Are drivers same for old & new ISA GPIB cards

[martin mannion]

Hi,
I have some 5 YEAR old AT-GPIB ISA type cards (have copyright 1995 written on them). They are installed & work fine on NT. I don't have the installation disks for the original drivers. To get these cards working on win 2000, exactly which driver(s) do I need & where can I get them - there seems to be a few versions of similar GPIB drivers on the NI website, all with different installation guidelines.

Also, if I buy NEW ISA card (as a backup for the 5 year old cards) will any drivers installed for these old cards work with the new card? (I would hope to avoid the installion of new drivers if the card must be replaced in future). My limited reading on ni.com suggests that my old cards need driver NI-488.2 for Windows, revision 1.7, while I;m concerned that any new cards would demand install newer drivers.

Any assistance would be much appreciated.

All the best,
Martin

[PNHorn]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for your post regarding which driver you should install to get your AT-GPIB card working on Windows 2000. The best driver for you to use would be NI-488.2 version 2.3. You can download this from the following link. This is the latest version of the driver but still supports the AT-GPIB card.

http://digital.ni.com/softlib.nsf/websearch/74B5B3FF1122C90F86256F4F00781783?opendocument&node=132060_US

With regards to your query about new ISA cards, we no longer sell ISA cards and therefore if you were to buy a backup for your cards you would have to either go for PCI, PXI, USB or PCMCIA as your bus type. For the newest products you are correct that you would have to have the latest drivers installed, at the moment you would be OK as the latest GPIB driver still supports your existing cards, but sometime in the future we will probably bring out new cards that require another version of the driver, and that version may not support your existing cards.

Hope this helps,

Best regards,

Peter H
Applications Engineer
NIUK.

[NI-488.2 master]

NI-488.2 version 1.7 will support AT-GPIB-TNT and AT-GPIB-TNT(PnP). NI-488.2 version 2.3 will just support AT-GPIB-TNT(PnP). Contrary to the previous answer, we do still sell ISA based GPIB cards. You should also be able to use a PCI-GPIB with the latest driver. The driver for this hardware will be backwards compatible with your application, so you don't need to worry about always having an ISA based GPIB card.

Craig A
National Instruments Engineer

[martin mannion]

Thanks Craig,Peter,
The old cards I have are AT-GPIB/TNT (I omitted the 'TNT' in my initial description of them!).
I understand the following from your replies... please correct me if I'm mistaken:

1) I need NI-488.2 version 1.7 to get my old AT-GPIB/TNT cards to work.
2) My old AT-GPIB/TNT cards will not work on Version 2.3.
3) If I get a new PCI-GPIB card i would need to use NI-488.2 version 2.3 to make this PCI card work.
4) If I get a new ISA based GPIB card i would need to use NI-488.2 version 2.3 to make this ISA card work.
5) Thus, if I order a new GPIB card (either ISA or PCI) as a backup to my old AT-GPIB/TNT cards, I would first need to upgrade from NI-488.2 version 1.7 to NI-488.2 version 2.3 before the new card would work.

Thanks for the support,
Martin.

[NI-488.2 master]

1) I need NI-488.2 version 1.7 to get my old AT-GPIB/TNT cards to work.
Yes

2) My old AT-GPIB/TNT cards will not work on Version 2.3.
Yes

3) If I get a new PCI-GPIB card i would need to use NI-488.2 version 2.3 to make this PCI card work.
This statement is incorrect. All PCI-GPIB cards will work with NI-488.2 version 1.7.

4) If I get a new ISA based GPIB card i would need to use NI-488.2 version 2.3 to make this ISA card work.
This statement is also incorrect. All ISA based GPIB cards will work with version 1.7.

5) Thus, if I order a new GPIB card (either ISA or PCI) as a backup to my old AT-GPIB/TNT cards, I would first need to upgrade from NI-488.2 version 1.7 to NI-488.2 version 2.3 before the new card would work.
Incorrect. You may continue to use version 1.7.