Calibre UK IC Communication Adapter ICA93LV User Manual - page 23

Revision 1.7

Page 22 of 27

09/12/1999

7.

The Real-Time Bus Monitor

The program REALTIM1.EXE in the MONTOR directory is a completely non-invasive real-time bus

monitor which records activity on an I

2

C-bus, post-processes the data and stores the results in an ASCII

file. This file can be printed out or examined with a word-processor as required. The monitor can record

up to 30,000 operations on the I

2

C-bus.

For the real-time monitor to work correctly it must be run using an 8MHz 286 AT type computer or any

faster machine (386/486 are ideal). Also, no TSR programs or background applications must be active

while running the monitor.

The monitor program can write quite large data files to disc; it must be copied from the floppy disc

supplied onto your hard disc before being executed.

The monitor program has to run very fast and without interruptions in order to accurately record data from

the I

2

C-bus. To achieve this it re-vectors the normal BIOS keyboard and clock-tick interrupt routines and

uses these for its own purposes. It is essential that the monitor program is exited cleanly – this is

achieved by pressing any alphanumeric key on the keyboard while it is monitoring; the monitor program

will restore the normal interrupts when it finishes.

Do not attempt to run the real-time monitor from any version of Windows

The following mnemonics are used by the monitor program in the ASCII file which it produces.

SaXX

Start code followed by address, acknowledged.

SnXX

Start code followed by address, not acknowledged.

DaXX

Data byte, acknowledged.

DnXX

Data byte, not acknowledged.

STOP

Stop code.

BUS ERROR

A bus error has occurred. This is non-fatal to the monitor but a small amount of

data may have been lost whilst recovery was taking place.

Note:

The program REALTIM1 expects the ICA93 adapter to be configured as supplied (i.e. default

base address, no interrupts). If this is not the case please refer to Section 3 of the User Manual for details

of the correct link positions. The one exception is the bus pull-ups. These may be on or off on the ICA93;

bus terminations must be present somewhere on the bus for it to operate. The alternative program,

REALTIM2 is identical except it is for an ICA93 configured with an alternative base address of 0x312.