What are IRQ, DMA & Address Ports? - Soundcard Memories [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd

If you owned an IBM Compatible PC during the 80s or 90s then you'll likely know the ordeal of setting up peripherals such as Sound cards. Before diving into a game, you had to make sure that it was setup to recognise your Soundblaster or Adlib card. This was done through an I/O Port address, an IRQ and a DMA channel. This video explores exactly what these things are, how they relate to your PC and why Plug & Pray was introduced to make our lives easier.
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[@philscomputerlab]

That was excellent! I miss those days to be honest. Everything was locked in once you configured your cards and it was transparent. No funny business going on in the background. I always kept my system quite simple and had little issues. Disabling unused resources on the IO controller like printer port or second com port helped a lot.

[@Nostalgianerd]

PhilsComputerLab Many thanks Sir Computer Lab, I've been enjoying your high RPM hard drive videos recently. It was a time when everything was just more understandable, and we were made to understand. It's a shame everything is so glossed over now.

[@connor4317]

Nostalgia Nerd this is actually my favorite computer channel. Every upload is a celebration.

[@Nostalgianerd]

If you mean PhilsComputerLab, good choice. If you mean me, many thanks!

[@TheBadFred]

I can't imagine setting up each and every USB-device manually .....

[@connor4317]

Nostalgia Nerd no i mean you. You make complicated things simple.

[@Daniel15au]

I'm so glad we don't need to deal with port and IRQ conflicts any more. Thanks for reminding me of the nightmares we used to face. =P

[@Nostalgianerd]

Agreed. But I do miss the skill level you needed to build up in order to be able to run DOS software successfully!

[@leisergeist]

Right? It's nice to see how far we've come, from manually setting jumpers, addresses, and various other shit to seamless plug & play everything

[@GreenAppelPie]

I never found all this stuff complicated, just down what was already being used and configure your new devices accordingly.

[@CommodoreFan64]

I have to agree it's nice to not have to deal with a lot of that now, but after awhile it became easier as I kept a hand written list on a note pad in my desk draw of what IRQ when to each device in my computer like my Sound Blaster, Modem, 10/100 network card, etc.. so I if I had to replace, or upgrade something after nearly pulling my hair out doing my first 2 386 builds with DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.1 as a kid having come from the C64, and Apple II IE machines.

[@truesenate5670]

Nostalgia Nerd that's what I was gonna say just having the knowledge of primitive complexity vs. Let the cpu do everything now for me... the real configuration is plug and pray.. trying new ports...( $quare biz fun) imagine toddlers in mid 2000s playing video games saving to 2mb 4mb memory cards... I hear the complaints on 2tb hdd'$ not being large enough for 30 40 gigabyte games easily sent to the clouds mite I add....

[@stevezpj]

I both miss the days of poring over my config.sys and autoexec.bat configurations and am also incredibly glad those days are over. People who get started with computers these days have no clue just how much harder they were to use back in the day. Getting enough memory for Doom, a SoundBlaster AND mouse drivers on top of that... I always ended up turning to Memmaker.

[@chatboxguy3363]

This is one thing with new computers I don't miss. IRQ errors or having to shut your damn computer down to fix your mouse keyboard issues.

[@MichaelAStanhope]

A220,5,1,5 Still remember after all these years the port config for an SB Pro!

[@Rouxenator]

Loved this ! Reminded me of my first "sound card" and ESS Audio Drive 1688 in my dad's 486 DX2/66

[@Fazeof1p]

OOOOooo.... I remember having to deal with DMA and IRQ channels when I was a kid. I dont know the exact details but since I was like 10-11 years old when games like Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad came out, I didnt know what they were, I just fiddled around with them until they worked. Maybe this is why it was so fickle. :) Now 20 years later, I kind of sort of understand how DMAs and IRQs work. Maybe. Mind you I'll still choose the "sound blaster" option when configuring the sound for old DOS games because that's what made the sound for these old DOS games work when I was a kid, so its safe to say that by now its like the standard for Windows 7. :P Good video

[@binkman853]

Great video and I mean all of them. Love your content and delivery. Thanks!

[@ms-dosman7722]

For a DOS build, I often look specifically for non-pnp parts, just to stay in full control of all IRQ and DMA channels. Back in the 90s I didn't know as much about how it worked so I ran into trouble too. Especially with some weird combo cards.. like a sound card and modem in one.

