Programming MT-2000

[NCal_Old_Bill]

All,

This one has me puzzled. I used to have a great programming platform- a WinBook Z1 running W98SE, and, among other things, it was set up for our HT1000's and MT2000's. Worked perfectly. Then it crashed.

Did a clean reload of W98.

Loaded the HT/JT1000/VISAR RVN4098H v. 03.03.00 10APR98... loaded in, and running in, pure DOS and it can't find COM 1.

Loaded the MTSX (MT2000 and others) RVN4097N V. R06.03.00 19FEB99... again loaded and running in pure DOS, and it too cannot find COM 1.

The first one I got to run (sort of) (double clicked on it while in Windows) and it seems to work just fine but we all know that is not how these things are to be used. The MTSX won't do anything. We need to work with both.

What happened to my serial port? Should I dump W98 and use pure DOS? All ideas welcome.

[MTS2000des]

you should be booting to pure DOS.
A simple DOS boot disk should do the trick.
that machine should run just fine for DOS RSS.
Make sure nothing else is set to the same IRQ in the BIOS (like an internal modem), that may cause problems with your serial port not being detected properly by the RSS.

[Will]

A simple change in the config.sys file, IIRC, will start the computer up in DOS.

bootgui=0 should be in the config.

Win 98 will then start in real DOS and run all the RSS.

Also works on Win95 too.

[NCal_Old_Bill]

Thanks all for reading and for the response.

Solution: Scrubbed the drive, and reloaded from some DOS 6.22 disks I had around from the 90's. The DOS-based RSS's never worked faster, cleaner, or better. Old laptops are everywhere and cheap enough to dedicate one with a real serial port to this function exclusively. And this is by far the best way to do it. Even though we were doing a restart from W98 into pure DOS, Windows was still messing something up.

[Will]

Even though we were doing a restart from W98 into pure DOS, Windows was still messing something up.

That IS where you get into trouble in 95 or 98. The restart is not real DOS because 95 or 98 IS STILL there......
The direct method, in my previous post, does not load any Windows stuff.

[wavetar]

If you decide to reload Win98 for whatever reason, this trick will help you with RSS:

Go into the "C:\Windows" directory & find the 'MS-DOS mode for Games with EMS & XMS Support'. Double-clicking this will re-boot your laptop into a superior DOS mode. One that uses expanded memory to emulate extended memory, for the best possible performance. There are no aspects of Windows (TSR's, drivers, etc) that load with this mode, just like using a boot disk. Your machine will even boot into DOS upon a hard reboot, just like your old DOS machines used to...no boot disk required! You will need to type 'exit' at the C-prompt in order to reboot back into Windows.

[NHfirefighter]

If you decide to reload Win98 for whatever reason, this trick will help you with RSS:

Go into the "C:\Windows" directory & find the 'MS-DOS mode for Games with EMS & XMS Support'. Double-clicking this will re-boot your laptop into a superior DOS mode. One that uses expanded memory to emulate extended memory, for the best possible performance. There are no aspects of Windows (TSR's, drivers, etc) that load with this mode, just like using a boot disk. Your machine will even boot into DOS upon a hard reboot, just like your old DOS machines used to...no boot disk required! You will need to type 'exit' at the C-prompt in order to reboot back into Windows.

This is a great tip I just found! It helped me with MTSXLAB that I was trying to run in Windows98. Anyone having troubles using RSS on newer machines should know about this.

[wavetar]

This is a great tip I just found! It helped me with MTSXLAB that I was trying to run in Windows98. Anyone having troubles using RSS on newer machines should know about this.

Thanks for the feedback. It's a trick I've posted probably 50 times over the years, but hadn't in many years as RSS use is becoming much less popular. Good to know it's still helping people.