Dialup

[arjoll]

I'm sorta digging up an old thread ... but, I would love to dial into some BBSs (not telnet) however, I have know idea where to start, I can only just remember dialup and BBSs were long gone before I was even born (1999) so any help is welcome . I went looking for an analog modem, I found two possibilities: both ISA cards, will these work? (I can plug an ADSL cable into them)

Those are PCI cards

It's been a long time since I've done much with dial-up from terminal programs, but those should work with a Windows comms program - even HyperTerminal would do the job. If you want to use a proper old-school DOS terminal program (Procomm Plus, Telix) then you'd need to find an ISA card (like this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture#mediaviewer/File:Us_robotics_isa_modem-2011-04-11.jpg) or an external modem.

Earlier in the thread I saw someone with an issue where the modem would report "BUSY" while the phone was ringing - this is a modem detecting the NZ ring tone as a US busy tone. USR modems tended to do this. There is an AT command to disable busy, I can't remember it at the moment, but hopefully someone here remembers it. If not, it shouldn't be hard to find. Crafting modem init strings was a bit of an art!

I took my BBS down at the end of 1995 - it's archived on a whole lot of QIC tapes I can't read now - and I probably haven't called a BBS since 1996 or so.

[LilJoe]

Those are PCI cards

Ah, right my bad

It's been a long time since I've done much with dial-up from terminal programs, but those should work with a Windows comms program - even HyperTerminal would do the job. If you want to use a proper old-school DOS terminal program (Procomm Plus, Telix) then you'd need to find an ISA card (like this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_S ... -04-11.jpg) or an external modem.

I still have some questions though:

-Will those PCI cards be suitable
-Do I need any drivers for the PCI cards
-Will puTTy work as a comms program? I have used it before to telnet BBSs and play trade wars 2000 , the reason I ask is I run mainly Linux, so hyperteminal isn't going to work, if not I will pull out my old P4 with XP
-Would this work in virtual box? Just curious or maybe DOS box

Thanks (I know alot of questions )

[Clym5]

I'll nip in and answer too. Those might be ISA still actually. When you say ADSL cable, do you mean the cable that comes out of the jack on your wall that you can also use a home phone with? If so, you can definitely get ISA cards for that. PCI too!

I can't say if they'd be right, but if they're advertised as a "Hayes compatible modem", or at least, that's what I think they're advertised as, they should work.

You don't need drivers, at least, in most cases you probably won't. Bear in mind, I'm a DOS person, so it might depend on the card and OS.

And for the other questions, I'm not sure about puTTy at all, as I only used bananacom for DOS. I would doubt you could dial into a real BBS through VirtualBox or DOSbox, but I'd love to be proven wrong!

If you'd like a nearby BBS to dial into, I can put my test BBS up. The calls to it should be free. And if there's enough interest, I might develop it further and have a schedule for uptime.

[arjoll]

Will those PCI cards be suitable

Yes, with appropriate drivers and software.

Do I need any drivers for the PCI cards

Almost certainly. The vast majority, if not all, PCI modems were dumb modems - basically sound cards with a hybrid transformer to interface them to a phone line. All the signal processing, encoding/decoding etc was done by the driver. ISA cards were almost always full modems.

Will puTTy work as a comms program?

Yes-ish. Select serial (I think - PuTTY is on my laptop, I'm on my office PC now). You'll need to enter the modem commands yourself - for example, ATDT<number> to dial out. You may strike the ring-tone-sounds-like-busy issue, if so you'll need to find the AT command I mentioned in my last post that turns off busy tone detection.

Would this work in virtual box? Just curious or maybe DOS box

I have no idea! It depends how they handle serial port redirection - it's worth trying though. If you get those PCI winmodems running (I don't know how easy that will be in Linux) then see if you can pass their serial port mappings through to your VMs.

[arjoll]

Those might be ISA still actually.

No, definitely PCI. Look at the edge connectors.

You don't need drivers, at least, in most cases you probably won't. Bear in mind, I'm a DOS person, so it might depend on the card and OS.

Most PCI modems will need drivers, and many will be Windows-only. You might be lucky and find a Linux driver, and they may work with generic drivers in newer versions of Windows (7+) although I haven't used a PCI winmodem since XP was in its prime.

[Clym5]

Huh, that picture didn't show up for me yesterday! Yeah, definitely PCI. Whoops!

[LilJoe]

Thanks guys , so I spent part of the day trying to get this set up and got nowhere

The hardest part (that I didn't solve) was getting linux drivers for the winmodem, I have only tried the one pictured left. Using the (linux) command 'lspci' I got it to display 'LSI Corporation 56k WinModem' 'lspci -n' goes further by displaying '11c1:0441' meaning it is manufactured by Lucent (11c1). Using the above information I searched for drivers, the only one I could find was called 'ltmodem' but I had trouble compiling it, so I gave up. I'm going to try and see how far I can get with xp tomorrow. Also in regards to using VirtualBox I tried a similar thing using VB with win3.1 and XP about a year back without success (thats why I was interested), I mapped one of the serial ports on VB to one on my PC and telneted the other port (on my pc) with hyperterminal, I then used a null modem emulator to link the ports together my goal being to be able to communicate with win3.1, sadly it didn't work I can't remember why. And that's about all I have tried, will try again tomorrow

Joe

[SpidersWeb]

I remember back around 2000ish, I set up an auto-dial up Linux server with a 56K WinModem - I remember downloading the source code, with instructions written in French, compiling it, and after a few hours I finally got it to dial out. Windows XP should be a breeze if you can find the driver (should be a lot easier to find).

Lucent was quite a popular chipset.
Just reminded me of the internet back then - part of the decision when choosing an ISP was what type of 56K they supported - I think I had 56KFlex and later X2 (I think it was called) - took a little bit for 56KB to become standardised and even then you did a fist pump if you got over a 48K connection speed.

[David]

Anyone who is playing around with old modems you will have to look at modem Initialization strings it will help in seting up the modems
go two these two sites
http://www.modemhelp.org/inits/
http://ps-2.kev009.com/eprmhtml/eprmx/f12492.htm
Iff you have a mac you can find Zterm

David B