Hello folks!

[LW1DSE]

Hello everyone here, from Buenos Aires Argentina.

This's my first post here.

I'm interested to learn a bit about USB and DOS. I have 4 pc's AMD486 running DOS7.10 from several years ago. All them are "network-ized" between them in a LAN using coax cable, UMC9008 boards and SB16. One of them has a USB port with the 82C861 IC with 2 ports and the USBASPI and DDI1000 drivers, running marvelous from a decade ago. Now I want to use a VIA VT6212L with 4 ports and your drivers.
I am not a programmer. So I need a small guidelines to start using the VIA card with 3 or 4 pendrives, and no other thing.

Many thanks in advance.

(I am not natural English speaker, but Spanish. I learned English when young, but I send all you my apologies if my English isn't too good)

[Bret]

The VIA card you indicate should work with my drivers, but you have to try it and see. However, my current drivers only work with the USB 1 hardware so it will be slow.

If the computer you're using has a BIOS that supports USB disks, I would recommend trying that first instead of using my drivers. My drivers are generally used when the BIOS doesn't do the job. This is usually because you have a device that the BIOS doesn't support (for example, some BIOS's will support USB mice and/or keyboard but not USB disks, and no BIOS I know of supports USB joysticks).

If your BIOS lets you enable USB, do that first and see what happens.

[LW1DSE]

Thanks guy. No, my morherboards and its BIOS are dated at 1995. No USB support at all. In fact I believe USB didn't exist at this time.

What I want to know is which is the proper sequence between drivers to run it properly. With Panasonic drivers, it's clear for me, but not with this new software.

Again, I am interested to run only pendrives, no mouses nor floppies nor printers, nor.... Only pendrives saturated with .mp3 files. (I am using MPXPLAY from several years and they updates it periodically and performs excellent at my 486's).

[Bret]

In theory, you should only need two programs: USBUHCIL and USBDRIVE.

Since you have two UHCI controllers, you might need to install two copies of USBUHCIL depending on which physical port(s) you are going to use. Each UHCI host controller can manage 2 physical ports, and you'll need to figure out which ports are connected to which UHCI controller. The way you manage which UHCI controller you are installing the software for is with the /Index:# option (/Index:0 will install the driver for the first UHCI controller and Index:1 for the second). The only way you'll be figure out which one is which and which phycial ports go with which UHCI controller is by experimenting. If you want all 4 ports to be turned on you'll need to install USBUHCIL twice.

USBDRIVE is what manages the pendrives.

At least in theory, that should be all you need to do. But USB is complicated, so it's possible you'll need to install something else or install at least one of the programs with some extra command-line options to make it work right. It also matters whether you want to use more than one pendrive at the same time.

Also, just so you know, the drives may not be very fast, or may not work at all due to compatibility issues, but there are sometimes ways around those issues.

[LW1DSE]

Many thanks, sir. This evening I'll try your suggestion(s). I'll post here the advances or problems.

Certainly, a doubt: the unofficial DOS 7.10 which runs under W98, support (with a special drive) long file names and up to +100GB disks. Does your software support both or have some limitation at those respect?

Cordially Osvaldo.

[Bret]

No known limitations. Just keep in mind that to support LFN's in DOS you need a special driver. There are several of them (DOSLFN, LFNDOS, StarLFN, and I think a few others). If you're using something like Win9x, the LFN drivers are built into Windows and are not included with the DOS that Windows boots from. MS demands you to use Windows to get LFN support.

[LW1DSE]

DOSLFN does its job pretty fine IMHO.

Re-reading your previous post, I understand that I need to call USBDRIVE once for each pendrive I attach to the PCI-USB adaptor card. Is that wright? In such a case, do I need to unload it if I unplug one of them?.

Note that I rarely unplug a pen, I try not to do it with system powered on and also rarely plug a device in such circumstances. Ergo, can I call the drivers directly from autoexec.bat or config.sys?

Again, many thanks for your effort and patience with us.

Osvaldo.

[admin]

No. You only need to install one copy of USBDRIVE. It can handle multiple pen drives at the same time, and it also supports "plug-and-play" so you can plug an unplug them if you want to (the other DOS USB drivers don't do this). You can control the total number of drives that can be supported with various combinations of the /Devices:#, /Disks:#, and /Drives:# options, but the default values should work for you just fine. You need to read the documentation if you want further details -- USB is very complicated.

You do need to install USBUHCIL (the driver for the USB UHCI Host Controllers) more than once if you have more than one Host Controller, though. The reasons for this are numerous, but one of the main reasons is the USBUHCIL uses too much memory for it to try and control all the Host Controllers you may have by default.

[LW1DSE]

Thank you guy !!!

[LW1DSE]

Unfortunatelly it seems your drivers aren't for my system, I suppose my AMD486 are obsolete. They can reach the VIA board but no the pendrives, thus it is no useful for me. Panasonic drivers actually do its job at wonderful way, so I discard a damage in them. Once, during the manual load of the usbdisk driver, the PC speaker did an extraneous sound, causing me preoccupation. Luckily no physical nor logical damage has occuried. But I decided not to try them again.

In any case, very thank with you and I also valuate your large effort offering us a USB DOS driver.

Cordially Osvaldo.