Hello. It is me again back with something annoying. Today, I am trying to program some MT2000s. However, whenever I go to run the MTSX software, it shows me something about 'Phar Lap's 286 DOS Extender" and then crashes to the DOS prompt with no given errors. I have tried a few versions. This also happens on the old DOS based Astro RSS and a few others that also use the format with the ".ODB" files and "RUNTIME.EXE". My computer is a Pentium II and I have tried from a FreeDOS boot disk and MS-DOS boot disk. Interestingly it seems to take slightly longer to crash for MS-DOS than FreeDOS. I have tried with EMM386 and HIMEM both on and off. I suspect the problem is with memory management when this DOS extender runs, because I have googled it and it seems problematic in its day. It is probably not a CPU speed issue- I have successfully programmed many Motorolas with this computer and older RSS packages, and this version of MTSX is dated some time in this century I think. Any suggestions? Thanks.
-
To anyone looking to acquire commercial radio programming software:
Please do not make requests for copies of radio programming software which is sold (or was sold) by the manufacturer for any monetary value. All requests will be deleted and a forum infraction issued. Making a request such as this is attempting to engage in software piracy and this forum cannot be involved or associated with this activity. The same goes for any private transaction via Private Message. Even if you attempt to engage in this activity in PM's we will still enforce the forum rules. Your PM's are not private and the administration has the right to read them if there's a hint to criminal activity.
If you are having trouble legally obtaining software please state so. We do not want any hurt feelings when your vague post is mistaken for a free request. It is YOUR responsibility to properly word your request.
To obtain Motorola software see the Sticky in the Motorola forum.
The various other vendors often permit their dealers to sell the software online (i.e., Kenwood). Please use Google or some other search engine to find a dealer that sells the software. Typically each series or individual radio requires its own software package. Often the Kenwood software is less than $100 so don't be a cheapskate; just purchase it.
For M/A Com/Harris/GE, etc: there are two software packages that program all current and past radios. One package is for conventional programming and the other for trunked programming. The trunked package is in upwards of $2,500. The conventional package is more reasonable though is still several hundred dollars. The benefit is you do not need multiple versions for each radio (unlike Motorola).
This is a large and very visible forum. We cannot jeopardize the ability to provide the RadioReference services by allowing this activity to occur. Please respect this.
Some DOS-based RSS crashes immediately
- Thread starter knockoffham
- Start date
RFI-EMI-GUY
Member
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2013
- Messages
- 7,319
May not be related, however I found some old RSS would crash because, when copied, or zipped, by others,,, the archive bit, or read only would be set for files that actually needed writing to during execution.
What PC are you using ? I use MS-DOS 6.0 on my old PC and its pretty stable but its a CF25.
ElroyJetson
Getting tired of all the stupidity.
It's been a while but I remember having similar problems long ago and it turned out to be a bad RAM stick, yet the memory test was OK.
Swapping out the RAM for another stick fixed it.
Swapping out the RAM for another stick fixed it.
Thank you for the help everyone. I figured it out by running it in DOSbox with some debugging. I was running the software from a CD, and the RSS was trying to create a temporary file as soon as it started in the current directory, and obviously couldn’t due to it being a read only CD. So it would just crash with no error code. Manually typing “d:\MTSX\runtime -o d:\MTSX\MTSX.ODB” instead of CDing to the directory it was installed to and running the batch file has it run with no issues. So now I have found another no-no for RSS- don’t run some of it off of a CD, or if you do make sure the current directory is a disk you can write to!
