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OMGMYSPLEEN
Jul 12, 2009

Rawwwwhiiiiide
College Slice
EDIT: Figured this out, found some magical proprietary adapter and it worked. Thanks anyway.



I have a really old piece of equipment we use at work (a General Railway Signal relay tester) that stores the test results internally, and then can be downloaded with software onto a computer, as well as have its software updated from a computer. The problem is, this piece of equipment is from the early 1990's, and the software is for DOS and has never been updated. It communicates with the PC via parallel port (the device has a 36 pin Centronics connector to a 25 pin parallel port cable). serial port (it's a 36 pin Centronics to a 25 pin serial with a 25 pin to 9 pin converter into the PC)

Right now we have an old desktop PC that dual boots Windows 98 and Dos to communicate with this thing, but I am trying to get it working on a modern laptop using Dosbox and a USB to serial or USB to Centronics cable. I have a bunch of different cables but I'm having a hell of a time getting it to talk.

I've tried a USB to 9 pin serial, with a 9 pin to 25 pin adapter to a 25 pin to 36 pin Centronics and set dosbox to point serial1 to the associated com port (using the Dosbox command serial1=directserial realport:com1), but the Dos software for the tester can't connect to the device.

The USB to 36 pin Centronics comes up as I said as a Windows printer device which has no port associated that Dosbox can see, so I've gotten nowhere with that.

This relay tester has been out of production for well over 20 years and the GRS company has been bought out years ago, and no one seems to have any idea what the hell it even is.

I'd love to hear some thoughts on ideas to get this to talk.

OMGMYSPLEEN fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Mar 3, 2017

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