About Slot Manager and System 7.0
About Slot Manager And System 7.0
You need to use Slot Manager routines only if you are writing an application or device driver that must address a NuBus card directly. For
example, you need to use the Slot Manager if you are writing a driver for a video card, but not if you only want to display information on a screen for
which a device driver already exists. If you do have to use the Slot Manager, use the information here to see if any of the functions added to the Slot Manager by system 7.0 or later are of use to you. There are two variations of the system 7.0 or later Slot Manager: version 1 and version 2. Version 1 of the Slot Manager is supplied with the system 7.0 or later System file on disk for use with Macintosh II-family computers that
were designed and built before system 7.0 was available. Version 2 is included
in the ROM of newer Macintosh II-family computers.
cards before patches to the Operating System are loaded from disk. Version 1 of
the 7.0 or later Slot Manager polls all NuBus cards again in case any cards that must be addressed in 32-bit mode were not recognized by the older Slot NuBus cards a second time. Both versions of the Slot Manager reinitialize all NuBus cards after RAM patches have been loaded, in case any card requires
RAM patches to be available before the card is used. Other than this difference
in initialization sequence, the two versions of the Slot Manager are identical.
You can use the SVersion function to determine whether the system 7.0 or later Slot Manager is available and, if it is available, whether it is version 1 or version 2. You cannot use the other System 7.0 or later routines if the
Once the system 7.0 or later Slot Manager has been loaded into memory, Because these functions are used for card initialization and all initialization is
handled by the Operating System, the availability of these functions should not
If you are writing a device driver, you need the book Designing Cards and
Drivers for the Macintosh Family, second edition. You will also find useful
in 32-bit mode to ensure that the Operating System recognizes all NuBus
cards. It also performs card initialization in a fashion different from that used
by older versions of the Slot Manager to ensure that all NuBus cards-including those that must be addressed in 32-bit mode-are initialized
correctly.
Several new routines have been added to the Slot Manager. You can use the • determine what sResource data structures are available
• get information about an sResource data structure, whether or not the
sResource data structure is enabled
• get information about all sResource data structures that match the
type of a specific sResource data structure
• enable and disable sResource data structures
• restore an sResource data structure that has been deleted from the
Slot Resource Table
Note: An sResource data structure is sometimes referred to as a slot resource. Note, however, that a slot resource is a data structure
in the firmware of a NuBus card and not a type of Macintosh
resource. The structure and content of an sResource data structure
are described in detail in Designing Cards and Drivers for the
Macintosh Family, second edition.
The Slot Manager parameter block has been modified to add a flag field that is These routines search for SResource data structures.