| Hi, I am as surprised as you are that you should be hearing from me again this soon. I have just had occasion (after eight years) to have to change computers on my loom. The old one curled up its toes and died. This may happen to you and it will probably happen to me again, so this is written so that when that time comes I will waste less time and do it right the first time. If you ever have occasion to change computers or, even more so, if you have someone helping you change, this information will probably come in handy. The I/O board that drives the J-comp is a CIO-DIO24H board, made by Computer Boards Inc., and the last contact information I have from them is: 2 Commerce Park Blvd;, Middleboro, MA 02346. 508-946-5100, Fax: 508-946-9500. e-mail: info@computerboards.com; www.computerboards.com. If your computer board is set up the same way mine was, dip switches 9, 8, and 6 are down and all the rest up. This appears to correspond to a base address of 832 decimal. My installation disk from Computer Boards is InstaCal-Version 5.02. This needs to be run first on the new computer before the board is inserted. (Just a reminder - it has to be an ISA slot and the operating system must be Windows 98 SE or earlier. XP and any flavor on NT won't work.) After the disk has put its programs on the hard drive, you then need to execute the installation program. It will be in directory C:\CB\instacal.exe. Use the INSTALL tab option. Then use the DOS / Windows 3.1 option. Assuming you have no other I/O boards in the new machine, the board you need to select is Board 0. Finish running the install, turn the machine off, and install the board. Do not attach the cable from the loom at this point. (My advice is do not close the case to the computer either, yet.) Now restart the computer and run instacal.exe again, this time using the TEST tab. If it tests correctly, you are in business. Mine did not test correctly. I therefore took the board back out, made careful note of the way the dip switches were set, and set them to the default setting of 9 and 8 down, the rest up. Then I tested again. This time the internal tests all worked correctly. I then (turn the computer off first) installed the cable to the loom and ran the dobby set-up in WeaveIt. It did not work. I then realized that the Base address in the Dobby setup did not match the base address of the new dip switch settings, so I made note of the old base address (832) and put the new one (768 decimal) that goes with the new dip switch setting into the Dobby setup. Lo and behold, the loom is working. I suspect that the problem could also have been solved by giving the board install program the base address from the dobby setup. I did not try this, but I think it would work. I have no idea whether I did this according to the accepted protocol for the J-Comp and WeaveIt. If I did not, please, please, send me a note and I will post corrections, amendments, whatever. Cheers, Tom. www.world.std.com/~kcl tpv@vineyard.net http://upislandeggs.blog-city.com/ |