NI488.2 version 2.52 - Win16 and DOS support under Vista?????

[Piilen]

Hi Makoto, What I've done is use a copy of WMWare Workstation instead of Virtual PC. That actually works with USB, you only need to install a GPIB driver in the guest (in your case MS-DOS). You need to be careful that the guest OS has focus when you physically install the GPIB driver - then the device gets transferred directly to the guest OS and you don't need to install a GPIB driver in Vista. But it's horrible that NI does not support DOS and Win16 bit programs anymore - and with no explanation as to why they have dropped this. The very big problem is that Microsoft is just months away from stopping the sale of Windows XP and thus cutting me off from selling my product !!!!!!!! BR Morten

[Kamen]

Hello,

I came across this post, looking for something else but decided to post a suggestion that might help. I can't help you make your old application work with the new NI drivers but I can tell you how we are able to keep selling Windows XP for another eight years. We are a Microsoft OEM distributor and since our systems are sold for a specific purpose, we resell under the so called the "Embedded OEM licensing scheme" and as it currently stands XP Pro with Embedded restrictions will be distributed through 12/31/2016. The only requirement to qualify your product for this scheme is to no allow the customer to use that PC for general purposes (e.g., word processing, checking email, etc.)

I hope that helps.

Kamen

[Kamen]

P.S. It costs nothing and is very easy to become a MS OEM.

K.

[Makoto]

By the way, away from the Virtual PC environment, is there any way to run GPIB DOS programs under the Vista (x86) DOS Prompt?  As I tried, XP (x86) with NI-488.2 VER2.5 well supports the GPIB DOS emulation by adding DEVICE=C:\<path>\GPIB-NT.COM in the CONFIG.NT.  However, as NI claims in the GPIB's README text, VISTA does not work any longer.

I found the fact that NI-488 SETUP program does not copy the DOSWIN16 contents to the VISTA machine when installing the NI-488.2 package and NI-MAX running under VISTA does not show the Tools --> NI-488.2 --> DOS Support menu.  To override this, I manually copied DOSWIN16 contents from other working XP machine to VISTA, and manually modified CONFIG.NT to add the GPIB-NT.COM line.

However, when running the old IBIC.exe (DOS 16bit version), it did not run.  Is it still insufficient configuration? or Can't run the GPIB-DOS program under the VISTA DOS Prompt anyhow?

Thanks,

Makoto

[Steve59]

I'm having a similar issue with trying to run a 16-bit app on Windows 7. The app runs ok, with the exception that it fails to find the gpib.dll library. A quick look in the System32 folder confirmed that it wasn't installed. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but my guess is that copying both the gpib.dll and gpib-vdd.dll files from the XP installation would be a logical first step. At worst, I'll have to run the 16-bit gpib.dll and the gpib-32.dll in separate processes and use some kind of RPC mechanism between them. DDE, though old technology, has served me well before for working between 16-bit and 32-bit code.

[Steve59]

OK, I can confirm that just copying the gpib.dll and gpib-vdd.dll files from an XP machine doesn't work. The 16-bit application happily loads the gpib.dll but there is no actual GPIB traffic. So I guess I'll have to use plan B...

[Steve59]

Hi Piilen

It was interested to read about your inter-program communication using Windows messages. DDE does exactly this, and can work between 16-bit programs, between 32-bit programs and between 16 and 32 bit programs! In essence, a program that wants to talk to another program starts by sending a message to all windows. The one program that recognises the message acknowledges it and a conversation is set up between the two programs. Data is passed between programs using handles, which refer to entries (normally text strings) in the global atom table. The mechanism has been around since the days of Windows 3.1, and still works today.