Alternatives to PAC-IV

[Dr.Fosgate]

I have a more modern system with no serial ports, and no ISA slots. I would like to migrate my RTAjr and LMS over to the newer system. Does anyone have any suggestions? I have read some things about this in other threads here, but the idea of multiple interfaces seems like it could be problematic.

Has anyone tried these products?

http://www.arstech.com/cgi-bin/ccp51...tr=HOME:usb2.0

The idea seems sound to me, but my fear is some other glitch. I have had great luck running my cards under Windows XP on my older system, so I know I will have no issues there.

Any help would be appreciated…

[cstrahm]

The ARS stuff is rather new. I have talked to some customers about it but have yet to find anyone who has reported using it. You will need the larger power supply. Even that still has some current limitations on some of the voltages which may be a problem. Especially for running two analyzer cards. I think the cost will end up around $200.

I think the cheapest way to go still is using a used P-II or P-III. They can be had for very cheap money and there are millions of them around. Many systems and motherboards are available on Ebay for very little money.

[tonychantm]

Try 2theMAX 4PCI2E if new mother board is the perference!


http://www.2themax.com

[Digi]

I have recently tried the ARS Tech ISA2USB adapter and could not get it to work. Paul, an ARS technician, seems a bit baffled why it doesn't work. The interface is very simple, you assign I/O ports, DMA, IRQ, and memory ranges to the interface and the LMS driver should recognize it. In my case I set the LMS I/O jumpers to 351F. The USB2ISA adapter recognized the LMS card and the hardware I/O jumper, 351F. I assigned ports 135F, 235F....735F to the adapter to provide the same I/O ports my working system has assigned. Everything seems like it should work but I cannot see any of the I/O resources being detected by the LMS_NTD.sys nPnP driver.

Chris, if you have any insight of how the LMS_NTD.sys driver works I would appreciate it. I would like to get this band-aid in place until LMS-5 is released.


Thanks,


Rob

[cstrahm]

I am happy to finally get some feedback from someone who has used the ARS product. Although I would have expected better results.

The LMS analyzer uses a group of (8) I/O addresses. If the base address is 021F, then the group is 021F, 121F, 221F, 321F, 421F, 521F, 621F, 721F. I think you already had figured this out yourself, and that is correct. There is no DMA, IRQs, or MemMap interface used.

The LMS kernel driver just does the normal things required by NT to communicate with the hardware bus interfaces through Ring-0. There is nothing unusual about it at all. Very common driver design modeled after examples given in MS DDK.

LMS should be very easy for the ARS to handle. Only I/O ports are required, no DMA, IRQs, etc. I am very surprised that it has problems with something this easy.

If the LMS driver cannot reach the board, then the ARS system is not providing the true equivalent it claims. However what it is trying to do is not exactly easy. A kernel driver makes direct calls into the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) of NT. The ARS driver must intercept these calls and redirect them to its own system, and fool the NT drivers into thinking they are talking to the ISA bus. If it is not doing that properly, than the LMS driver won't see the card.

[Digi]

Chris, here is a response to your post, let me know what you think:


"Hello Rob ,

We do the redirection properly .

The problem is that the driver is not installed properly on the particular system.

The potential issues -

- defining of the i/o ports as belonging to the lms driver; I am not sure how is the lms driver installed - there may be a 'boot loader' which is not present on systems with no isa bus;
we have a way of loading modern 2k/xp/vista .sys drivers, however older nt drivers may have custom ways;

- the driver does boot time initialization , and usb2isa+isa comes later after boot

- the driver requires tight timing , and the redirection through usb brings timeout


We have developers kit - 'sdkbus' , allowing developers to debug and fix software.

If LinearX is willing , they can test their products with usb2isa.

Paul"



Thanks,

Rob

[cstrahm]

>> - the driver does boot time initialization,
>> and usb2isa+isa comes later after boot

I think that's the problem. The LMS NT driver looks for the card when it is loaded (during boot). That's pretty standard for most NT drivers. It's really only WDM drivers for USB etc. that do their mapping later on the fly. If their ARS driver gets loaded later, than yes that will be a problem because the LMS driver has already initialized itself and found no LMS card before the ARS driver is up and running.

There's one potential workaround you might try. If you go to the Administrator Tools folder in Control Panel, and then choose Services, you will find the LMS_NT driver listed there. You can Stop the driver, and then Restart it. Assuming the other ARS driver has been loaded, when you restart the LMS driver it should be able to be captured then by the ARS driver. You can try it.

