A somewhat techie question...

[kiosk]

Can someone tell me in which way do motherboards assign I/O memory addresses to cards on ISA buses?

IRQs are assigned by individual gold traces on D card edge, and they can sometimes be reassigned by jumpering these connections in a different manner.

With I/O addresses it gets a bit muddy; some cards allow you to alter this address with special jumpers, and others even allow you to do this via software configuration issues. Thus - I'm not sure if this is a hardware or a software setting, seems to go both ways.

Some links to webpages detailing this issue would be VERY helpful. As a matter of fact, I'm trying to build an ATA-1 host adapter which is reportedly just a subset of ISA bus connectors, with no (or very little) additional circuitry...

[Paleo Pete]

If you head on over to Google (http://www.google.com) and run a search for I/O assignment it comes up with a bunch of links, a lot of them plenty techy sounding and seems to be mostly PDF files. That may give you some info to go on, I didn't think I wanted to download pdf files all night to see if it was good, sorry but I'm on dial-up at 31,200...

You might need to tinker with keywords to get good search results, and if you take a look at the PC Guide (http://www.pcguide.com/topic.html) main page, and you should be able to find some good general info about I/O. Probably not a lot related to what you want to do, but it will help you get a better overall understanding of it.

I/O can be assigned by hardware or software, as you already noted. Some of the older ISA cards used jumpers to assign I/O addresses, and at the same time those without were assigned I/O addresses by Windows and could be changed in Control Panel if necessary to resolve conflicts.

With PCI it's usually plug-n-pray - I mean play - and there is no jumper setting on the card, Windows handles it. Some can also be set in BIOS, along with IRQ and DMA addresses.