rainer@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rainer Malzbender) (02/28/91)
I've just recently bought the SDK, and I'm new to this group, so forgive the novice questions. I'm currently using a temperature controller card whose software gets timer interrupts once per second and then reads and writes some hardware I/O ports in the card. The problem is that you can't do anything else while this is running (it runs all day) so we end up dedicating a lot of PCs. The guy who wrote it (in Fortran) isn't interested in converting it to a TSR. I'm planning on rewriting it in C. So, I thought that at least Windows would let you run other applications, even if they're just Windows applications, and if we get a 386 it should be possible to multitask with other DOS programs. The problem is, these boards really need to be coddled once per second, and I understand Win3 is not pre-emptive, so one could get locked out. Thus, is there a way to activate a program every second, no matter what ? Secondly, would the direct hardware accesses confuse Windows? I guess the real question is whether this requires OS/2 (sure, Unix is best, but nobody else here wants to go that route). Thanks for any info. -- Rainer Malzbender "It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole." Dept. of Physics (303)492-6829 -Laurie Anderson U. of Colorado, Boulder rainer@boulder.colorado.edu 128.138.240.246
pfulghum@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com (Pat Fulghum) (03/01/91)
/ hpdmd48:comp.windows.ms / rainer@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rainer Malzbender) / 11:43 am Feb 27, 1991 / I've just recently bought the SDK, and I'm new to this group, so forgive the novice questions. I'm currently using a temperature controller card whose software gets timer interrupts once per second and then reads and writes some hardware I/O ports in the card. The problem is that you can't do anything else while this is running (it runs all day) so we end up dedicating a lot of PCs. The guy who wrote it (in Fortran) isn't interested in converting it to a TSR. I'm planning on rewriting it in C. So, I thought that at least Windows would let you run other applications, even if they're just Windows applications, and if we get a 386 it should be possible to multitask with other DOS programs. The problem is, these boards really need to be coddled once per second, and I understand Win3 is not pre-emptive, so one could get locked out. Thus, is there a way to activate a program every second, no matter what ? Secondly, would the direct hardware accesses confuse Windows? I guess the real question is whether this requires OS/2 (sure, Unix is best, but nobody else here wants to go that route). Thanks for any info. -- Rainer Malzbender "It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole." Dept. of Physics (303)492-6829 -Laurie Anderson U. of Colorado, Boulder rainer@boulder.colorado.edu 128.138.240.246 ----------
pfulghum@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com (Pat Fulghum) (03/01/91)
You could write it as a TSR that gets loaded before windows. Let it run from the Timer Interrupt. Pat Fulghum 208-323-2667