users we recommend that you use Windows Setup either during the initial installation or after Windows is installed e Manually as detailed below If you are an experienced Windows DOS user then it is quicker to use the manual method but you must be sure that your existing installation is for VGA Aleph One Ltd 39 PC Cards User Guide Version 3 0 otherwise you will have the wrong 386 grabber installed and your display will not work properly After installing the driver you need to use PCConfig to specify the RISC OS mode that the driver will use The OEMSETUP INF file supplied with this version of the Windows driver has to assume a particular version of Windows when prompting fo
60. ng files will result in corruption of the data on your drive To exit from the PC 1 Press Menu the middle mouse button or the ALT and BREAK keys simultaneously This will return you to multi tasking mode 2 Choose Quit from the PC application s icon bar menu 5 4 Resetting the PC card Reset the PC card using the traditional key combination CTRL ALT DEL This is sometimes referred to as a warm boot or soft reset in PC parlance A cold boot or hard reset is achieved by quitting and restarting PC e You must reboot the PC if you have changed your PC s CONFIG SYS or AUTOEXEC BAT files for example by installing new software and wish the alterations to come into effect 5 5 Configuring your PC When the PC starts up under DOS two important files affect its configuration These are CONFIG SYS and AUTOEXEC BAT These must be in the root directory for DOS to be able to work If these files are not found DOS will ask you to confirm the time and date CONFIG SYS sets up the DOS operating system by defining the data structures which determine how many files can be open what Aleph One Ltd 33 PC Cards User Guide languages can be displayed and what device drivers are installed to access memory CD ROMs etc It is consulted by DOS when the system in this case the PC card starts up AUTOEXEC BAT is a standard batch file see your DOS manual which contains executable DOS commands It is read by the system after CONFIG SYS o
61. ning this means the PC must share the ARM processor and consequently runs more slowly e There is a third state Freeze This occurs if the PC window is closed in multi tasking mode or if Freeze is selected from the icon bar menu Switching between PC Card modes 32 When running in a window multi tasking mode a double click will cause the PC to switch to single tasking mode you may return to the Desktop by pressing Menu the middle mouse button or ALT BREAK as described in the next section If you close the window while the PC is in multi tasking mode you can return to the PC Card by either clicking Select on the PC icon on the icon bar or choosing Single Task from the icon bar menu Multi tasking mode provides a menu within the window selected with the middle mouse button which allows the screen to be saved in sprite ie Paint and text ie Edit formats Note that some PC applications use text only or graphics only display modes which will prevent data saving in one or other format in this case the menu options will be grey and cannot be selected Aleph One Ltd Using your PC Card 5 3 Closing down the PC Make sure that you have saved any PC files you are working on before quitting e It is important to exit Windows completely before quitting by quitting any programs open and then quitting Windows e Wait until all files are written by waiting for the C gt prompt to reappear Quitting the PC while it is writi
62. olete These will produce a warning Unknown option xxxxxxx the first time you use the new version of PCConfig but once you have saved the settings this will not happen again as these old options will have been removed from the Config file 4 11 Using direct IDE drives Expansion Cards permit up to two IDE hard disks to be connected X1 directly to the PC card itself You may prefer to get your dealer to help you install and set up this drive If you have two drives they must be configured as master and slave Details of the link settings needed can be obtained from your Aleph One Ltd 25 PC Cards User Guide 64 way connector SIMM 25 way parallel port 486 9 way 40 pins serial port J10 IDE connector drive supplier Even if you have a hard drive connected to your PC card you may want to set up a PC partition accessible from the PC desktop for ease of moving files back and forth between the two environments This partition need not be your boot drive Setting up an IDE drive To set up an IDE drive do the following 1 26 Install the hard disk in a spare drive bay in your computer The disk must be fixed to a suitable mounting bracket inside the computer Connect the drive to the connector JP1 on the PC Expansion Card using a 40 way ribbon connector Ensure that pin I on the IDE drive connector and
