enabling midi-in in bios 1

[wolf6656]

I want to enable midi-in in my cmos, but I am confused as to which setting to use.
the choices are 1. disable (current setting) 2. 300 3. 330
I am using a gigabyte GA-6WMM7 motherboard v 2.0 with onboard sound. AC97 Sigma tel audio controller, STAC9700 audio codec. Intel810 chipset
Celeron 500 mhz, 66 mhz fsb.AMI 2.0G 01/20/00 bios

What do those numbers 300 and 330 indicate?
Are they memory addresses, or related to bus speed?
I have tried to download mboard manual from gigabyte, but there is something wrong with their adobe encoding, document will not view.
Any suggestions, or can anybody point me in the right direction?
Thanks
wolf

 

[CitrixEngineer]

In short, use port 330.

The low-down;

The numbers 300 and 330 refer to the port number assignment. Generally MIDI likes to use port 330, and 300 is grabbed by NICs (NICs will use just about any port between 220-320, and then some).

The I/O port is a way of directing the software driver to the hardware interface to the outside world (serial devices connected to the computer). All serial add-on cards in a PC (sound, IDE, SCSI, NICs, etc) utilise a hardware I/O (Input/Output) port.

Without an I/O port number, all devices would have to use the system timer IRQ 0, and scrap with each other for various resources. Hence we tell software drivers which port the hardware is using, the interrupt number (so that it may interrupt the processor and the processor knows exactly who is interrupting it and for what reason), a memory address range for it to operate in away from other drivers, and, with newer devices, a DMA level so that the device can directly access a slice of RAM for additional use (eg soundfonts on sound cards).

It is important that the hardware is configured to use the I/O port and IRQ that has been defined for it in the software. In the bad old days, this was done via jumpers on cards - and was pretty much hit and miss.

Now this is configurable via the BIOS. If Windows finds the driver and utilises the setting, but registers a resource conflict, you may need to re-configure the BIOS so that the MIDI device uses port 300 - but this is fairly unlikely.

I hope this helps

 

[wolf6656]

Wow, Thank you CitrixEngineer for a prompt and very enlightening reply.
That is about the best response I have ever gotten in a forum.
I am sending you a virtual beer for that one.
wolf