BASIC GPIB comms

About a year ago, i was able to find GPIB programs on the web; 20 years ago (or more) source code was available in BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, ALGOL, and Assembly.

What kind of equipment are you trying to talk to? Is it old enough that is meets the IEEE-488.1 standard instead of IEEE-488.2?

What type of computer and GPIB controller are you try to use? What software are you trying to use with it?

You may get more help if you post to the newsgroup: natinst.public.gpib.general. It is the place to ask if you are using a National Instruments controller.

Aidan Grey

Aidan: He's obviously trying to run/port some old test code written in RMB - ergo your cookbook sales probes are irrelevant. 488.1 vs. 488.2 doesn't mean jack if the program ran on HP/Basic aka RMB. The level at which RMB code talks to HPIB makes 488.1 vs. 488.2 irrelevant - RMB is old-school - what *real* GPIB programmers really do. No wussy plug-and-play driver with girly visual programming interfaces like LabView or VEE! :-)

Wayne: you need to decide if you want to stay on HP/Basic or not. If yes, look for a used 9836C or 9000/345 (etc.) *with RMB/WS* install disks. It's not pretty but you can find these pretty cheap. Getting data off an RMB/WS is a major pain in the butt. Find DOS CSUBs or use Kermit over RS232.

If you have your source code already on a PC you need to decide if you keep the code in RMB or translate to something else. Last I heard TAMS had services for getting source off RMB/WS media. Otherwise, get the DOS csub for RMB/WS or use Kermit to transfer a SAVE'd version (not STORE'd) of your code. If your code uses CSUBs you're out of luck - you'll have to stay on RMB/WS or find someone to rewrite it from scratch.

Otherwise you need to move your code out to something else. HT-BASIC

Trying to use an ISA GPIB card is a major uphill battle. I'd advise against it - even using "free" student slave labor. If you're very, very lucky you might have one of the specific ISA GPIB cards that have an Open Source driver on Linux. Regretably the odds are against you. You best bet is to spring for a PCI card. Yes, National Instruments makes a very good PCI card. So does Agilent.

At that point, I'd use HT-BASIC but otherwise you can also translate your code to C, VB or something else. Again, TAMS sells some tools for this. There are also some open-source programs floating around to do translation. It can also be done by hand once you get a feel for the coding differences.