63. ompletely black screen Starting up the PC You should now see the PC Card startup messages Aleph One Universal PC Card BIOS followed by a message showing the type of processor and cache detected e for expansion cards CPU Type 486SLC CPU Cache Enabled e for Mark I second processor cards CPU Type Cx486DX DX2 CPU Cache WriteBack then the following messages Total RAM 4096K Main RAM 640K Extended RAM 3072K After these messages will be messages showing that a numeric coprocessor has been detected where one is present e Other future cards may display slightly different messages If these messages do not appear then refer to Troubleshooting on page 67 Next you should see the message Booting from floppy disc You should be able to go on to install DOS Aleph One Ltd 31 PC Cards User Guide e If things do not go as they should then check the Troubleshooting chapter and Readme file for relevant details 5 2 Using the PC Card The PC card can be used in either single or multi tasking modes It is easy to change from one mode to the other and back The configuration options Start up and PC RISC OS affect the initial mode and control of mode changes e In single tasking mode the full speed of the PC is available but the RISC OS desktop is suspended whilst using the PC This is the usual mode of operation e In multi tasking mode the PC runs in a window whilst other RISC OS applications are also run
64. onfig programs e Used PCConfig to set up a hard disc partition or to enter details of your IDE or SCS1 PC format hard disc e Checked any other setup requirements and additional options in PCConfig which apply to your system you are ready to start using your PC Card 5 1 Starting the PC Card The first time you run PC you should insert your DOS boot install floppy and ensure that the Enable Boot from floppy option in PCConfig is on DOS stands for Disk Operating System and loads from disk rather than being in ROM as RISC OS is Once DOS is installed onto a hard disc you do not need a boot floppy disc again 1 Run PC by double clicking Select on its icon IPC 2 PC will start up Exactly what you see varies according to the Start up option that you selected in PCConfig In all cases the PC icon appears on the icon bar like any other RISC OS application e If you selected Start up on Icon bar as your start up option then nothing more will happen immediately You have the choice of clicking on the icon to start multitasking or Window mode or selecting Single task 30 Aleph One Ltd Using your PC Card from the icon bar menu to start single tasking or Full Screen mode e If you selected Start up in a RISC OS window then it starts up into multi tasking mode immediately This starts as a black window e If you selected Start up in full screen then it starts up into single tasking immediately This starts as a c
65. ow resolution font for text modes Config line UseLoResText On Off Default setting off If your monitor is not VGA or better you may prefer to use Low resolution text which is designed to be easier to read on low resolution screens If you are using a multi frequency monitor you should not select this option Use MDA monochrome video mode Config line InitInMono On Off Default setting off Select this option if you need to work in monochrome MDA mode on the PC You will only need this option for extremely old software that cannot run in colour This option may be discontinued in the future Aleph One Ltd 77 PC Cards User Guide Use powersaving features Config line PowerSaving On Off Default setting on This option uses the powersaving features of the 386 and 486 CPUs on all Aleph One PC cards to make significant heat and power savings when in multitasking mode and when frozen There is no performance penalty so this option should always be on Generate debug messages Config line Trace On Off Default setting off This line is used to turn on trace information when you have a problem with running software See the Troubleshooting chapter section 8 on page 67 for details Level 1cache Config line L1iCache 0 1 2 3 Default setting autodetecting L1 cache controls the processor s internal Level 1 cache Level 1 cache depends on whether the CPU has a write back or a write through cache It should be set to e w
66. pansion cards are correctly installed Check that your PC expansion card is correctly installed with the following procedure 1 Switch to the RISC OS command line by pressing function key F12 2 Type PODULES at the Supervisor prompt 3 You should see the message Podule X Aleph One PC Card Rev 2 where X is the number of the slot in which the card is fitted If this message does not appear then try the card in another slot before consulting your dealer for further instructions Aleph One Ltd PC Cards User Guide 3 Installing support software Before you can use your PC card you will need to e Install the latest version of DOSFS e Install the PC Card software e Set up a DOS partition e Install a copy of DOS A copy of DOS is also required all common versions of DOS from Microsoft Digital Research IBM and Novell have been tested on the PC card and found to operate correctly If you have RISC OS 2 you may need to update some of your system modules before you can run PC Aleph One can supply a Sysmerge utility to do this please contact technical support 3 1 Installing DOSFS DOSFS version 0 49 or higher enables you to view and access DOS disc partitions larger than 32MB using the RISC OS desktop Although optional it is recommended that you install it for ease of transferring files from RISC OS to DOS This is not required if you have RISC OS 3 6 or later which have a recent version of DOSFS built in Ins
