Kempy

Thanks for your help. I think I'm on the right track now.

Right, I need some help from you CompSci guys out there. On early computers (IBM PC/XT/AT era), was MS-DOS dependent on BIOS interrupts to perform certain functions? Also, does this mean that the versions of DOS a computer could run is limited by whether or not a particular BIOS interrupt routine was available on the ROM? If this is true, I hope that there is a resource somewhere which lists the BIOS interrupts required for DOS to run, so that a BIOS could be designed around a particular version of DOS. Any clarification from anyone who knows more about software than I do would be fantastic.

Thanks. I have seen some diagrams which show a small amount of ROM in the lower addresses, and RAM in the addresses just after it. I must have mis-interpreted these somewhere along the line. Anyway. It seems the solution was simpler than I guessed. Thanks for your help.

Does this mean that half of the address space has to be for ROM, halving the maximum amount of usable RAM in the system?

Hi. I was just wondering about something. There's a lot of schematics out there for homebrew 8 bit computers, and these show the ROM and the RAM connected directly to the address and data buses. If the physical addresses in the ROM start from 0000, and the physical addresses in the RAM also start from 0000, how are conflicts avoided? How does the CPU or MMU split up the address space? Thanks in advance.

So I guess the PCI controller sends out incrementing addresses and waits for a response from a device, and then allocates it an address for the rest of the system. This makes a lot more sense now. You can Google just about anything, but the internet didn't seem to know the answer to this one. Thanks.

Hi all. I am self studying computer science as a hobby. I am completely self taught, and as a result of this, there are gaping holes in my knowledge. I wondered if anybody could tell me how it is that addresses are assigned to hardware devices. If you have a PCI bus, I guess the computer could connect to each device and assign it hardware addresses, but how would the computer communicate with these devices in order to assign it a hardware address in the first place? I wondered if perhaps there was a unique address given to each piece of hardware when it is manufactured (much in the same was as network devices have a unique MAC address). Thanks in advance to anybody who can shed some light on the subject, and sorry if my terminology is completely wrong. This is my first post on the forum, and as I said, I have never been tutored in computer science.