Device Drivers and Installation for PC Card

This section summarizes PC 98 requirements for PC Card device drivers.

20. No user intervention required for correctly installing devices
Required

The user must not be required to perform any device-installation action other than to insert disks that contain drivers and other files.

21. Device is immediately functional without restarting the system
Required

It must not be a requirement for the user to restart the system in order to begin using the device, either after installation is complete or whenever the device is inserted in the system.

22. ZV-compatible PC Card driver uses DirectDraw LVE
Required

ZV-compatible PC Card drivers must use software interfaces based on 32-bit DirectDraw Live Video Extensions (LVE) in order to configure the graphics controller to receive video input using the ZV port. This includes programming the graphics controller to configure the format of the video data, its location on screen, and so on. LVE is part of DirectX 3.0.

ZV card device drivers must handle dynamic graphics state changes, such as resolution changes, color depth changes, and switching to and from full-screen MS-DOS–based applications.

23. PC Card 16 card driver supports sharing of level-mode interrupts
Required

CardBus systems support both PC Card 16 cards and CardBus cards. In this environment, interrupt sharing becomes an issue because CardBus controllers can use PCI interrupts, which are level-sensitive and sharable. To help alleviate interrupt limitations in CardBus systems, Windows operating systems can take advantage of PCI interrupt-sharing capabilities.

In cases where no ISA IRQs are available to a PC Card 16 card in a CardBus controller, the operating system will assign a PCI interrupt to the card. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that PC Card 16 card drivers are updated to support interrupt sharing. However, it is a PC 98 requirement that PC Card 16 card drivers must “hook” the interrupt (whether sharable or not) before its hardware generates any interrupts.