67. ph One Ltd Using your PC Card e CD ROM driver and DOS extensions e Sound utilities e Windows driver These drivers are described in the relevant sections of this manual but there are some general principles associated with the transfer from the RISC OS PC floppy to the DOS environment which we explain here Drivers are found in the Drivers directory on the PC card software disc which is actually a Spark archive as this preserves the complete DOS filenames Within this archive are subdirectories for each driver set These files need to be transferred to your DOS partition This is usually most easily done on the RISC OS desktop if you have RISC OS 3 or using MultiFS or similar if you have RISC OS 2 Note that if your partition is bigger than 32MB then you must install the new DOSFS module supplied in order to access it see Installing DOSFS on page 10 1 Double click on your DOS partition icon This will open it up just like any other directory 2 Double click on the Drivers archive directory This will open it up 3 Drag files from the relevant directory inside Drivers to your DOS partition You are now using DOSFS to read from and write to your DOS partition file This is completely independent of the PC Card 4 The Windows drivers are installed by Windows and are put in the Windows System directory automatically 5 Most other drivers can be placed where you want to put them The mouse driver AMOUSE COM and
68. r E if you have two Adding the CD ROM extensions 62 Your DOS installation routine may well do this for you If not here are the instructions for doing it yourself 1 Add the line MSCDEX D MSCD000 to your AUTOEXEC BAT file Put this near the begining of the AUTOEXEC BAT file as the later commands may run something like DOSSHELL or WINdows which would mean that this command would not be executed until you quit from them Be careful about linefeeds see Editing DOS text and system files on page 34 You must alter the RISC OS configuration for CD ROM drives to indicate that a CD ROM drive is present Note that the RISC OS CDFS does not require this so you may not already have it correctly set but PC does require it and will not work without it displaying the error message No CD ROM drives working Recent versions of CDFS will let you configure the drive from the icon bar Click Menu on the CD ROM icon then choose Configure Drives and enter the number of CD ROM drives you have usually one If your software does not have this option you must do it Aleph One Ltd PC card devices from the Supervisor prompt by entering Configure CDFSDiscs 1 or more if you have several CD ROM drives and then press CTRL BREAK to bring the new configuration into effect Note that this syntax is for an Acorn SCSI card The exact command may be different for your SCS1 card for example CDROMDrives CDROMDiscs You can use s
69. r floppies This version assumes version 3 11 of both Windows and Windows for Workgroups If you have a different version 3 1 3 0 or 95 or even a version supplied by a manufacturer other than Microsoft then some of the files required may be on different floppies particularly vddvga30 386 which is on disk1 for v3 1 and disk2 for v3 11 If this is the case insert the disk containing the requested file shown in the bottom right of the setup screen rather than the prompted disk Setup will then proceed Using Setup when installing Windows 40 1 Copy the ARMDRV DRV and OEMSETUP IMNF files to a dos format floppy disk as detailed in Moving files between RISC OS and DOS on page 34 This disc will henceforth be referred to as the Aleph One Windows Driver floppy 2 Start to install Windows using the Custom Installation option 3 When you get to the screen that displays your settings do not choose the VGA Version 3 0 display option Instead choose Other display Requires disk from OEM from the bottom of the list 4 Insert the Aleph One Windows driver floppy into the drive as prompted 5 Press Return to accept the default path of A or type in the drive letter if you have placed the disk in a different drive 6 Select the driver Configurable ARM Driver 4 8 16 32bpp 7 Continue with the installation supplying disks as prompted You may find that some files are not on the requested disk Aleph One Ltd b