[@marcuscowles3384]

Absolutely love these vids, so informative but in a very relaxed way - no intense training or pressure. Have you thought of doing a spin-off series of sci-fi nerd or something for cutting edge IT technology but in the same casual and enjoyable fashion?

[@CommodoreFan64]

Awesome video, brings back memories of getting my ASound Gold ISA sound card(sound blaster 16 clone with Yamaha XG midi) to work in DOS, windows 3.1, and later Windows 95 I learned quickly to write all my IRQ and jumper settings down on paper after I figure out what worked, and did not work. Edit: just pulled out the 2 CD driver disk I have for the later PCI versions of those cards, and I'm going threw the sweet Midi demos on them that play great with my Asus Xonar DG PCI sound card in Wndows 10 LOL!

[@Anonyminded]

Really good to have these explanations ;)

[@ghelyar]

5:25 Polling is pronounced "pole-ing", as in polling station

[@UpTheAnte1987]

My flat mate had only ever read the word "debut" and we were watching football one night and he comes out with "It's his D-BUTT tonight!"

[@Nostalgianerd]

Did you watch that episode of 999, presented by Michael Buerk where some lad got a javelin through his neck? I'm pretty sure that's "Pole-ing"

[@reddev5420]

Ah, I remember 999. Gave me nightmares as a kid! Would that not be more "skewering" though?

[@Foebane72]

But, NN, you have to admit, Ghelyar is correct. I was about to say the same thing.

[@Daehawk]

Lol I thought I was alone thinking it was pronounced wrong.

[@totallymady42069]

Great content, nice and informative while clear and uncluttered, unlike my desktop

[@amitakartok]

Trivia addendum to the IRQ stuff: aside from priority, interrupts are also distinguished as maskable or non-maskable, which determines whether a higher-priority interrupt can override a lower-priority one if the latter has already begun executing. As the video says, an interrupt causes the CPU to dump its current instruction pointer and register contents into a cache and load the interrupt handler, service the interrupt, then reset the registers and instruction pointer and resume whatever it was doing when the interrupt came. Now, if the CPU is in the middle of working on a priority 3 interrupt and suddenly gets a priority 1 interrupt, it checks the value of a certain bit in the priority 3 interrupt and depending on the result, either tells the priority 1 to wait for its turn despite its higher priority, continues working on the priority 3 until finished then greenlights the priority 1, or pauses the priority 3, does the priority 1 immediately, then resumes the priority 3. With today's clock speeds, being forced to wait for another interrupt to finish usually doesn't mean much delay, but if a high-priority interrupt were to do something that needs an ongoing low-priority one to finish, it would deadlock the system if the high-priority interrupt gets precedence.

[@pepe6666]

now days its all software interrupts on windows from other processes ruining my realtime audio fun :(

[@DeanJ1984]

Aaaah that DUKE3D setup screen brought back some memories haha

[@jdpruente]

The Computer Man has been my ring tone for a couple years!

[@CoreyDeGrandchamp]

This was excellent, thanks!!!

[@Sadik15B]

Your soundcard is working perfectly

[@stoojinator]

Anyone who finds this nostalgic clearly was never the LAN leader in multi-PC setups at gaming days. I used to spend HOURS getting everyone's PCs working with LAN cards (most people didn't own them, so we'd have to install new or loaner cards). More often than not I wouldn't get to play because of this. It was fun, but bloody painful!

[@lightsier]

Awwww man... those days suuuuucked! You probably should have just tossed in Kernel conflicts as a freebie of nightmares in the 90s. Also your bit at the end made me lol, good one!

[@andreassjoberg3145]

Pressing the "caddy eject" on a CD-Rom/DVD-Rom drive will still generate an IRQ. This is a handy way of getting out of frozen programs when the ctrl-alt-del will not work. Nifty hack to know, it works more often than not...

[@OxKing]

God, remembering this let me love my Windows 10 PC ten times more. :) All the hassle with IRQ, DMA and the different RAM Spaces for drivers in DOS.. Don't miss my config.sys really. And those jumpers, Floppy and IDE cables. Figuring out all that stuff on you own basically, without the internet to guide you. Now almost every thing runs out of the Box, with Windows getting the drivers itself via Update. Also PCs don't crash or die due a failed fan anymore, because everything is monitored and smart in itself nowdays.

