[SBE] Imtech Video Wall

[Cowboy]

On Wednesday 16 January 2008 02:44 pm, Jerry Paonessa wrote:

>  

>  We have an old Imtech Video Wall, vintage 1994.  The 16 Barco 27" monitors 

>  still work fine, but the computer, a '486 PC, has some issues.  It recently 

>  suffered a hard drive failure.  We were able to replace the hard drive, 

>  reload DOS and Windows 3.1 (!) but we ran into problems harvesting the 

>  remainder of the software from the original hard drive.    


 //snip//


>  It was missing several files which we found and  

>  replaced, but now we are stuck at a point where the computer prompts that 

>  it cannot load the program because the file, "MSCOMM.VBX" is out of date.  

>  That file is actually a Windows component.  The latest one we downloaded 

>  from the Internet was dated May, 1995; that is newer than most of the files 

>  on the original 3.1 disks.         


 Some on the list know that one of my side-lines is data recovery from crashed
 drives. Not cheap, but I usually get everything back. ( 90% of the time or so )

 If the old drive is still intact, *maybe*..........

 Meantime, the file "out of date" is a windowsism meaning incompatible, but
 not necessarily due to vintage. ( they could make the error message something
 like "Dude ! Something's wrong with" and it would be just as informative, but
 actually more accurate in most cases ) (( like a "corrupt" file. That almost
 NEVER happens, but has become the generic windows error explanation ))

 That vintage, DLL's especially, were not what DLL means. Many re-wrote
 their own incompatible files, and used the same name. Kinda a Micro$oft
 tradition, I guess.

 If I was you, I'd grab any and every version of that visual basic VBX file
 I could find, and try them all one by one. Unless it's a proprietary one-off
 file, you may well find an older version that works fine.

 There was also a Micro$oft general bug from that era that interpreted any
 date after some cut-off which I forget as "too old" especially if it was newer.

-- 
Cowboy

http://cowboys.homeip.net

It is better never to have been born.  But who among us has such luck?
One in a million, perhaps.