IMS Serial Multi Port Card Hardware Support Area
General Card Trouble Shooting
Please note that all Multiport cards shipped by IMS include a diagnostic
utility that will allow you to test the status of individual ports. These
utilities must not be run under REAL/32 ( Or any other protected mode operating
system ) and only under DOS!.
ISA Buffered cards
Most problems with ISA buffered cards relate to Interrupt and IO port clashes. To help resolve these check the following.On PCI machines make sure that the IRQ used by the ISA card is marked as reserved within the BIOS Setup screens. Symptoms of IRQ clash's are some characters being sent from the port and then stopping.
PCI cards will use high IO port ranges so as a rule anything below 400 is safe from PCI clash's but may be used by a ISA card. Symptoms of IO port clash's may be some ports on a card working but not others or the card itself not operating.
Important Note : When testing IMS Buffered cards you must use the CCDIAG.EXE utility supplied on the floppy disk and not the TCLDIAG.EXE utility also supplied.
ISA Memory mapped/Intelligent
Make sure that the upper memory region you wish to use is Marked as not shadowed or cached within the BIOS setup. Symptoms of the upper memory being shadowed is the card not being found on boot up even though the card and REAL/32 have the correct address's.
Specific Card Issues
| IMS 4 / 8 Port ISA Multiport Boards | We have noticed an increasing number of newer Motherboards do not allow these cards to function fully with a port address of 280, one or more ports will not work as an address in the range is used by other hardware. We suggest using port 180 in these situations. |
| 8 Port ISA Buffered Cards | If you have fitted one of these cards in your PC and (for example) port3 does not work but the others do this indicates that a port address is in use that the card requires. (this is not an IRQ issue) change the BASE address from (for example) 280 to 180, this should resolve the problem by allowing the card to access a different, potentially free, range of addresses. |
| TCL Dataserver 16 Drivers IMSPCCGN.DDF IMSPCCGN.SYS and PCCASYNC.SYS |
Please note that the first
two TCL drivers required for REAL/32 are now located on the TCL Disk 1
provided with the TCL Dataserver 16 card in the file A:\DOSDRVR\TCLDOS.ZIP
(see accompanying README file in same directory for instructions)
PCCASYNC.SYS is found at A:\ Copy all 3 files to C:\REAL32\DRIVERS NOTE: ENSURE YOU SELECT 'TCL 188/186 GENERIC Driver' in setup > stations and multiports NOT 'TCL PCC/16i' |