[Digi]

During my troubleshooting I did try that, thinking the same thing that you stated. Unfortunately I cannot start and stop the driver on demand. It does not work, here is the error "The request is not valid for this service." I set it to manual, restarted the machine, waited for the ISA2USB to load, then I started the LMS_NTD driver. no luck. Under the LMS_NTD driver you can't see any resources assigned to it. There is one thing that does bother me but I am not sure if it will effect the LMS_NTD detecting the LMS card. The ISA2USB detects the LMS card and the hardware jumper I/O port setting but it assigns ports 358-35F automatically to the card, and then I manually add the other I/O ports 135F...etc. I wonder if having ports 358-35E assigned will effect the LMS_NTD driver?

[cstrahm]

There is no accurate way for the ARS driver or any other driver to detect general I/O ports in any card, so I'm not sure what they had in mind there. The fact that it does not get them right does not surprise me. They must be trying to do so on the basis of some assumptions, and clearly that doesn't work. They must be trying to assume that all I/O addresses are R/W when they are not. Some are Read, some are Write, some are Read/Write.

If their driver does not get loaded early enough to intercept the calls to the ISA bus, then it would not work with many card drivers. The drivers have to initialize at boot time in order for NT to be able to detect collisions (requests for the same I/O port adr by multiple drivers) at boot time.

It sounds like this isn't going to work.

[Digi]

Thanks Chris,

Seems that it would be difficult to get it working:

"The LinearX may be reluctant to do a 2k/xp driver if the win nt one did work under particular conditions.

We may be reluctant to do an update to handle the loading of older nt drivers.

We can advance only if both companies collaborate .


Here is my response to comments -
Unless a driver is used for booting of the operating system, it has to be able to load at any time after boot .
If some i/o ports are not detected by the enumerator [ISA2USB configuration software], they can be manually specified for redirection.
Collisions are detected/handled by the enumerator as well.

Paul."

Rob

[cstrahm]

Yeah I guess we can both pass the buck back and forth all day long.

The LMS driver was certainly created during NT4, but it is just as valid under NT5 (Win2K), NT5.1 (WinXP), or NT6 (Vista). It is true they have added newer driver models like WDM that allow you to do what they describe, and I use those myself on our other drivers where they are appropriate.

But those types of drivers are generally used where a pariticular device is expected to be removed/added while the system is running. For an internal card that is bolted down inside the computer in a bus slot, that is where a fixed boot driver is nearly always used. No one expects that device to change while the computer is on because it is impossible. Obviously this situation is very unique.

I can put it on my list of things to do, but I can't promise you a time when I will get to it. Honestly it is a low priority. We already have an alternative solution (PAC-4) that does the same thing of course. My plate is very full right now trying to get other new code done. Doing driver development requires setting up the DDK again with another debugging workstation. It's not a 60 minute job. It is time consuming.

[Digi]

Chris,

I appreciate all of your input thus far, especially considering this is not a LinearX product. I know more about the ISA architecture than I ever wanted to know. I thought about trying to hack the driver but the time I would have to spend would be 10X more than I have and 10X more than a software engineer. Is the "other new code" LMS-5? Is there any preliminary info you want to share with the forum?


Rob

[cstrahm]

I'm really sorry it didn't work out. Yes I have to put my time into the new products. It has been a big project. I hope to have some info up on the web site within a couple more weeks.

[yamane]

I having passing by the same situation too.

- ISA Slot is impossible to be found on new PCs.
- PAC IV is "out-dated" because is very difficult find a new computer with SERIAL port.
- Buy OLD motherboards is not good, because the Laboratory MUST be high-reliability (and we can not have this with OLD PCs)

I think the best way is buy a Industrial PC, like this:
http://www.adek.com/ATX_motherboards.html

Best regards,
Renato S. Yamane

[BushyHair]

First let me say that most of this is old news, but I would like to reiterate for those who may have gotten lost in the forum labyrinth.

Like several other people I have found no alternative to using the PAC IV with newer PC's lacking ISA slots (ARS will not work/did not work for me or others).

Nevertheless, the PAC IV WILL WORK with usb, provided you purchase a simple usb to D-9 pin (com port) adapter... and they are cheap. I'm using a brand name "prolific" and it works fine with the PAC IV provided you connect prior to boot.

Alternative to a cord-like adapter... many notebook/laptops have a legacy port docking station solutions. My Dell precision M4500 (win7 64b) has one and it works fine with the PAC IV too.

The final alternative would be to wait for the coveted LX500, but I'm not sure if it will have RTA-like features in addition to LMS capabilities and a host of copious other drool catalyzing tools. A beefed up portable LMS+RTA would really be the cat's meow.

In any case... personally, once I upgrade from LMS to LX500 I'll still keep the old one with the PAC IV... never hurts to have a backup.

Best of luck