[@MarkColemanRules]

Bought back lots of memories... mainly bad ones!

[@MindOfCrim]

What are IRQ, DMA & Address Ports?

[@Nostalgianerd]

Brancasm beats me.

[@razeezar]

Brancasm Kid in 2037 : "What is usb, apps and touch screens?"

[@AiOinc1]

Interrupt ReQuest, Direct Memory Access, communications port. Universal Serial Bus, mobile applications, resistive / capacitive input device.

[@dan_loup]

The first is your teacher poking you with a ruler so you can pay attention to her task, the second is you copying your friend's work directly instead of asking him and the last one is where you sit in the class, now on the dunce chair because you got caught dmaing your work.

[@EdinburghGuy]

IRQ is an interrupt request by the hardware to inform the CPU of some event - the keyboard would send interrupts for key presses and releases. DMA is direct transfer of memory. A hard disk drive controller could send kilobytes of data message by DMA straight into system memory. The CPU had a special bus for writing to hardware. You read and wrote bytes down this bus by using the IN and OUT assembly language commands. In hex E6,60 would send the contents of AX to port 0x60 which was the speaker frequency. No volume control.

[@ezydenias8505]

Reminds me on debugging microcontrollers, Seriously yu can see every part of the memory, it's address and it's value. So you can directly see what is in the ram. Seriously that is quite awesome, unduable with higher levels of programming on higher machines but damn that is something that really give you a feel for the thing.

[@IGOH4nI]

Great channel, thank you for subtitles!

[@Nostalgianerd]

You are most welcome.

[@KuraIthys]

Those derpy faces creep me out. XD Well done. ;p

[@MrDbrennen]

One bit of nostalgia I can live without

[@pinkipromise]

didnt know irq or dma channels when i was a kid. but i know randomly choosing them would eventually make duke work

[@Moonchild1607]

Smart comparison!

[@user-rh9ku5sb8s]

I think I spent my whole time gaming in my youth not knowing what these acronyms meant or did. Just played around with the numbers/accepted the defaults. 😂

[@GerardKean]

I remember the days or IRQs and running out of them and trying to get the joystick plugged into the midi port on my sound card working. Getting things working was, at times, more interesting than the games themselves.

[@tobiberlin3471]

hahaha awesome!!! all this old stuff to explain how it worked :)

[@unfa00]

Learning about how computer components cooperate teaches me about how humans cooperate. Fascinating!

[@sirjaunty1]

Phillips CDI Palm Springs Golf there. Nice. A game you can play within that game, is Spot The Rake in the sandtraps. : )

[@matthewday7565]

Ah, the good old days, my tactic for the really tough ones was to prepare a "cheat sheet", listing things with their resources in order of flexibility... absolute requirements first, going down to devices that had the widest choice. For some particular combinations, the DMA day was saved by one device allowing DMA 0 (formerly memory refresh, but available on 286 or better - and yes, the high DMAs were available too but there were never that many devices competing for them. DMA 0 - formerly memory refresh, latterly available but a rare option on devices DMA 1 - first choice of pretty much everything! DMA 2 - floppy controller DMA 3 - the usual backup selection of devices Competing... Sound card, Network card, Old scanner cards, LPT1 in ECP/EPP mode

[@wjckc79]

Talk about back in the day. I remember when it was good to know base 2 and 16.

[@BilalHeuser1]

The one thing that I found more frustrating than IRQs, DMAs, and address ports was the crappy PNP management software that always refused to configure devices they way I wanted. Windows and it's device manager made things a bit more tolerable though ...

[@jamegumb7298]

Reminds me of having to set up each sound card by hand for every single game in DOS. Good old AWE.

[@Dlf212]

Your sound card works perfectly! - Warcraft 2 . . . .

[@qdeqdeqdeqde]

HMI module alpha-humana on approach to space station Mercury.

[@ForrestBobHD]

Watching this, as I unbox my eBay Sound Blaster 2, it just hit me why I lobe these old things. The knowledge, the learning curve. It is so much more fulfilling than building a modern rig. Glad I didn't HAVE to grow up with this tho 😂

[@etatauri]

I remember as a kid trying so hard to install C&C Red Alert. If only I knew more I wouldn't have had to guess all DMA and IRQ combos to make the sound work.

