Visual Basic Question

[Douglas Taylor]

The interface is an ISA bus card that is a custom design.  ISA slots in 
computers are hard to come by these days.  Luckily for me I ran into a 
Gateway in a thrift store that did.

I have some of the diagnostic routines and they run under Windows 98 and 
'talk' to the spectrometer via the interface card.  I suppose it is 
using the same low level driver.

In the published literature of that era (1990's) I found a couple of 
references that said they used Visual Basic to get data for experiments.

On 4/21/2015 12:45 PM, Dave G4UGM wrote:
> The phrase "standard Windows 16bit DLLs" means Windows 3.1 DLLs. Such DLL's no longer work in a modern windows. If they directly access the hardware then they will not work on any NT based windows such as Windows/2000, Windows/XP, Vista, or 7, 8 or 9. Nor will they work on any 64-Bit windows full stop. 64-Bit windows does not support 16-bit code. If you have a Windows/95, 98 or ME environment then the code may work.
>
> There is information here:-
>
> http://www.tsreader.com/docs/eng-ole.html
>
> on how to call 16-bit DLL's from VB4.
>
> How does the hardware physically interface? Is it a serial or parallel card, or special hardware.
>
> Dave
> G4UGM
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cctech [mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Douglas
>> Taylor
>> Sent: 21 April 2015 15:19
>> To: General at classiccmp.org; Discussion at classiccmp.org:On-Topic Posts
>> Subject: Visual Basic Question
>>
>> I have a software driver for an old scientific instrument that is described in a
>> brief manual this way:
>>
>> "The acquisition driver is a tool that allows developers to write their own
>> Windows based programs that can acquire data from any Michelson series
>> spectrometer. The programs can be developed with any programming
>> environment that supports calling standard Windows 16bit DLLs. Examples of
>> such environments are Visual Basic and Visual C++ from Microsoft ( up to
>> version 1.5 ), Delphi and C++ from Borland, Labview from National
>> instruments. This document assumes that the reader is familiar with all the
>> concepts surrounding DLLs and Windows programming. It is a reference
>> guide that explains the parameters of the functions that make up the
>> Bomem acquisition driver and how they are used to acquire data."
>>
>> I recently purchased Visual Basic 4.0 Standard Edition, but the first pages of
>> the reference indicate that it is a 32 bit only version.
>>
>> Which version of Visual Basic will allow me to call this driver?
>