Measurement Computing Personal488 rev.3.0 For DOS & Windows 3.Xi User Manual

Page 210

II. SOFTWARE GUIDES - 10. Driver488/W31

10B. Installation & Configuration

Personal488 User’s Manual, Rev. 3.0

II-195

Assuming that the Driver488/W31 disk is in drive

, specify the full path of your Windows directory.

For example, if your Windows directory is

C:\WINDOWS

, you would copy all required files by entering

the following command at the DOS prompt:

INSTALL C:\WINDOWS

The language support files can be copied to any location accessible to your compiler and other
development tools. If you wish to have the Driver488/W31 support reside with your application,
simply copy or move the files from the

\LANGS\xxx

directory appropriate to your development

environment:

•

For Borland C compilers:

\LANGS\BC

•

For Microsoft C compilers:

\LANGS\MC

•

For Visual Basic:

\LANGS\VB

Alternatively, you can place the files where your compiler expects its own files, which may involve
placing include files in one place and library files in another.

Example programs are contained in individual subdirectories of

\EXAMPLES

with a precompiled

executable made from the provided source files, allowing you to run the example and compare the
source code without necessarily needing to compile the program.

The utilities subdirectory

\UTILS

contains two utility programs:

WINTEST

and

QUIKTEST

. These

programs were designed as an exercise in order to see the functionality contained within
Driver488/W31, to test that your hardware is properly installed and working correctly, and to
experiment with command sequences that might be used in your application. For more information on
these programs, refer to the Sub-Chapter “Utility Programs” found later in this Chapter.

Note:

Before using Driver488/W31, the

C:\WINDOWS\IEEE488

subdirectory must be added to your

path. To do so, you may wish to add the following line to your

AUTOEXEC.BAT

file:

set PATH=C:\WINDOWS\IEEE488;%PATH%

or simply add the following segment to your path statement:

;C:\WINDOWS\IEEE488

Note if any error messages display when trying to load Driver488/W31 in memory. If so, refer to
“Section IV: Troubleshooting” in this manual..

Enhanced Mode DMA Transfers

Driver488/W31 contains an option to use Direct Memory Access (DMA) transfers which provides the
highest data transfer rate of the interface hardware. Due to the fact the Microsoft-supplied enhanced-
mode DMA device-driver does not allow Driver488/W31 to properly interrogate the DMA controller,
you must instruct Windows to use the DMA device driver. If you wish to use DMA transfers, perform
the following additional installation steps:

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI

, change the line:

device=*vdmad

to:

device=vdmad.386

Next, copy

VDMAD.386

from the

C:\WINDOWS\IEEE488

directory into the

C:\WINDOWS

directory:

COPY\WINDOWS\IEEE488\VDMAD.386 \WINDOWS

Note:

The device driver

vdmad.386

can be used in Windows 3.1 only. DO NOT use any other

operating system.