My trusty old XP windows notebook in my shop decided to flake out on me so I decided now would be a good time to try transferring everything to a WIN7 64 bit machine. I was using the XP notebook for internet browsing as well and the slow speed was becoming annoying but the thought of bringing up a new setup and the possible problems kept me from upgrading unless absolutely necessary.
The first thing I needed to do was to get my DATA I/O 29B and Promlink to work with my WIN7 64bit computer - the nice thing is that it had built in parallel and serial ports.
I tried running the XP version of PROMLINK using all of the advice I found in a dos window but it would not cooperate. I decided to try DOSBOX and followed the directions to mount a drive and directory. It ran PROMLINK ok but it was not talking to my 29B over the serial port. A little more reading told me that I needed to configure the serial port in DOSBOX so I edited the options.bat file and added this command:
serial1=directserial realport:COM1
It still was not communicating with the 29B and DOSBOX seemed to be waiting for some response from the serial device it was connected to. I checked all of the settings in promlink and windows - everything said 9600,n,8,1 for com1.
I turned off the 29B and in the DOSBOX window I noticed an error reported for the serial port. Then it hit me.....
I ran DOSBOX first, then turned on the 29B (mine starts up in remote mode; if yours does not you need to press "SELECT" "F" "1" START" "START"). Voila!!
I turned everything off, repeated my new process and am happily reading, programming, loading/writing files, and verifying with no issues.
I am documenting what worked for me for anyone else out there thinking about or trying to get their data i/o / promlink or other legacy dos stuff working with a win 7 computer. Off to make a donation to DOSBOX....
Bill