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Assuming you want the value in a REAL (I’ll call it Rval):
1. Dimension Ref$ large enough to capture the entire output string
2. Capture it
3. Then ENTER Ref$;Rval
That should do it.This may not be relevant, but on versions prior to 10, there was a 256-byte limit on transfers via the htbdde dll. Has that been fixed? I had to use the Techsoft dde driver to get around it.
OK, thanks. But does it also work properly on Win 7 and 10? 9.2 has serious display issues with Win7.
Also, has the large block data transfer via DDE liimitation been fixed with 10.1? I have to use a Techsoft binary to get it to work with 9.2 .
Hi Zerider,
I don’t think that is the same You might have to print it, then erase it (with a negative PEN number), then print it again at a new location.
I heard back from HTB support yesterday, he told me the SET ECHO issue with 98SE was a known bug in 8.3, it was fixed in 9.x. So I installed 9.2 and its working fine.
This problem has been solved, see the details in this thread:
Thanks ZeRider. It just so happens, I found the problem, and the solution, late last night. Detailed explanation follows.
The problem for the “legacy” National Instruments cards began with HTB versions 7.x, when HTB started using the Nat’l Instruments Windows drivers to access all of NI’s cards, and wrote the “GPIBNI” driver to interface with it. This made life much easier for HTB, because they no longer had to write individual drivers for every card that NI came out with.
This “GPIBNI” driver works well for the PCMCIA-GPIB and PCI-GPIB cards, but not for any of the cards that “GPIBN” supported, i.e. the ISA bus cards, even the 488.2 ones, even though NI’s website says some of them should work and provides Windows drivers for them.
Last night I decided to look at hex dumps of all of HTB 8.3’s GPIB-related driver files. It occurred to me that a list of what cards each driver supports would be somewhere in the driver. And sure enough, there it is.
What I discovered is that, from version 7.x and up, the “GPIBN” driver was merged with the “GPIB” driver, which previously supported only the Transera and Ziatech cards. Now it supports those, plus the “legacy” NI cards; PC2, PC2A, PC3, AT-GPIB, AT/GPIB-TNT, PCII/IIA, MC-NI, and PCMCIA. The setup paramaters for these crds are the same as they were for the earlier “GPIBN” driver.
Apparently whoever was writing these drivers did not communicate this fact to the person writing the manuals. The documentation for the NI GPIB cards is COMPLETELY WRONG for ALL of these versions, 7.x and up. I would bet that the error persists in current HTB versions 10.x too.
I checked the GPIB.DW6 file in versions 7.2, 7.4, 8.3, and 9.2, and they all use the same driver and support the same cards.
I tried it late last night with HTB 8.3 and my AT-GPIB/TNT card and it works perfectly.
This means that you don’t have to buy the “latest-and-greatest” Nat’l Instruments GPIB card to access your GPIB instruments from HTBasic in Windows. You can use all of your “legacy” ISA bus GPIB cards directly while running ANY version of Windows. Just change your LOAD BIN statement from “GPIBN” to “GPIB”.
For example, my AT-GPIB/TNT card is now set up: LOAD BIN GPIB;BO AT-GPIB DMA 5 IN 11
and my PCII/IIA card (in PCIIA mode) is: LOAD BIN GPIB;BO PC2A DMA 3 IN 5What an ordeal. I hope this info helps.
OK, thanks for the confirm. If it’s true for WIn98, then it will be true for XP too, because the NI driver is the same for both OS’s (NI ver 1.70).
It seems NI made sure that no card that worked in DOS will work with Windows. The AT-GPIB/TNT (and PCMCIA-GPIB) come the closest. But my bench computer doesn’t have PCMCIA. Sigh.
HTBasic by TransEra 