A Short Description of PCIScope

PCIScope gives a detailed view of your system. The Main Window of PCIScope represents your system as several trees that you could easily navigate. PCI tree displays a detailed view of your PCI subsystem. Please note that PCIScope is able to recognize almost any PCI extension card by the name.

Configuration space of every PCI device may be represented as a plain text, a list of PCI registers, PCI registers or binary dump.

PCIScope gives you for most computers the detailed information about contents of PCI configuration space and even I/O and memory mapped registers: names of registers, names of bit fields in every register and so on. Furthermore, some groups of registers have a particular information page (like ExCA registers for CardBus adapters), which decodes them to the convenient format.

PCIScope will display all standard registers for every PCI device, PCI-to-PCI bridge or CardBus bridge. Additionally PCIScope recognizes a lot of specific PCI devices (identified by PCI Vendor Id/Device Id/Revision Id) and displays an exact registers' layout for them. Moreover, PCIScope recognizes specific registers for classes of PCI devices. For example it knows what registers USB controllers have and will display those registers to every USB controller.
Click here to see a file which contains a list of PCI devices and classes of PCI devices that are fully recognized by PCIScope.

PCIScope keeps description of all PCI registers in a number of text files. This allows the user to add description of any registers of any PCI device. If you create description files for your PCI device, then you may send these files to APSoft automatically, and they may be included in the next release of PCIScope. PCIScope contains the special Description File Wizard in order to help you to create description file for your device.

PCIScope collects and displays Device Manager information. It shows a detailed report on each device in the system. It also displays PNP Arbiter information under Windows 2000 and XP.

ISA Plug-n-Play information, which is retrieved by PCIScope from system PNP BIOS, is displayed as a separate tree.

PCIScope supports scripting. You can use any scripting language (for example VBScript) to read or modify PCI configuration space, I/O registers and system memory, access information collected by PCIScope, open or save PCIScope's files. Click here to see examples of scripts in VBScript and JScript.

PCIScope is very easy for navigation. The most common way to navigate through PCI subsystem is to use a tree of PCI devices. In addition, you may jump to a desired PCI device or PCI register almost from every place in PCIScope. For example, you may switch to description of PCI device directly from IRQ routing diagram, Buses Topology diagram, or right clicking to PCI registers form.

PCI buses topology also has a special graphic representation in PCIScope.

PCIScope gives you convenient and easy to understand PCI IRQ Routing Diagram.

You can even examine PCI devices under DOS. PCIScope installation includes DOS agent (PCITOOL.EXE) which allows reading PCI configuration spaces under clear DOS or Windows 9x DOS and saving them into a file which can be imported into PCIScope.

PCIScope implements several debugging facilities.

• You can use Watch Window to specify PCI registers you want to watch. That information will be automatically refreshed with the desired frequency. As the refresh interval is measured in milliseconds, you can detect a lot of problems that are very hard to find manually.
• PCIScope implement intelligent PCI error watch facility that keeps track of such PCI system errors as Target Abort, Master Abort, Parity errors, etc. Additionally an error semaphore is displayed in status bar all the time and shows if any PCI errors occurred.
• PCIScope implements Interrupt watch module. Now you can spy PCI and non-PCI interrupts, view detailed interrupt information and statistics. This facility was designed to support both uniprocessor and multiprocessor platforms.
• PCIScope collects and displays Device Manager information. It shows detailed information about each device in the system. It also displays PNP Arbiter information under Windows 2000/XP and PNP Driver Stack.
• PCIScope collects events from a System Event Log. All events are immediately decoded, which means that PCIScope's Event Log can be viewed on any machine, not only the machine where it was saved. Detailed event information, including decoded event's description and event's data can be viewed in Event Properties dialog.
• You can find information about installed Win32 services and kernel-mode Drivers in Services object, which is located in PCIScope's System tree. The information is basically retrieved from the Win32 Service Control Manager API. The Service Properties dialog shows detailed information about each Win32 service or kernel-mode driver.
• Are you interesting why the same PCI card works great, for example, under Windows 95, but doesn't work on the same machine under Windows NT? Or you have two very similar computer systems and you want to find differences? You just need to use Configuration Comparison Tool. It will find all differences in PCI configurations. That tools works with the current PCI configuration as well as configurations save into a file.
• Does your customer have a problem with PCI adapter? He could send you a snapshot file saved by PCIScope and you can explore his PCI subsystem on your computer.
• PCIScope determines phantom PCI devices and implements filter that allows to show or hide them.
• PCIScope allows not only viewing PCI subsystem, but it implements a lot of possibilities to edit PCI registers. As PCIScope shows name of almost every register and every bit in a register, the editing is very convenient. With the help of specially designed registers editor you can modify the entire register as well as separate bits using binary, octal, decimal and hexadecimal formats.
• With the help of Hardware Debugger you can read/write to system memory, I/O ports and PCI registers. For your convenience a command set of Debugger is compatible with command sets of the most popular debuggers.
• It was found, that sometimes Operating System may consider some resources as free while they are actually used. PCIScope's Resource Summary was designed to display all available system resources, which are retrieved from PCI devices and ISA Plug-n-Play device nodes, in order to find such mismatches.