Win95/8 GPIB driver for unknown NI board (see pic)

[QuantumEraser]

Hi,
Thanks in advance for any help.

• A friend of mine owns a photo-processing business and I help out with IT/tech matters
• He has come into possession of an unused Imapro QCR-35 film recorder, driven from a rather old Win95/8 computer via a GPIB board. The board is manufactured by Imapro with NI chips - please see images
• Athough he has all the old software that came with the recorder we can not make it work as it relies on other pieces of kit (such as out of date densitometers) and the company Imapro is long gone.
• The GPIB board in the computer appears to be functional but the driver is proprietary and when used with non-Imapro recorder software, (specifically WERP - an american program dedicated to driving image recorders via GPIB) does not appear to function.

We are thus trying to find a generic win95/8 driver for this board that will (hopefully) work with the imaging software to drive the recorder.

If more details are required please do contact me; Any suggestions very welcome and thanks again.

regards

Gary

[paw510]

As far as I know there are no generic windows drivers for GPIB. But if the driver is already installed, as I suppose from your explanation, you can scan the windows system directory for gpib dlls to know which type of interface it is: if it is an NI board it could be NI488.dll or gpib32.dll (although my recollection about what we have been using in 1995 might not be exact :)).  If you find one of these just google for the manual.

[QuantumEraser]

Brilliant, thanks for the help.

I’ll contact my friend via Skype and guide him in looking through the windows folders as you suggest.

I’ll post our results here for info - might be a few days though due to Movement restrictions of course,

best regards

Gary

[paw510 · Accepted solution]

I forgot one: under win958 it might be  "gpibmngr.dll" as well, I think it is even older than the other two I cited.  Actually at that time I was using different brands for gpib (although sometimes helping my collegues that were using NI boards) so I never had a chance to use this dll  (I know fairly well the other two though).  

[QuantumEraser]

Apologies for the length of time it has taken me to get back to this post - the lockdown restrictions have been making any progress extremely slow, (having to guide my friend through the steps required remotely via Skype, etc is incredibly slow).

Anyhow  -  in the end he bought a replacement the board in the pictures so the question of a driver does not really apply. Interestingly it is an NI board and works a treat.

We still can't get his imaging camera working but the exact cause of that is unrelated I think, (might be the camera itself or even the imaging software).

However NISpy software shows the NI boards is working fine.

Thanks for your help

best regards

Gary