70. r own RAM Use the gt TZ PCRAM option in PCconfig to specify how much of the host T machine s RAM the PC card can use This value does not include any host or video memory Thus a PC card with 4MB RAM and using video mode 52 Aleph One Ltd PC card devices x800y600c256 with an extra 250K for butting will use 4 096K for PC RAM 420K for PC application 472K for PC screen 250K for screen butting 5 238K of host RAM The PCRAM setting is used to define how big the memory of the PC is Enter a value in Mbytes do not enter the M on the end Typical values are 4 8 12 16 You can specify any value you like but the PC card can only handle a limited number of chunks of memory so the number must be rounded to the nearest achievable value and it always rounds down The smallest possible memory is 1 1MB and the largest is 32 32MB Given these criteria the possible sizes of actual memory are e 1MB 2MB 3MB 4MB 5MB 6MB 7MB 8MB e 10MB 12MB 14MB 16MB 20MB 24MB 28MB 32MB Of course the host machine must have enough RAM to supply the PC card s requirements 6 6 Video The PC display depends on the capabilities of the host computer The PC card cannot display more colours than the host hardware It can display bigger modes than the host but only in a window in multi tasking mode Under Windows the PC card can display any mode the host can display using the Aleph One Windows driver supplied
71. riteback for Mark I second processor cards e writethrough for expansion cards This option should be correctly set when you receive your software and it never needs to be changed so it does not appear in PCcon fig You only need to reset this option if you lose or damage your configuration file or attempt to use this software with an Acorn PC card or a later Aleph One card Level 2 cache Config line L2Cache 0 1 2 3 Default setting autodetecting RISC PC 78 Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting e This option is irrelevant to expansion cards L2 cache controls the external Level 2 cache The correct settings depend on your hardware Level 2 cache should be set to e for Mark I second processor cards e 2 for Mark II second processor cards This option should be correctly set when you receive your software and it never needs to be changed so it does not appear in PCconfig You only need to reset this option if you lose or damage your configuration file or attempt to use this software with an Acorn PC card or a later Aleph One card Cache size Config line L2Size n Default setting 256 This option governs the size of the level 2 cache in second processor cards It is irrelevant to expansion cards The correct setting depends on hardware but can be between 32K and 512K Tl486SXL2 clock doubling enabled Config line ClkEnabled On Off Default setting depends on hardware RISC PC This option for second
72. s available DOS needs to boot from disk For this it needs two hidden files in specific places on the drive If these are not present you will get this error message You will also get this if the DOS partition is not marked active Normally this happens because you have created a drive and then run PC without installing DOS onto that drive It can also happen if PC has not recognised your hard drive which may be bootable so it is actually looking at the floppy drive and being unable to boot from that because there is no disc in it Cannot install DOS to hard drive You have created a drive_c partition but when you try to install DOS is says there is no hard drive or only gives you the option of installing to a floppy disc This can happen for a number of reasons to do with the way PCconfig operates It is possible for PCConfig to have edited the wrong config file or for you to have forgotten to save the settings or if you dragged a drive name into the box and made no other changes for the drive name not to have been recorded To check that PC is really looking for the DOS partition name you expect look at the Config file inside PC At the bottom of the file should be a line or two like HD0 File Name adfs 4 drive_c If the filename is blank or different from your drive then either go back to PCconfig reading Configuring your PC card on page 13 carefully and try again or put in the name with the text edi