[@robehickmann]

It's worth noting that not all cpu architectures have a concept of ports. It is very common to map peripherals to memory addresses instead, memory mapped IO. I know that the GBA and original NDS consoles do this, I suspect that more recent ARM based devices do as well but have not had any reason to look into it.

[@PhoenixNL72-DEGA-]

A lot of home computers like the Amiga used memory mapped IO as well. (They also used DMA to do memory to memory transfers to do things like create hardware sprites. Leaving the CPU to do other work instead of it having to actually drawing the sprites pixel by pixel.) (For those who don't know: A sprite is the name for an ingame object like the character you control or the enemies you have to evade/shoot.)

[@pwolkowicki]

These DMAs, IRQs and others were always black magic for me. :P

[@oleksiynehlyadyuk8123]

the background music is so cool that i couldn't understand the topic :P

[@mickles1975]

I remember setting up warcraft's sound by trial and error and never remembering to write down the settings that worked. Not having to go through all that business is glorious. You kids don't know yer born!

[@technirvana4199]

True That!! Ad-lib, direct sound, or if very lucky you had a Soundblaster 16!

[@CommodoreFan64]

I remember doing that a few times during my first 2 386 builds(one for myself, and other the family computer) back in the day as a kid trying to get sound to work on a SB 16 clone card(ASound was the brand if i remember correctly), so after that I started to keep a written list of what IRQ went to what device, and what jumper settings did what on my motherboards, and man did that save a lot of time.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

And then you got the issues that you can't use your sound card and your printer port at the same time.

[@jamesisaac7684]

No wonder majority of gamers gravitated to consoles.

[@randywatson8347]

Just recently tinkered one of my retro pc. Some have a tiny board with a all in one cpu chip, which is a pain in the butt conflicting irq at sbpro emulation at it's own will... also lack of bios settings, not partcular dos compatible. If I remember correctly it was a cyrix mediagx cpu.

[@gnumone]

what is the medical encyclopedia software you are using in the video if i may ask ?

[@benjaminfacouchere2395]

I could read "Bodyworks 5.0"

[@ig_foobar]

Ugh ... the bad old days!

[@SqualidsargeStudios]

What is it with the separate calling of things like 22? why 2 2 instead of 22.

[@Kippykip]

Thank goodness PCI soundcards with DOS drivers handle this already.

[@matthewday7565]

I miss those days, I loved the challenge of getting reputedly difficult combinations set up. The killer was the low DMA channels 0-3, and in the AT and above era where DMA 0 was no longer needed for memory refresh, if one card offered it, it saved the day. The Floppy controller was always on #2, so unless a device did offer #0, you could struggle. Typical devices that needed a low DMA (0-3) . there was never a problem with high DMA (4-7), were: Sound card (typ #1, often the one device that could take #0)) LPT port in EPP/ECP (typ #3) Network card Scanner interface card SCSI or other interface cards

[@mickwolf1077]

if the keyboard is irq 1 why is it that when you put in a cd into a cd drive the whole computer including keyboard stops until the disc is read?

[@mariannmariann2052]

Maybe it's IRQ 0.

[@mesicek7]

I remember how annoying it was if u didn't know what u had and you'd just randomly select something hoping the sound would work

[@MasterNeiXD]

PLEASE, MAKE A PART 2 AND GO DEEEPER. I'm currently studying peripherals in one of my computer science courses.

[@Nostalgianerd]

That's what she said (that doesn't even really make sense). In all seriousness, it's unlikely that I'll follow this up with anything more in depth. I like to keep them "Byte Size" to avoid getting bogged down.

[@simontay4851]

Do a megabyte sized episode about this.

[@MasterNeiXD]

Nostalgia Nerd Oh, no problem. I still love you. Thank you for replying.

[@SkyOctopus1]

At 0:28 that looks more like a COAST than a disk controller. What kind of disk controller is it?

[@SanderSmit77]

Could you do a video about IRQ sharing?

[@tinchovm85]

Never understood this as a kid. Anyway I remember always selecting IRQ 5 and DMA 1 for Sound Blaster when setting up (SETUP.EXE) most MS-DOS games my computer back then. That always worked, buy I think I arrived to those values by trial and error.

