I am starting a new project, want some ideas..

[Rick Holcomb]

I am planning to start a replacement project for an older QuickBasic 4.5 project. The machines that this project runs on are AMD 386-25 mini hand held computers that are used for shop floor data collection. They have built in 10Base-T network interfaces and run on DOS 6.22. They have 4mb of ram memory and DONT DO Windows... The current application that runs on them uses the DOS Client for Windows NT to connect to an NT 4.0 server via Netbios. The application is very time intensive because it must monitor a single line in the parallel port to watch a switch opening and closing to collect piece counts from external sensors. OK, here is my question, I want to use Powerbasic to rewrite this application and really don't want to use the DOS Client for Windows to do the networking. Can any one make any recommendations on what other clients I might possibly use knowing that the machines run on DOS only and they need to communicate with an NT server. I was thinking of trying a TCP/IP approach to this but have never done any programming in DOS for TCP/IP. Network traffic issues do exist because there are currently 85 machines on a single 10/100Base-T network segment using a switch and we plan to add more in the future. BTW: The machines have no physical drives, he he. The application is stored in a 512k sram chip and the boot sector and config files are burned onto a 512k Eprom. (Works great, unless you want to change your startup files). Erasing and burning the eproms is no problem, for it has been done a couple of times before.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Rick

[Jerry Mason]

I have used tcpport.exe from the Waterloo TCP library for years. It opens
a telnet session, then executes my program in a shell with the telnet
session "mapped" to the BIOS com port routines. My program then executes a
program on the sparcstation server that sends and receives data using stdin
and stdout. Best of all, it's free, and the source code is available as well.

Sorry, it's been so long since I've downloaded it that I don't have a URL.

[Scott Slater]

You could use IPX on the DOS side, since NT can also use this protocol. IPX drivers for DOS are much smaller in memory than NetBios. The only problem would be picking it up on the NT side. You could either write a Windows 32 app that listens for your IPX packets or you could also run a DOS based app on the NT side. I have some IPX routines for DOS that I would be happy to post or email you if you are interested.


Scott