73. so this option does not appear for second processor cards Expansion card users should select Enable VGA mode support if their monitor is capable of displaying a VGA screen If you do not have a monitor capable of displaying VGA modes Monitortype 1 3 or 4 required then the PC Card will revert to multitasking mode if a VGA or EGA mode is selected If you want to operate in single tasking mode you should turn this option off which will mean that CGA modes are always used and the PC Card will be able to remain in single tasking mode The VGA display requires an extra 512K of RAM to operate check that Aleph One Ltd 75 PC Cards User Guide you have enough free RAM under RISC OS before making this configuration Video retrace emulation Config line RetraceEmulation 0 1 2 Default setting Normal 0 The three options here are Normal Fast A and Fast B Normal is the default This option controls how the PC Card software emulates the Vertical and Horizontal Retrace registers found on VGA cards These registers are used by very old software to avoid rewriting screen memory whilst it is being displayed which caused snow on XT vintage display systems They are also used by games for things like synchronisation and generating pseudo random numbers For a perfect emulation the PC Card would have to spend its entire time updating these registers so a compromise in necessary Three possible options are given If you have trouble wit
74. t have this facilty will go much more slowly an Intel DX2 66 for example will go at about one third the speed of a Cyrix DX2 66 Thus chip upgrades are not possible unless faster 5V write back cache chips are produced The Mark 1I Aleph One second processor PC card can take a wide range of 3 3 5V processors Note that processor upgrades must be handled by Aleph One as changes are required to the CPU core voltage CPU interface voltage BIOS support CPU speed ASIC speed and a large number of links Attempts to change processors without a complete understanding of the details is very likely to damage expensive components 6 2 Keyboard When installing DOS or Windows you will probably have to specify the keyboard that you are using This varies depending which Acorn Computer your PC Card is installed in e If the host machine is a Risc PC then the keyboard should be configured as UK English e If the host machine is any of the older Acorn computers A5000 A3000 A400 A300 then the keyboard should be configured as a United States keyboard e If you have a foreign keyboard on any host machine eg German then you should indicate it when installing software 48 Aleph One Ltd PC card devices 6 3 Mouse The host computer s mouse is emulated for the PC Card as a Bus Mouse Installation software will usually set this up for you To use the mouse under DOS you need a mouse driver suitable for bus mice A modern version of DOS wi
75. tallation for expansion cards 10 To install DOSFS for use with an expansion card 1 Locate the directory System Modules likely to be Boot Resources System Modules 2 Drag the DOSFS file on the supplied disc into it 3 Load your DeskBoot file into an editor such as Edit and add Aleph One Ltd Installing support software the following line RMLoad System Modules DOSFS 4 Save the updated DeskBoot file Installation for second processor cards To install DOSFS for use with a second processor card 1 Open the root directory of your hard disc containing the Boot directory RISC PC 2 Locate the file Boot on the floppy supplied by Aleph One and drag it on to the root directory filer window 3 The contents of the file will be added to your existing Boot structure This procedure also installs PCSleep This utility program ensures that the PC card is put into a low power sleep mode on start up PC puts the PC card into sleep mode on exit 3 2 Installing the PC Card software The procedure for installing the PC card support software is the same for both expansion cards and second processor cards To install the software 1 Make a backup copy of the PC software and keep the original somewhere safe 2 Write protect your copy and use that from now on 3 Drag the PC and PCConfig applications into a suitable directory on your hard disc perhaps a directory called PC 4 You may need other fi
76. tatus at the command line to look through the settings to find the right name for your SCS1 card 4 Once everything is set up and RISC OS restarted you can run IPC You should see something like the following lines A1CD SYS CD ROM driver for PC Cards V1 1 C Aleph One Ltd 1994 1 drive s available MSCDEX Version 2 23 Copyright C Microsoft Corp 1986 1993 All rights reserved Drive E Driver MSCD000 unit 0 e See Troubleshooting on page 67 if this doesn t happen 6 12 Other devices If you want to use some other device from the PC Card such as a MIDI card then you will need a driver for that card from the card manufacturer to make it look like an equivalent PC card in this case a PC MIDI card You may then also need PC side drivers for the impersonated card This is how the NE2000 network card and SoundBlaster cards work Aleph One provides a developers kit to enable these drivers to be written Aleph One Ltd 63 PC Cards User Guide 7 Printing from the PC card There are a range of ways in which your PC Card can be configured to print These cater for all the possible combinations of host card and printer To give this flexibility is necessarily a little complex Here we explain how to do what you want Printing from expansion cards 64 With a PC expansion card you have two possible printer ports one on the PC card and one on the host computer DOS also recognises two logical printer streams c
