KIP 2900 - Anyone here repair these in the past and has info on them?

Looking for the upgrade Eprom for the 2021 scanner to enable it to run with revision 5.5.x of the software on XP. This machine has a proprietary interface card (KIP6CP - which is a PCI card), so it is not running on SCSI or USB in case you are curious.

KIP says to contact my local dealer, and the dealer isn't interested in supporting this ancient device (1999 being ancient). Keepitprinting.com is a useful resource, however these folks have mostly all moved on to the more recent machines and can't find anyone there who has this info.

There is one supplier of parts for the machine who may have the correct Eprom for sale, but he is not returning emails or phone calls...

The basic machine runs fine - copies from the scanner to the printer clearly, and the computer does recognize the scanner but the earlier (DOS TSR)version of software that I have appears to be broken in that the files are zero length when scanned.

I have tracked down the field service manuals (no schematics) for the machine scanner and printer which have been of help.

So, what I am looking for are: later versions of the Eproms (my revision appears to be 49012) , service bulletins for the KIP 2900 (2012 scanner), and other info on this orphaned machine.

Thanks,

John :-#)#

-- (Please post followups or tech enquiries to the newsgroup) John's Jukes Ltd. 2343 Main St., Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 3C9 Call (604)872-5757 or Fax 872-2010 (Pinballs, Jukes, Video Games) www.flippers.com "Old pinballers never die, they just flip out."

Contact the next dealer over. Have an address in their territory handy in case they ask.

You might be doing this already, but: are you running the DOS TSR software under real DOS on a vintage PC with a reasonably-sized hard drive? Some DOS applications don't deal too well with 2+ GHz CPUs and multi-gigabyte hard drives, even if late-model DOS itself will run.

Running on a 15-year-old PC is probably not ideal if you want to do 20 scans a day with this machine, but it will at least tell you if it can successfully talk to *a* PC.

Do you know if the PCI interface card wants 5 V, 3.3 V, or both? If the motherboard is late enough to have an ATX power connector, this probably doesn't apply, but: at the transition from 5 V to 3.3 V PCI cards, some motherboards had the PCI slot keying to accept either. Since AT power supplies didn't usually have 3.3 V outputs, the 3.3 V lines from the PCI slots went to a separate power connector. It looked like a 6-pin AT power connector but didn't live next to the standard two 6-pin power connectors in line.

I had an Intel Socket 5 motherboard from early 1995 that was like this. I kept it long enough that I tried to use a 3.3 V PCI card with it and nothing happened; the card physically fit in the PCI slot but none of the software could see it. A LM317 provided enough juice to the 3.3 V input on the motherboard to make the card work.

If you don't have any documentation, sometimes you can get a hint on what the command-line switches are by looking at the program with a hex editor. Sometimes there are switches the program can parse that aren't in the documentation or the /? output. This doesn't work if the program was packed with one of the executable compressor tools; some unpackers are available if you Google.

Matt Roberds