[@laharl2k]

Plug and Pray indeed! Just had to disable PnP Aware OS on my MMX's bios and then change the ethernet card on pci slot 2 to irq 12 to make the sound card work properly! Whatever is up with this M571 board, it doesnt like giving an IRQ to the VGA and the sound card at the same time. Or maybe its because of the network card but in any case it took me waaaaaay more time that it should have to figure this out!

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

Never did understand why an IRQ conflict would often cause a freeze or cause one device to be non-functional instead of just the CPU reacting to the interrupt by checking both devices using that IRQ.

[@tsartomato]

computers are absolutely unlike a body body is analog and merges cpu with memory on 2,5d space, while also not designating resources to always on input devices which are on standby

[@Nostalgianerd]

Of course computers are nothing like a body. Good lord.

[@tsartomato]

you see the windows 95 is like a cabinet with two doors and a stained glass door while windows 98 is like a cupboard with two glass doors and 3 shelves pointless bad analogies are pointless and bad

[@funghazi]

So glad I don't have to deal with these things anymore.

[@TheRestartPoint]

Autoexec.bat, config.sys, how much do I NOT miss having to be concerned with them! But on the other hand, at least it made it necessary to understand a little more about how my computer worked more than is required these days.

[@FurEngel]

Correction in your video: all of the devices had separate BUT EQUAL IRQ addresses.

[@barrybritcher]

I miss those glory days.

[@tancar2004]

Back in my college days (1995) my roommate and I spent 6 hours trying to get his brand new top of the line pentium pc to with the brand new plug and play bios to work with his soundblaster 16 which he held over from his old system. Those were not so good times.

[@BesterP12]

I remember my second home computer. An odd Frankenstein 386 put together by my science teacher. It used a non ide hard drive. I guess cause that's what he had. When I bought a cdrom/soundcard kit, something about the new stuff kept the serial port (mouse) from working. I even called tech support for creative. When I told them the.cable going to the hard drive wasn't 40pin, they gave up. I finally just got a mouse emulator off aol. And used a joystick for cursor movement in cd games until I replaced some things. Sorry for lack of details but this was 20 years ago in hs

[@ChristyCub]

PCI express lanes are the new IRQs. There is just not enough lanes!

[@LoRdLoSs1337]

Haha, I remember setting up sound in Blood so many times. Maybe I should go get my Pentium II out of storage....

[@unfa00]

"I live... Again..."

[@cbremer83]

I don't miss the days of random IRQ conflicts rising when no hardware was changed.

[@wisteela]

I like your old Wang keyboard. It has a great sound to it. Sounds great quality.

[@DizzyDooDar]

Is that a Compaq Prolinea at 0:30?

[@KowboyUSA]

The good ol' days when a computer required an operator.

[@suminshizzles6951]

Lets see if i remember. Interupt requests, Direct Memory Access.....address ports? Not sure anymore but some how i seen to think of the addresses serial and parallel ports used

[@suminshizzles6951]

IRQ's were still present on the XP Comptia A+ examination that i passed in 2010. lmao

[@reggiep75]

Thank the universe we never have to mess around with that old crap and plug and play saved us in the end! I remember this crap from over 25 years ago!

[@henrymach]

I miss jumpers. Jumpers were cool

[@PhoenixNL72-DEGA-]

Dipswitches where better though :) (Ah the time when you set your CPU Bus and multiplier and your memory speed and latency with dipswitches.

[@ZaCaptain1229]

So you could only have 4 cd drives then not 5... I don't know why you would need five but is this correct?

[@SpearM3064]

+Zac Meyers That depends on whether your CD drives are IDE or SCSI, or require a interface card. Originally, CD drives required an interface card, because the original IDE controller only allowed two hard drives, one as master and one as slave. You would have been correct; back then, each CD interface card required its own IRQ, DMA, and I/O address. Then the ATAPI specification was updated to allow you to connect a CD drive to your IDE controller, so you could have one hard drive and one CD drive without needing a separate card for the CD drive. Then EIDE (Extended IDE) came along and added a second IDE channel, which could support an additional two IDE drives. It was common practice to attach your hard drive(s) to the first IDE channel, and CD drive(s) to the secondary channel. You could still connect additional hard drives or CD drives by adding expansion cards. For example, you can theoretically have four IDE channels, allowing you to connect a total of 8 IDE drives. However, the two extra channels often had software support problems because they were on a "nonstandard" IRQ; most drivers expected the IDE channels to be on IRQ 14 and 15. It's not as much of a problem these days because Plug & Play actually works (most of the time), and modern operating systems since Windows 95 SR2 have something called "PCI IRQ Steering", which allows multiple cards to share a single IRQ. If you need more drives than that, you have to switch to SCSI. A single SCSI-2 host adapter can support up to 14 drives. And yes, you can mix-and-match... for example, you might have two or more IDE hard drives in a RAID configuration, then have multiple CD/DVD drives attached to a SCSI-2 host adapter. I've seen servers with up to 40 DVD drives.

