Dick,
1. Has anyone had any bad experiences using Dell computers with NA?
My only experience is with a Dell P-200MMX laptop which came with Win95. In
order to get the ports to work with NA I had to disable PnP address selection
for the COM, LPT and mouse. This causes no real issues.
2. Has anyone had problems (or no problems at all) running NA under Windows
98, either in stand-alone DOS mode or in a DOS window?
The 40M station was run in a DOS window under Win95 on a IBM Thinkpad at the 40M
position of the MRRC FD effort at K8MAD. We had CW keying, and radio interface
connected, and it worked perfectly. It was K9TM's computer, so he might be able
to provide more details, but it was my understanding that it was somewhat of a
"spur of the moment" decision to improve the display (the ThinkPad's DOS display
is reduced size) so I don't think there was a whole lot of setup involved.
3. Has anyone found an 8-port or 4-port PCI serial card that works well with
NA under DOS on a Windows 98 (or Windows 95) system?
I have had good luck with 4-port cards from SiiG. Now I run them under DOS, but
they have complete control of IRQ and port address so you should be able to set
them up as needed.
4. Hard question (maybe only Dave can answer): If you run NA in a DOS window,
are special DOS drivers for the multiport card necessary or are the Windows
drivers sufficient?
Dick's comments concerning INT 14 show just how an astute observer he is.
However, NA does direct I/O control to the serial port. Experienced users may
recall that we had problems back in late version 9 or early version 10 where the
serial reports were disrupted by the DVPTSR program to run the K1EA DVP. Direct
serial control made these problems go away.
I don't think a special serial driver is necessary, however there may be
problems with port addressing. NA gets the addresses for COM1 thru COM4 from
the computer BIOS data area starting at address 0040:0000. A DOS computer runs
thru the I/Os and lists the ports it finds in this table. I'm not sure that
Win95 does the same thing, but rather might keep the addresses itself. You
probably will have to do some experimenting to determine how to make it work.
However, I would think in the worst case you could use the SETCOM.EXE program
that comes with NA to load the appropriate addresses into the Win95 emulation of
the BIOS. On other hand, NA does not support IRQ sharing (neither does CT -
TRLog will because it does not use IRQs at all, but polls the COM ports, which
is why TRLog is limited to 4800 baud).
I hope this info is useful.
73,
Dave, K8CC
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