77. ternal cache options Auto configure J Write back cache 3 Write through cache J No cache Video retrace emulation Normal _ FastA _ FastB Generate debug messages Enable bus mouse emulation iv interrupt number for bus mouse 3 Interrupt number for NE2000 card 5 __Gancet 5 Remember to click Save when you have finished editing your choices and to quit and reload PC so that your changes come into effect Adding options to the advanced configuration window Not all the available options are displayed automatically in the Advanced configuration window 74 Aleph One Ltd Troubleshooting However all are stored in PC Config s ConfData file To add hidden options to the advanced configuration window 1 Shift double click on PCConfig to open its directory 2 Load the text file ConfData into a text editor 3 Each item is listed in the file Hidden items have a character in from of their item name 4 Delete the character from the options you want to appear 5 Save the edited file 6 Reload PC Config The hidden options will now appear in the file You can also edit the configuration directly by opening the file Config inside PC A 4Advanced configuration options The entries in this section have the title of the option as it appears in the PCconfig window Enable VGA mode support Config line VGA Attached On Off Default setting on e All RISC PCs support VGA resolutions
78. that is 2 1 seconds Fitting a drive activity light It is possible to fit an LED to the PC Card via jumper J10 This allows you to set up a front panel LED so that you can see when the drive is being accessed Note that if you do this the LED will always be on before PC is run for the first time and will only give a reliable reading when you are actually running PC 4 12 Direct SCSI access If you have an Acorn SCSI adapter or an alternative which supports the same SWIs check with your SCS1 adapter supplier you can use direct SCSI support The aim of this is to allow SCS1 hard disks which have been formatted and used on a PC to be read and written Aleph One Ltd 27 PC Cards User Guide to by the PC Card If you want to connect a PC formatted SCS1 disk you should 1 Select the DOS format SCSI drive radio button 2 Enter the device number that is the drive s number on your SCSI chain 3 The software will configure itself automatically to the shape of the drive e You may experience desktop problems because RISC OS thinks that this disc is a SCSIFS drive which it cannot read properly To cure this the PC hard disk should have its SCS1 ID set to a higher number than any other RISC OS drive on the SCSI chain and you should use Configure SCSIFSdiscs n to reduce the number of disks by one that is n should be the number of discs present on the SCSI chain minus one 4 13 About PCConfig PCConfig is used to
79. ther when printing from both RISC OS and DOS For the typical configuration with one printer which is plugged intc the host computer set Use RISCOS printer Stream to LPT1 Printing from second processor cards SS RISC PC The second processor card does not have its own parallel port so it uses the host port You have a choice of two ways of doing this e Connecting the port bidirectionally exactly as if it were a real printer port which stops RISC OS from using it whilst PC is running e Use RISC OS Printer Stream which connects a PC card print stream to the host computer s print stream These methods are mutually exclusive You must not use both at once as the printer output can only go to one place If a bidirectional connection is made DOS port LPT I becomes the host computer s parallel port See Printing on page 19 for details of how to select these options using PCConfig Selecting the printer driver in DOS Windows Once the printer streams are assigned you just have to use the appropriate logical stream from DOS Windows Most applications will default to LPT 1 so if you have configured this to be connected to the host printer stream the default then printing will automatically come out on your existing printer DOS does not need to have a printer driver selected but Windows and some applications for example WordPerfect for DOS do Just pick the driver for your printer Aleph One Ltd 65 PC Cards Us
