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From: rainer@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rainer Malzbender)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Hardware access in Windows 3.0
Message-ID: <1991Feb27.184359.17256@csn.org>
Date: 27 Feb 91 18:43:59 GMT
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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