Solve : AST premium 386 tower circ late 80's?

1.	Solve : AST premium 386 tower circ late 80's?
Answer» Hi I am new to this forum and hope someone can help. I am still using this tower running Cadd6 but my battery failed so lost Bios settings....I have managed to re-config everything from the manuals but my setup has a parallel card installed that needs the ASTSETUP disc to assign this as LPT1 so that i can use my plotter. Computer working back to normal drawing fine but wont plot.. Can you help ? Kind regards Steven King (UK) Did you replace the battery ? ? if so did you re-install the drivers for the LPT device ? ?At a loss as to why a battery would have lost your settings for LPT1 config. The config.sys and autoexec.bat files should not have been tampered with, and so driver setting for software config should not have changed as a result of this. The LPT1 port in the bios should have been the default address etc with nothing special I am guessing. Do you have the installation manual for the plotter that might indicate any special LPT1 config? Did you format the drive and rebuild clean and lose your prior config? Quote from: DaveLembke on July 10, 2015, 08:54:46 PM The LPT1 port in the bios should have been the default address etc with nothing special I am guessing. Good point. The LPT1 port may have been set to a non-standard address, or using EPP/ECP vs SPP A 386 PC is very old. Very, very old. Quote At a loss as to why a battery would have lost your settings for LPT1 config. On some old systems the LPT could be set to one of three ADDRESSES. This would be in the BIOS. The default setting may have been different that what the OP had. Current articles on LPT do not have this detail. You need to look in the original documentation for that old motherboard. Quote Most PC-compatible systems in the 1980s and 1990s had one to three ports, with communication interfaces defined like this: Logical parallel port 1: I/O port 0x3BC, IRQ 7 (usually in monochrome graphics adapters) Logical parallel port 2: I/O port 0x378, IRQ 7 (dedicated IO cards or using a controller built into the mainboard) Logical parallel port 3: I/O port 0x278, IRQ 5 (dedicated IO cards or using a controller built into the mainboard) If no PRINTER port is present at 0x3BC, the second port in the row (0x378) becomes logical parallel port 1 and 0x278 becomes logical parallel port 2 for the BIOS. Sometimes, printer ports are jumpered to share an interrupt despite having their own IO addresses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port Hi Thanks for all your replies thus far...... I have been working HARD on my building site and just run out of steam.....I will gather all the information and the course of events leading upto and beyond the problem and reply and post text from AST manuals. I have some DRAWINGS to do so eager to get plotting On older 386's a duff battery would lose the settings as it's BIOS CONTROLLED...

Answer»

Hi I am new to this forum and hope someone can help.

I am still using this tower running Cadd6 but my battery failed so lost Bios settings....I have managed to re-config everything from the manuals but my setup has a parallel card installed that needs the ASTSETUP disc to assign this as LPT1 so that i can use my plotter.

Computer working back to normal drawing fine but wont plot..

Can you help ?

Kind regards

Steven King (UK)

Did you replace the battery ? ?
if so did you re-install the drivers for the LPT device ? ?At a loss as to why a battery would have lost your settings for LPT1 config. The config.sys and autoexec.bat files should not have been tampered with, and so driver setting for software config should not have changed as a result of this. The LPT1 port in the bios should have been the default address etc with nothing special I am guessing. Do you have the installation manual for the plotter that might indicate any special LPT1 config?

Did you format the drive and rebuild clean and lose your prior config? Quote from: DaveLembke on July 10, 2015, 08:54:46 PM

The LPT1 port in the bios should have been the default address etc with nothing special I am guessing.

Good point. The LPT1 port may have been set to a non-standard address, or using EPP/ECP vs SPP

A 386 PC is very old. Very, very old.
Quote

At a loss as to why a battery would have lost
your settings for LPT1 config.

On some old systems the LPT could be set to one of three ADDRESSES. This would be in the BIOS. The default setting may have been different that what the OP had.

Current articles on LPT do not have this detail. You need to look in the original documentation for that old motherboard.
Quote

Most PC-compatible systems in the 1980s and 1990s had one to three ports, with communication interfaces defined like this:

Logical parallel port 1: I/O port 0x3BC, IRQ 7 (usually in monochrome graphics adapters)
Logical parallel port 2: I/O port 0x378, IRQ 7 (dedicated IO cards or using a controller built into the mainboard)
Logical parallel port 3: I/O port 0x278, IRQ 5 (dedicated IO cards or using a controller built into the mainboard)

If no PRINTER port is present at 0x3BC, the second port in the row (0x378) becomes logical parallel port 1 and 0x278 becomes logical parallel port 2 for the BIOS. Sometimes, printer ports are jumpered to share an interrupt despite having their own IO addresses

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_port
Hi Thanks for all your replies thus far......
I have been working HARD on my building site and just run out of steam.....I will gather all the information and the course of events leading upto and beyond the problem and reply and post text from AST manuals. I have some DRAWINGS to do so eager to get plotting On older 386's a duff battery would lose the settings as it's BIOS CONTROLLED...

Solve : AST premium 386 tower circ late 80's?

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