ladasky@tornado.Berkeley.EDU (John Ladasky) (07/17/90)
Hi! I'm a newcomer to the IBM PC discussion group, but I've been hacking around with a high-speed data acquisition system (PC-based) for several months. The system uses a cheap, commercial DMA card to stuff the memory. What I'd like to do is use the DMA on my hard disk controller to write this stuff out as fast as it comes in (top speed will be about 50K words/sec.) You might wonder, given that I am using a nifty, high-speed AT as the basis for my system, why I don't plan to use string writes. Well, I'd like to use the microprocessor to run the display while all of this stuff is happening. I just purchased a program that does hard-disk backups that would appear to be doing exactly what I'm trying to do. The program is FastBack Plus from 5th Generation Systems. Neat Stuff. Does anyone know where I can find information concerning the DMA circuitry on the hard-disk controller card? From what I can gather, DMA must be a fairly standard (if infrequently used) feature of PC hard-disk controllers. (I found a useful book about the EGA and VGA displays by Sutty and Blair... something like that would do.) Please send me email, as I don't log on frequently and the bandwidth of this newsgroup would appear to be quite huge. Thanks in advance.