Problem with old serial midi interface... M-audio portman pcs

[Steven_C]

The driver for the portman PC/S can't see my com port, even when I manually tell it which address and IRQ it is on. I know the serial port works, as I have read, erased, and reprogrammed a PIC on that port. The interface does work on a different computer. Does anyone have any suggestions, or know of where I might find an alternative driver?  :-\

Many thanks from Steve

[Jidis]

Sorry I can't help on the undetection issue, but I've got one at the studio. I think the only drivers I ever dug up for it were all the same version (probably the current 98 ones from the M-Audio site).

I can check the version number tomorrow night if it would help.

                                       -Good Luck!

[Steven_C]

Yeah, maybe there is only one driver out there.. Strange... The laptop has one hardware serial port that can be configured as COM1 or COM2. When I configure it as COM1 the portman driver dosen't see the com port at all. When I configure it as COM2, the portman driver thinks it 'sees' COM1, but it never actually works (I get the 'portman hardware not detected' error messages. Oh well. the laptop was for free and the interface cost me $25. I only bought it to use editor software with my JX8P synth.

Yeah, it would be interesting to see what driver version you are using, if it isn't too much trouble, Jidis, thanks!

[Jidis]

Steven,

I had them on four different discs out there, and they were all the same files. They appear to be version 3.1, and they are the same ones you get now from M-Audio in an archive called "PCS_1.12". I got that thing after it was already old, so I don't have any previous drivers.

Hope you can get it going.

                                          -George

[Steven_C]

thanks for checking that out, George.

Oh well!...

[TK.]

Hi Steve,

is your laptop stuffed with an IRDA sensor? Then it could be that it allocates one serial port. This can lead to inconsistencies between the COM number and the COM address, and "poor" drivers cannot handle with this properly, regardless if they allow to change the address or not (I had a similar problem some time ago).

Solution: disable IRDA in the BIOS. Or, if the BIOS provides an option to select the COM address, try a different one

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[Steven_C]

Hi Thorsten,

  Many thanks for that reply. I played around with bios com port settings (I hadn't thought of that!) but haven't got anywhere yet. (No IRDA).  I think I'll try to hunt down an old paralell port midi interface from ebay. Or maybe I'll dig into modifying the midibox 64 so it can do the sysex/synth editing functions that I was going to do with software. (long term goal) I dunno...

...Steve

[Jidis]

I think I'll try to hunt down an old paralell port midi interface from ebay.

Hey again-  I did the same thing recently per recommendations here, and ended up with a MOTU MicroExpress. They seem to be on there a lot for pretty cheap. It's only been here a few days and I've been mostly on electronics junk at the studio, but it did very well on a Nuendo latency test. The lowest latency was almost unmeasureable and the high was in the 150-175 sample range which was much lower than most of the interfaces people were reporting with (unless I was doing something wrong). It's also got 4 in and 6 out ports, so I probably won't even need my patchbay. The install was the only hitch, but it was recognized properly after making a change in the device manager and has been fine ever since. I wish there were more parallels to pick from, but it's cool that they're still supporting it for 2k and XP. Should be useable for a while.

                                -George