A way to automatically detect the base address of a PCI card

Hi guys,

I have a program that interfaces with a PCI card and it works fine, except that the needed PCI base address either has to be hard-coded or entered by the user. Ideally I would prefer for the app to automatically detect the base address of the PCI card.

Is there a way to do this?

Well, first of all, if you plan to use the address directly, don't bother - Windows won't let you directly access it, and even so, it can remap those kinds of things dynamically, anyway, so a physical address is practically useless. That said, Windows does have a standard interface for accessing hardware via IOCTL commands, though I have no idea what exactly would be needed to get access to the PCI card and it's statistics. Good luck.

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Originally Posted by Sebastiani

Well, first of all, if you plan to use the address directly, don't bother - Windows won't let you directly access it, and even so, it can remap those kinds of things dynamically, anyway, so a physical address is practically useless.

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I'm not accessing it 'directly' as such, the drivers/code supplied do the hard work and all that is needed is for the user (or so far just me hard-coding) to supply the base address (by going to the Device Manager, clicking on the desired PCI card and getting the values under the Resources tab).

I know that the base address is prone to change. I'm sure that this value must be held somewhere and accessible so that upon start-up, the program would retrieve the address.

Thanks anyway.

You can either use WMI or the SetupAPI. Both are equally fun. However, there are more examples using SetupAPI on the net - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/SimpleSetup.aspx

gg

Thanks, will definitely take a look.

Also for anyone interested, or in the same boat, I'm currently checking out devcon.