
Section 3. Using the PCPIC
Installing the PCPIC
The PCPIC contains CMOS circuitry and can be damaged by static
electricity, as can your PC. When installing, DO NOT touch the gold
edge fingers, but DO touch a metal part of your PC before picking
up the PCPIC. DO NOT place the PCPIC onto plastic surfaces,
particularly polystyrene or polythene.
The mechanical part of installation is quite simple. In most cases it
involves switching your PC off, taking its cover off, finding a spare
8-bit I/O slot and inserting the PCPIC into it. However, some PCs
have different ways of doing this, so you must read your PC manual
and follow its instructions.
Initially we suggest that you do not use interrupts, so remove the
IRQ link.
Set the address links to 180 and power your PC up. Watch the LEDs
on the PCPIC while it powers up. You may see the red LED flash
once. This simply means that the BIOS startup program in your PC
is checking through I/O space to see if any boards are there, and is
nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if your PC fails to boot
or the red LED flashes continuously, you will need to change the
PCPIC base address (see Addresses below for suggestions).
If your PC does fail to boot up, power down, remove the PCPIC and
power up again to prove that the problem lies with the PCPIC rather
than some disturbance created by your installation procedure, such
as a loosened cable connector, for example.
Addresses
Although PCs differ in their available I/O address space, some
generalisations are possible. There is usually space between 100H
and 1FFH. Addresses 300H to 31FH are (notionally) assigned to an
I/O prototyping card, so if you don't have one these are also free.
Avoid addresses below 100H. Remember that many PCs 'wrap'
addresses above 3FFH, so that 400H is treated as 000H, which won't
work.
It is not usually necessary to remove the PCPIC from the PC in order
to change the address. Unless your PC is very cramped internally it
is possible to adjust the address links to change address with the
PCPIC still installed.
Installing Multiple PCPICs
This is just like installing a single one, except that they must all be
installed at different addresses. The most obvious scheme is to
install them at consecutive addresses, remembering that each PCPIC
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