ISA bus interrupts with Windows 7 & 10

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Is there anyone here familiar with the way Windows 7 or 10 handles interrupts from hardware?

I have a custom ISA based board that was never updated to PCI as the volumes are too low to justify the costs.

I can get the interrupts to work under XP using a driver called TVicHW32 from Entech Taiwan. Using the same driver Windows 7 & 10 never sees the interrupt or at least my code never gets called. According to the company who wrote this, it should work. :frowning:

I’ve enabled the BIOS to reserve the IRQ for legacy ISA devices. It appears free when you check in Device Manager.

I did a search to see if there is any way to get Windows 7 or 10 to register for this but found nothing.

I spent a solid week trying all sorts of things and nothing worked. I eventually had to run XP which is not ideal for future proofing the system.

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@ Dave McLaughlin - The IO Ports, Memory regions and interrupts for your ISA adapter need to be defined in the INF file for the device.

Here is a link to some of the descriptions for creating INF files.

[url]https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/hardware/drivers/multifunction/supporting-pc-cards-that-have-incomplete-configuration-registers[/url]

In my Windows 7 embedded system I had an issues more with the aliasing of IO ports as old ISA cards may only decode some of the 16 IO address lines. This can cause conflicts with some of the system IO ports. I traced this down to a BIOS issue on an Advantec PC-104 system I was using.

The keywords you need for searching MSDN for are INF and IRQConfig.

If you would like some help with this issue please direct message me, your INF file, I would be glad to try and help.

Regards
Phil

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Thanks Phil, this looks like the information I needed for this.

I’ll start the INF file and send it over via PM once I work out all that I need and the sections.

I will owe you a load of beers if this works.

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