DosBox Com Port OR WinXP Graphics

[senordos]

I am writing to you from my new (old) Ebay DELL D620. It's not the best - battery and powerpack issues to resolve and a load of cleaning up on the operating system to do, but ok so far.

Reason: FTDI adapter didn't work... wouldn't talk to the M4 at all. Old one seemed too much trouble to get working - I'm sure it's possible but spent too many hours piddling with it.

Not tried this laptop on the car yet... only arrived in an old apple box this evening. Hopefully no issues though and then I can buy a new battery.

Adam: thanks for all your help diagnosing the previous issue!

[stownsen914]

I recently purchased a vintage racecar that has an older (serial < 3000) Motec M4, and am trying to get connected using my Windows 7 computer. I am using a Prolific USB to serial adapter and the serial cable from Motec to communicate with the older M4. I am using Dosbox v.74, and after searching in this and other forums, have been playing around with the port configuration to get it working. After some experimenting to get any connectivity at all, I am now getting framing errors similar to those mentioned earlier in this thread. I've managed to get my computer to recognize the M4, but similar to what is mentioned earlier in the thread, it seems to connect initially but when I try to actually do anything like retrieve data, I get an endless WAIT and nothing comes back.

My current Dosbox port config is as follows:
serial1=directserial realport:com6 rxdelay:1
serial2=dummy
serial3=disabled
serial4=disabled

I tried putting serial1 to com1, and also setting seral2, 3, and 4 to directserial (and serial1 to dummy) to see if that helped. No luck.

I started out using the newest version of EMP (6.2 I believe), but got an error when trying to connect to my M4 saying that the software version was mismatched with the ECU, which apparently has v6.06, so I downgraded EMP to 6.07. Now it connects but only partially communicated with the M4 as I mention above.

Any recommendations how to get this working? Thank you in advance ...

Scott

[senordos]

Hi Scott,

I'm afraid I never got mine to work. Still struggling now even with another laptop. I shall watch with interest if anyone has had a more successful experience.

Good luck!

[stownsen914]

After looking around the forum for a bit, I'm wondering if anyone has managed to communicate with an M4 unit using a Windows 7 computer. I see lots of people getting close to doing so, but no success stories stand out. It would be great to hear from anyone who has managed to get such a setup working!

[AdamW]

After looking around the forum for a bit, I'm wondering if anyone has managed to communicate with an M4 unit using a Windows 7 computer. I see lots of people getting close to doing so, but no success stories stand out. It would be great to hear from anyone who has managed to get such a setup working!

Yes it works fine in both win7 & win8.1 32bit OS directly without any special setup.
Only the 64bit versions require dosbox or another VM and often take a bit of work to get reliable coms.

[stownsen914]

Thanks Adam. Is there any reason to think that I'd have an issue using EMP v6.07 with Windows 7 (64 bit) and Dosbox to communicate with an M4 running v6.06?

I've been focusing just on Dosbox serial configuration based on what I've seen posted in this forum. Should I also be looking at Dosbox configuration parameters like rxdelay, irq, cycles, etc?

[AdamW]

I dont have a PC with 64bit OS so have never tried.
A couple of comments though:
1. According to the readme.rtf in the latest EMP, USB serial support didnt come until Version 6.13 so 6.07 may never work with USB.
2. Many of the 64Bit drivers for USB>Serial adapters seem to be quite buggy, try a couple of different versions and download them direct from the Prolific or FTDI chipset websites.
3. FTDI USB>Serial adapters seem to be generally more reliable. Also if your laptop has a PCMCIA port or Expresscard slot then you could try a PCI/PCIe (search for oxford chipset) based serial port adapter - these will be seen by the OS as a native serial port so are generally robust.
4. I have never needed any of the DosBox optional parameters such as RXdelay etc.

[stownsen914]

Thank you again Adam. Interesting point about the EMP version - I hadn't noticed that. I started off using the most recent version of EMP (6.2 I believe), and I got an incompatibility error telling me to use EMP v6.0. I can try upgrading EMP, but I suspect I'll have the same incompatibility. I think this will leave me with a bit of a catch 22. If I can't connect properly to the ECU, I'm guessing I can't upgrade the ECU software. Are my options to find another computer or send it to Motec?