CREATIVE AWE64 - Manual (Page 79)

12
PnP Concepts
When you add a hardware card to your personal computer (PC), you
must reserve some system resources — such as input/output address
spaces, interrupts, Direct Memory Access channels or memory spaces
— for the card. You must also make sure that there is no hardware
conflict, that is, the resources reserved by one card are not used by
another card in the same system.
Before Plug and Play (PnP) was introduced, you can reserve system
resources only by manually changing the settings of some dip switches
or jumpers on a legacy (non-PnP) card. This can be quite difficult
since you have to understand how the hardware settings correspond to
the system resources that your card requires. It can also be very tedious
since you may need to change the dip switch or jumper settings several
times before your card can be configured without any hardware
conflict.
With the emergence of Plug and Play (PnP), a revolutionary design
philosophy and a new PC architecture specification finalized recently,
the PC, hardware cards, drivers and the operating system can now
work together without such “user intervention”.
You no longer need to change any hardware settings on your card
before it can work properly in a PC. Instead, a PnP BIOS or software
would find out the types of resources each card needs and allocate the
resources accordingly.
Generally, a PnP card requires one of the following to work:
❑ PnP System BIOS
❑ PnP Operating System
❑ PnP Configuration Drivers and Utilities
The PnP BIOS specification went through several revisions.
The version 1.0a specification was finalized in May 1994, with
further clarifications documented in October 1994. As a result,
older PnP systems shipped are not fully compliant with this
specification. So, there are some compatibility problems. For
more details, please read the section “PnP in DOS/Windows
3.1x” on page 14.