80. tor being very careful to get it right Problems with Windows There are innumerable ways of breaking your Windows but a couple are specific to the PC Card Aleph One Ltd 69 PC Cards User Guide Wrong version of ARMDRV If you have upgraded your PC but not your ARMDRYV in the WINDOWS SYSTEM directory then a message like Wrong version of ARMDRV Found ARMDRV 1 80 requires ARMDRV 1 94 will flash up momentarily in the black screen after the Windows banner before the screen is cleared on the return to DOS Putting the right version from your release disk in the right place should fix this Failure to perform a Custom Install If you did an express install or selected VGA display drivers then you will get a set of drivers that won t work Install Windows again following the instructions in Installing the Aleph One Windows driver on page 39 CD ROM errors 70 CD ROM drive is not recognised This is usually due to some combination of e Editing the CONFIG SYS or AUTOEXEC BAT files with a RISC OS editor so that the linefeeds are wrong e Not setting CDROMdiscs CDROM drives to the correct value e Putting MSCDEX into the AUTOEXEC BAT file so late that it is not executed e Not powering up the CDROM drive check it works from RISC OS first ERROR Invalid line in CONFIG SYS Means some of the text following DEVICE A1CD SYS is incorrect Currently you may only have the phrase D name after this n
81. tware This presents complete SoundBlaster hardware to the PC so that all Windows and much DOS software can be Aleph One Ltd PC card devices expected to work in 8 or 16 bits The hardware is 60 plus VAT software prices are not currently available contact Aleph One e The 16 bit hardware is built into all Risc PC 700 series models e Alternatively you can fit a parallel port sound adapter PC speaker sound expansion cards card generate sound from the on board PC motherboard chip in the same way as a normal PC does In order to hear this sound through the host computer s loudspeaker you must link the two sound systems together using a cable We can supply you with a suitable cable for 5 plus VAT Details of how to construct and connect a cable are given in Appendix B RI The Aleph One PC cards except for the Mark I second processor To play WAV files under Windows you will need the SPEAKER DRV speaker driver from Microsoft This is now included in this release as a DOS self extracting archive in the file SPEAK EXE Copy this to a DOS floppy disc or a hard disc directory and run it to extract the files Then read the text files for details of installing the driver This file is not included with Mark I second processor cards as there is no speaker output SoundBlaster sound on expansion cards To get SoundBlaster sound from an expansion card you will need X1 to fit a parallel port sound adaptor There are several availa
82. ut on a different one Using your PC Card Using Setup after Windows is installed You can change the display driver at any time by running Windows Setup either from DOS with your Windows directory as the current directory or from within Windows You will also need to do this if you receive updated versions of the Windows drivers 1 Open the Windows Setup program it should be in the Main program group 2 Select Change System Settings from the Options menu Display Keyboard Mouse Network ise Change System Settings VGA Version 3 0 Video 7 512K 720x512 256 colors XGA 640x480 16 colors XGA 640x480 256 colors XGA Large fonts XGA Small fonts Other display Requires disk from OEM Click on the Display option to show the list of display options Do not choose the VGA Version 3 0 display option Instead choose Other display Requires disk from OEM from the bottom of the list A further dialogue box will appear Windows Setup Insert disk with display driver provided by the hardware manufacturer If the files can be found at a different location for example on another drive type a new path to the files below cae 5 Insert the Aleph One Windows driver floppy into the drive as prompted 6 Press Return to accept the default path of A or type in the Aleph One Ltd 41 PC Cards User Guide drive letter if you
83. y and or it allows upper memory blocks to be used for DOS and its device drivers e DR DOS 5 or 6 Novell DOS 7 which have one primary 45 PC Cards User Guide memory manager EMM386 SYS which does all of the above Memory managers must be installed before other device drivers in the CONFIG SYS file See your DOS manual for details on how to do this Versions of DOS before version 5 do not include memory managers although Windows 3 0 or later comes with HIMEM SYS Example CONFIG SYS settings for extended memory use Use these to enable extended memory and load DOS into upper memory thus maximizing the amount of conventional memory available for programs e Note that your installation program will make these settings for you If you are unsure about what you are doing it is better to stick with the default settings DR DOS 5 or 6 DEVICE EMM386 FRAME NONE ROM F400 ffff BDOS AUTO HIDOS ON MS DOS 5 DEVICE HIMEM SYS DEVICE EMM386 EXE i C0O00 F3FF noems DOS HIGH UMB The above assume that no expanded memory is required 46 Aleph One Ltd PC card devices 6 PC card devices PC Cards have two sorts of hardware e Real items which are physically present on the card e Hosted items which are shared with the host computer Which devices are which depends on the sort of PC card you have The keyboard mouse floppy and video are hosted for all PC cards The hard disk usually is any extra devices like CD

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