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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.cis.okstate.edu!newsfeed.ksu.ksu.edu!news.physics.uiowa.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!news-res.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!nntp.coast.net!fu-berlin.de!zrz.TU-Berlin.DE!zib-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Modem at COM3: can't find it! Date: 23 Jun 1996 13:41:02 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 31 Message-ID: <4qjhhe$4ds@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4q4bho$7ht@netnews.upenn.edu> <4q6227$qc0@panix.com> <31C6C2FF.26FB@www.play-hookey.com> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> wrote: > Not true! MeSsy-DOS recognizes four specific port addresses for serial > ports in order: 0x3F8 0x2F8 0x3E8 0x2E8 > > However, MacroSquish in their (?)wisdom still left only the two IRQ lines > specifically allocated to COM ports. Not that i really like to defend M$, but that's rather the fault of Little Blue's geniusses of engineers. They've been to stingy to use a tri-state gate for driving the IRQ line, which would have allowed for shared interrupts, but yet assigned the default IRQs for com1/com3 and com2/com4 twice. These funny engineers did more things one could damn them now, like dropping the READY line from the floppy bus, just for the sake of their $%@!ing ``twist some lines to change the drive ID'' misfeature. So now, you don't know whether there's a floppy in the drive without trying to read something, and having the controller timeout if no floppy was there (which in turn gets the FDC stuck where only a hard reset will unwedge it). There's also the 16-bit DMA controller which is another indication of their unlimited wisdom... -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)