Networking the Acramatic A2100

[mwildin1]

Hi,
I was looking at installing an Ethernet Card in my friends Acramatic A2100 controller (running NT4). However, when I install a Network Card (Linksys Ether16 combo for NT4), it seems to conflict with the Pendant control (Com 2) settings, with both devices wanting to use IRQ 3. Even if I set the IRQ manually for the network card, say to IRQ 11, I still get the conflict. If I leave the network card enabled, it works fine, allowing me to move programs from a remote PC to the Acromatic, but the Pendant control (Com 2) is disabled. If I disable the Network card, the Pendant control (Com 2)works fine.

Is there a standard IRQ setting that should be used when installing a network card to the A2100?

Any help would be apprectiated.

Cheers, Marcus.

[mwildin1]

I've solved the issue by using a 3Com Etherlink card and networking is fine now.

[Bradd0]

We have fitted a 3com card but the networking button on our control is still greyed out, is there a way to enable it or have we missed something (drivers etc)

[218ean]

We have fitted an unbranded card using IRQ11 and NT works fine.

However the Acramatic software does need to be enabled with paid for authorisation codes for proper "seamless" file transfers.(Unless anyone knows how they are encrypted)

Otherwise you just need to map the network drive in NT and then change to that drive in the file transfer windows.

[Bradd0]

Thanks for the reply 218ean, could you tell me a bit more on how you installed the card ? for instance, did you have a 3.5" floppy to install drivers, or is there a way to set up the card without.

We have the card in, no drivers installed & pretty much no clue what to do now. Finding help on this is a bit of a nightmare.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[218ean]

Assuming you can boot the PC into NT, you just follow the normal windows installation procedure for the card. If the driver is already one of the standard NT ones then you just pick the card when it asks, otherwise you do have to use the drivers on a floppy. Even if you don't have the originals you should be able to find them fairly easily on t'internet.

(To boot into NT on our machine I edited the dos batch file C:\mustang\load.bat and put in a pause after the :LOAD statement to hang the Acramatic startup process. There are probably other easier ways but it worked for me!)

Whilst you are piddling about with the OS, it is a good idea to get some disc imaging software and make a full copy of the hard drive on another PC. Don't whatever you do use a PC with anything later than Win98 though or you'll bugger up the file system good and proper.

[Bradd0]

We didn't "boot" the pc into NT, we let it load then on the keyboard we pressed the windows key which let us into the control panel networking screen, from there we picked the Etherlink III card from the list but so far we still don't know what settings to have in for some of the options (I/O Base address for instance). I have tried some settings then using the cmd box to ping the server but still nothing yet.

I'm sure with enough time (very limited here lol) we will work something out but right now we are rs232ing our programmes over, considering that some take about 4 hours then I think we need to get this going soon.

Thanks for the reply, it is appreciated at this end.