qbasic serial communications in 98/xp

[drivers]

I hava a qbasic program that works on win95, but cannot communicate with the serial port when running Win98SE or XP.
If I run the Win98 machine in dos mode it works, so there are no hardware problems. How do I make it work on Win98SE, and hopefully XP? It is a plot program for surveying, and reads data from an old handheld Sanyo.

[Platypus]

I guess it should be able to work OK, for example here:

http://www.techlib.com/electronics/serialport.htm

qbasic is said to do a similar thing OK under 98 and XP.

Maybe the difference is between the systems rather than the Windows versions? eg if the Win95 system it works on still has an ISA bus with the I/O on it, but the 98/XP systems are pure PCI, you may need to reserve the required Serial Port address and/or IRQ for Legacy in the BIOS setup.

[ShadowWynd]

How are you accessing the COM port?

Are you doing using OPEN "COM1:" FOR INPUT AS #1
or are you uisng INP(&H3FC) or similar direct addressing?

Does the program need to Read and Write data to the device, or is it a read-only dump?

Assume for a minute that it will not work under advanced OSes - have you considered a third-party com port read/write utility? The 3rd party utility could read the data coming from the device over the COM port and read it to a file, and you should be able to adjust the program to use a dump from another file.

http://www.handyarchive.com/Utilitie...t-Toolkit.html

Or perhaps even rewriting the code in another language - I recentlly needed to talk to a serial device, I used Python (a free interpretive programming language, www.python.org) and the Python Serial library (also free) - serial port is treated just like a file, I was able to get data to my program after only a few minutes of playing with the code.

[drivers]

I guess it should be able to work OK, for example here:

http://www.techlib.com/electronics/serialport.htm

qbasic is said to do a similar thing OK under 98 and XP.

Maybe the difference is between the systems rather than the Windows versions? eg if the Win95 system it works on still has an ISA bus with the I/O on it, but the 98/XP systems are pure PCI, you may need to reserve the required Serial Port address and/or IRQ for Legacy in the BIOS setup.

I tried setting IRQ4 to "reserved" or "legacy" - did not solve the problem.

[drivers]

[QUOTE=ShadowWynd]How are you accessing the COM port?

Are you doing using OPEN "COM1:" FOR INPUT AS #1
or are you uisng INP(&H3FC) or similar direct addressing?

It is using the OPEN "COM1": FOR INPUT AS #1 syntax.

Does the program need to Read and Write data to the device, or is it a read-only dump?

It is set up to recieve data from a handheld computor or to upload data to the handheld.

[drivers]

[QUOTE=drivers]

How are you accessing the COM port?

Are you doing using OPEN "COM1:" FOR INPUT AS #1
or are you uisng INP(&H3FC) or similar direct addressing?

It is using the OPEN "COM1": FOR INPUT AS #1 syntax.

Does the program need to Read and Write data to the device, or is it a read-only dump?

It is set up to recieve data from a handheld computor or to upload data to the handheld.

Here is a snippet of the code:

IF B$ = "500" THEN PRINT "select file: field.35/field.65 "; : GOSUB 7: OPEN "COM1:9600,N,8,1" FOR RANDOM AS #1: RETURN
GOTO 7910

9010 SCREEN 0: COLOR 15, 12: IF ERR = 58 THEN PRINT "file exists! overwrite? (y)/n:"; : GOSUB 7: IF B$ = "n" THEN RESUME 4000 ELSE RESUME NEXT
IF ERL = 10132 OR ERL = 2222 THEN RESUME NEXT
IF ERR = 53 THEN PRINT "file not found"; : P2 = 7: RESUME 10190
IF ERR = 24 OR ERL = 2275 THEN PRINT "device cannot communicate"; : RESUME 4000
IF ERR = 25 THEN PR$ = "n": RESUME 4000
IF ERL = 0 THEN PRINT "impossible"; : RESUME 4000
IF ERR = 13 AND ERL = 10251 THEN PRINT P; : INPUT #2, Q$: RESUME NEXT
IF ERR = 9 THEN PRINT " exceeds 150 lots or 7999 points!"; : RESUME 4000
IF ERL = 1076 OR ERL = 1071 THEN COLOR 7, 0: RESUME NEXT
PRINT "error "; ERR; " line "; ERL; : COLOR 7, 0: RESUME 4000

9990 PRINT " 1 receive co-ords from PC-1460(500); 2 store co-ords to disk; (6 append)"
PRINT " 3 read co-ords from disk; (5 string) 4 send co-ords to PC-1460(500)"
PRINT " 7 search for co-ord file; 8 delete co-ord file; "
PRINT "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 ?: "; : GOSUB 7: P2 = VAL(B$): P1 = 0
ON P2 GOTO 10000, 10100, 10200, 10300, 10200, 9996, 10190, 10099
GOTO 4000
9996 COLOR 15, 1: PRINT "append points; "; : GOSUB 1060: GOTO 10110