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IO Trace backwards compatibility

Hi,

I was working on an outdated system which uses an old version of NI MAX (I'm afraid I don't know what version, but we are talking Windows NT, so it's going to be pretty old).  

I ran a few captures using NI Spy and kept them to review later.  I've installed MAX and IO Trace on my PC in order to look over the captures and am having an issue; I go to open the file, and I get no data, there is no error message or anything, but the data isn't displayed.  

 

Is there a limit on how backwards compatible IO Trace is? Is there a way I can have an old version of NI Spy I can use to look at my data?  I need to see what is in the capture files and it's not a simple plain-text file.  

 

Alternatively, does anyone know an easy way of reading these file types?  I can see the data I want is ASCII mixed in with a whole bunch of other stuff.  

 

Kind regards,

Dom

 

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Hi Dom, 

 

I'm Chiara, an Applications Engineer at NI.  What drivers were you using when you were capturing the commands with NI Spy? I believe you may need to have that same driver installed on your machine with IO Trace in order for MAX to be able to parse the data.  Try downloading the NI-288.2 or NI-VISA driver that you were using at the time and see whether this allows you to read the data.

 

Best wishes, 

 

 

Chiara A
Applications Engineer with NI UK & Ireland
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Hi Chiara,

Sorry for the delay in my response.  I tried this, and I got a step further, but I'm still having problems.  Now it loads, but I get the following error: 

io_trace_error.png

 

Any ideas? Alternatively, anywhere I can get an old version of NI SPY that might read these files? 

 

Cheers,

Dom

 

 

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Hi Dom, 

 

Unfortunately, that message looks to me like the files themselves might be corrupted.  You can see that some of the data is getting through, but not all, on that screenshot.  Especially if these files were saved a while ago on an old computer, it looks like maybe something happened to corrupt the files and that's why I/O trace can't parse them.  If so, I'm afraid there's not much help I can give.

 

I could be wrong: one last thing to try might be: I noticed that it's called "Agilent_Selex".  Does that mean that the scope would be using a third party driver?  It's worth definitely installing whatever version of that driver you had at the time just in case that allows the 'invalid' data to be read, but I'm not entirely certain it'll work, I have to admit.

 

Sorry I'm not able to be of more help here.

 

Best wishes, 

Chiara A
Applications Engineer with NI UK & Ireland
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Hi Chiara,

Thanks for the suggestions.  Sadly I couldn't get it to work.  Perhaps it was corrupted, or there is a subtle difference in the files from this very, very early Spy software.  

I've managed to make sense of the information in a plain-text document after some manipulation, so this will do!  

 

Kind regards,

Dom

 

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