Can access read this?

[wh00t]

I'm desparatley trying to convince my company to buy a copy of visual basic, but even getting them to buy you a cup of coffee is difficult!!!

Is it at all possible for MS Access to read a HEX address on an I/O card?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Is it at all possible for MS Access to read a HEX address on an I/O card?

Directly? You haven't been able to do this in Windows for years now unless you run highly privileged. You don't talk to hardware any more. There are some low-level routines in the Hardware Abstraction Layer that would allow you to call a system function to touch an I/O card, or you could write a device driver that VBA could open as a file. Heck, even on my Alpha ES40 I can't directly touch the hardware without a whole raft of privileges, and I'm running something a LOT more stable than Windows.

I would further advise that there is a reason why Windows is set up this way. NXM faults will kill/crash a system. I/O cards are managed from an area where memory is sparsely allocated. Address FEF0 might exist normally but FEF2 might be non-existent. Accessing FEF2 would trigger a hardware trap (NXM), which pretty much guarantees a system problem. They call it the Blue Screen of Death (BSD, no relation to a popular version of UNIX). The reason Plug-and-Pray has even a SMALL chance of working is because Windows does not allow programs to touch memory arbitrarily. So the non-existant memory trap (NXM) isn't going to occur very often.

I could go on for a while about this, but let's just leave it that you are not likely to enjoy the results of trying to directly address one chunk of memory in the I/O card interface area in conventional "high memory."

 

[wh00t]

not directly, I know it can be done through VB, but not sure if it can be done through access. We have a system in place that was written in basic with a custom made ISA card in the PC which receives a signal from several switches, the program then works out what switch it was and updates a screen. The problem being is that we need to expand this system but the needed parts to expand the existing system are no longer available so I am investigating the possibility of using Access to do this.