[@ZaCaptain1229]

SpearM3064 Wow thank you for that explaination. I can't imagine having to set up 40 DVD drives, hardware or software wise.

[@betamax80]

Thats a fab explanation!

[@Nostalgianerd]

betamax80 thanks!

[@AiOinc1]

"Disk controller" *Shows picture of voltage regulator*

[@Nostalgianerd]

AIO inc. Shhhh, it looks pretty.

[@AiOinc1]

But it serves a completely different purpose

[@drunkrdm]

ahh.. the lovely days of .. trying to get games to work...

[@rationalraven8956]

What was the song at 7:27?

[@lordmmx1303]

the computer man

[@balaclava351]

Scatman John

[@KasparOnTube]

as kid I just always thrown random values for IRQ and stuff until got somewhat working result :D

[@wesmatron]

Back in those days, you were a bit of a guru if you could merely get a game running

[@Nostalgianerd]

wesmatron That's why those days were so special. You had to work to play your crap game!

[@mr.nobody6829]

Thanks to the advancements we don't have to deal with these boring stuff anymore.

[@rationalraven8956]

What does it say about me that I learned more about human biology than I did about computers from this video?

[@KaienSander10Official]

Plug & pray 😂😂😂

[@MarkReed-smokindeist]

I was big into the Amiga and those computers had Autoconfig for the hardware. It was a nice way to handle things it it worked well unless you tried to--for instance--add more Zorro RAM than the computer motherboard could address. It was a simple and effective version of "Plug & Play" before the Wintel systems got Plug and Play. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig

[@TheJamieRamone]

BEFORE plug & play? Keep in mind that well into this century, P&P was said 2 stand 4 "Plug & Pray" ;-)

[@uzaiyaro]

I can not even imagine 4GB of RAM hanging off a 386. You would’ve been the most popular kid in the damn county.

[@needforsuv]

wait you mean to tell me the 386 can address 4 GB (4096MB) of ram?

[@Mr.NiceUK]

In theory for the 386DX, but there was never a motherboard could get any where near that. The 386SX with its paltry 24 physical address lines could "only" address 16mb of physical memory.

[@NullaNulla]

Don't you mean 4096k not m? I don't remember even a 486 going beyond 32meg for most.

[@falcon-ng6sd]

No, the 80386 really did have a 32-bit physical address space.

[@NullaNulla]

@@falcon-ng6sd but the mobo couldn't handle it.

[@pcuser80]

Only the Intel CPU has io space, Motorola only io in memory space

[@truesenate5670]

pcuser80 your right Motorola was the worst

[@retrogamelord3763]

I'm gonna be DOOMED when my sound card comes in... haha, doomed. Cause I must play Doom first lmao

[@bazahaza]

HMI Module Alpha Humana on approach to Space Station Mercury

[@AiOinc1]

The AdLib uses port 388. I know that much.

[@onirtnec183]

2:18 damn that scary sound

[@Nostalgianerd]

Your profile pic... Classic.

[@negirno]

There's one user, who has a single strand of hair on a white background as a profile pic. It fooled me thinking that my monitor got hair stuck onto it almost every time I see that user in the comments.

[@Nostalgianerd]

Negirno haha, I've seen that one. Damn these people.

[@onirtnec183]

hell yeah l like

[@ewthmatth]

0:21 "AT machines" what are those? Google isn't helping

[@kelsen30]

Just the vision of the word "vxd" in a blue screen give me the creeps...

[@unlokia]

Tip for you: The word _”Polling”_ is pronounced _”Pole ing”_ and not in the way which you pronounced it here, using the _”Poll”_ as-in _”pollen”_