PCII, PCIIA, or AT-GPIB

[Dnmeeks]

I have some old calibration software (Tektronix) that was used in the mid 1990s. It gives me two choices for the GPIB card to use for talking to the scope:

PCII

PCIIA

This particular PC is running XP, and I have a PCI-GPIB card installed.

I also have an old ISA card, AT-GPIB 181060-01 Rev. C2 on the shelf. (I don't even know if this PC has an ISA slot).

The cal software will not work with the installed PCI-GPIB, as configured.

Can anyone tell me if either the PCI-GPIB or the AT-GPIB card should work if the cal software is looking for a PCII or PCIIA?

Thanks -

Dan

[Dennis_Knutson]

I don't know for sure but my guess is no. The pcii and pciia have not been supported since win 98.

[ChacAttack]

Unfortunately, PCII/PCIIA is not supported in Windows NT4, 2000, or XP. 

[JasonSmith]

It really depends on how they programmed the GPIB controller. If they programmed it through the National Instruments driver, you may be able to get it to work by enabling DOS Support. This loads a DOS-compatible driver which forwards calls back to the modern Windows driver that is used by your PCI-GPIB. You can enable this in Measurement and Automation Explorer (NI-MAX) under the Tools->NI-488.2 menu. If you have a newer version of NI-488.2 installed, it is likely enabled by default.

It is also possible that they programmed the hardware directly, without going through the NI driver. If this is the case, DOS support isn't going to work, and it is going to be very difficult to get the software to work on a modern computer.

As a side-note, if you are able to get it to work by enabling DOS support, you should know that this feature is only available on 32-bit versions of Windows, so you will need to account for this when upgrading to newer versions of Windows. 64-bit versions of Windows simply do not include the infrastructure needed to support DOS or 16-bit Windows applications.