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[Trlog] No paddle or footswitch input

To: <trlog@contesting.com>
Subject: [Trlog] No paddle or footswitch input
From: "ke5c" <ke5c@hot.rr.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 00:18:17 -0500
List-post: <mailto:trlog@contesting.com>
I am just totally perplexed, but I cannot get my IBM Thinkpad T23 to
read the paddles (or the footswitch) on the parallel port.  I inherited
this laptop from my boss.  He literally had it sitting on his desk at
work for five years, never took it home, and had an old HP Laserjet IIIP
connected to the parallel port and working.  Due to a number of events,
I came into possession and thought it would be a nice contest computer.

I installed FreeDOS and TR-Log by copying a working partition from a
Dell desktop computer.  Everything works except I cannot get anything
from either the paddles or the footswitch with everything set up as it
had been.  I can send CW via the keyboard out the parallel port but can
not get the port to read the paddles.  That TR sends CW on the port says
to me this is not an address problem.  Nevertheless I started TR with
the PORTS parameter, and that was all correct with the port at 3BCh and
assigned LPT1.  The default mode is bi-directional but I also tried EPP
or ECP, whichever of those also worked with the BIOS.

I am using the same parallel interface (which I got from K5TR) which
worked with the other computer, but neither the paddle nor the
footswitch inputs work.  Pin 14 does not have the 5V or so it is
supposed to need to pull up pins 12 and 13 through 10K resistors, but
all the prior posts dealing with that problem reported alternating dits
and dashes being sent as would be expected.  In my case, nothing is
being sent.  It's as if TR is not reading the input lines for that
parallel port, yet TR sends CW out through the very same port.

I also tried a fresh installation of FreeDOS and got exactly the same
results.  Arghhh!  I also tried loading FreeDOS without any drivers just
to have a clean (thought limited) memory and had the same result.  I
have Fedora in another partition, and I do have native MSDOS 6.22
diskettes, but installing that would wipe my Fedora partition and
require a reinstall.  I'd actually do that if I thought it would fix
this problem.  Any ideas?  Help?

73, John

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