INTERRUPT SETUP (WIN95)
INTERRUPT SETUP
(WIN95)
STUDI/O uses an
interrupt.
As a responsive, real-time subsystem, STUDI/O
places a high demand on computer resources, especially the
interrupt mechanism. If the computer is unable to service
interrupts at a high enough rate, it will not be able to deal
with 16 or more streams of audio at professional rates.
Many things can affect the interrupt
servicing, including porcine video cards, and 'stacked' interrupts. A
stacked interrupt is where more than one device shares the same
interrupt line (which is allowed for PCI devices). Then every
driver has to check its hardware for every interrrupt,
which is alot of extra overhead.
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CLICK HERE for our hardware alerts page, which includes some info on Matrox and other video cards, including how to keep them from hogging the PCI bus. |
What is an interrupt?
IRQ STEERING: Adding to
the madness
Adding to the madness is that the newer
versions of Windows 95 have a feature called 'IRQ steering'
which doesn't work right and that they don't support!
Unfortunately, it seems to be enabled by default on many
computers!
For an explanation of IRQ steering from
Microsoft, CLICK HERE. (or for the text only, click here)
Setup
Here is a step by step setup of our demo
machine, which has an Award BIOS, and Windows 95-B.
This should help keep your machine running consistently!
HOW DO I REALLOCATE
INTERRUPTS???
If you have 'stacked' interrupts (that is,
where different things share the same IRQ), you may run into
problems. This is especially true if any two of: Video,
SCSI, STUDI/O share an interrupt. These three put high
demands on the system, and if they have to go through extra
overhead involved in stacked IRQ's, it makes things worse.
Since IRQ steering does NOT work (see above), there are only a couple of alternatives. One, is if your BIOS allows you to set fixed IRQ numbers for the PCI slots, like our Asus does. The other is to physically rearrange the cards. This may be necessary anyway. I noticed that on our Asus, which has 5 PCI slots, plus an AGP slot, slots 4 and 5 share the same interrupt number, and that slot 1 shares the same interrupt as the AGP slot! So, you shouldn't put STUDI/O or a SCSI card in slot 1, and you shouldn't put STUDI/O in slot 4 or 5 (unless you have TWO STUDI/O's, in which case you WANT them to share an interrupt -- our driver actually likes that!) Check your motherboard's manual, or just experiment.
Keep in mind, that these are the settings that we used to get this setup working.
Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computers, Inc. Windows 95, Windows MM System are trademarks of Microsoft Inc. Studi/o is a trademark of Sonorus, Inc. Copyright © 1997 Sonorus, Inc. All rights reserved