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INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
COMPOSE AGFA PCI I/F CARD
xvii. PCI Configuration for your PC
The Compose Agfa PCI interface card is a fully Plug and Play compatible PCI
card. The availability of numerous PCs with numerous versions of BIOS, each with
their own implementation of the PCI Plug and Play standard, has made PCI con-
figuration not as ‘Plug-and-Play’ as it should be. To add to the confusion, most PCI
PCs have ISA , VESA or EISA bus and the PCI controller has no idea what
resources are occupied by the non-PCI cards.
The Agfa PCI interface card is a PCI IDE device. Some PCs does not allow the exis-
tence of more than one PCI IDE device in the same PC. Installation of the
Compose card on those PCs using IDE hard disk will not be possible because the
Compose card can not share resources with the PCI IDE hard disk controller. On
those PCs, you must use SCSI hard disk.
On older PCs, the BIOS may not be fully Plug and Play compatible and it might
not be able to assign correct PCI resources to the Compose card. On those PCs, you
can use the supplied ISA paddle card to let the Compose card access ISA
resources.
Since there are many different brands of PCs with many different kinds of BIOS, it
is impossible to write a general guide on PCI configuration that will work with all
PCs. The following is a list of things you should observe while you are doing the
PCI configuration for your PC.
•
Make sure the Agfa PCI Card is set to use INTA. If you can assign a PCI Interrupt
Level (A, B, C, or D) to a particular PCI slot in the BIOS, make sure the PCI Slot
the Agfa card is in is set to use PCI INTA.
•
If the BIOS doesn’t work with Auto Configuration and you cannot assign PCI
Interrupt Level to ISA Interrupts, then you can try using the ISA paddle card to
access Interrupts using the ISA bus.
•
If you are using the ISA paddle card, make sure that the ISA Interrupt you want to
use is not available to or in used by other PCI cards. Some BIOS will let you assign
which interrupts are available to ISA cards and which interrupts are available to
PCI cards. If you are using the ISA paddle card, the Interrupt used by the ISA pad-
dle card must be set to be used by ISA card in the BIOS.
•
the Interrupt Requests used by the PCI cards in your PC are not used by ISA,
VESA, or EISA cards,
•
the Interrupt Request used by a PCI card is not used by another PCI card in your
PC,
•
the memory address needed by some ISA cards are not reserved by the PCI con-
troller. Some BIOS will also let the user reserve a range of memory address to be
