Important for Saber and Systems Saber that OS permit application to have direct access to the UART. Windows (including DOS shells under Windows) blocks this. Run RSS under native DOS.
Your finding out What many before you have already discovered. Many of the older Motorola software programs do not like to be run on anything but an older computer that has a built in serial port. In many cases you computer speed needs to be under a clock speed of about 800 MHz or so or slower. It may also take a small DOS program like cacheoff.com to be run to shut off the computer cache.
This pure DOS operating system and the serial port are a staple requirement for many radios like the Syntor X9000, Spectra, the serial interface unit (SIU) that the Spectra can use, the Saber and several others.
If you don't have a computer that is slow and has a serial port, start stopping by the older computer repair stores and see if they just might have something laying around. In many cases they will just give them to you to get them out of the store.
You can hunt around on the Internet and find a number of places that you can download one of the many versions of DOS from. Just bear in mind that if you are going to store the programs on a hard drive, it needs to be an 80 GB or smaller hard drive. It has to be formatted as a FAT32 for DOS to be able to read it.
As a side note, I tend to use the 80 GB hard drives and load DOS onto it along with windows 98 or XP. You partition the drive for say 20 GB for Dos and load DOS into that partition and the rest is used for Windows. This way you can run the old Motorola software in DOS and have Windows to transfer files between computers using an IP network connection to the other computers. Windows will work just fine with the FAT32 formatted hard drive.
If you don't want to partition the hard drive, then just make a DOS boot disk and run it from the floppy drive. that way you can have Windows loaded and use DOS also. Just remember to put the DOS boot disk into the floppy drive before you boot up the computer. Plus you need to set the BIOS up to have the floppy drive be the first boot device. When you don't want DOS, just remove the floppy and the computer will boot up in Windows.
Another point to remember is that DOS can only have file names and directories with a max of 8 characters. Like a directory of syntorx9 will work, but syntorx9000 is too many characters. The same thing for file names. You can have spectrav.com but can't have spectravhf.com for a file name. Remember only 8 characters that can be any combination of letters and numbers.
