I'm having some trouble with my PC finding my Super Wild Card back up unit. I've used a few transfer programs for sending ROMs to the unit but none of them work. So I finally tried Wildload95. This software tells me that I need a Lpt connection. So I go to my PC settings to see if the printer port is present (which it was) and the drivers are installed yet nothing is working. Does anyone know how to get this port recognised? Also, should my Wild Card show up on windows as an external device or something? Yakumo
I'm no expert, but what version of windows are you using? A lot of support for existing ports/hardware etc was removed from Win 2000 and upwards. Try using Win 95/98. ...if you already are doing then I have no idea sorry!
oh man, that's bad news. I'm on XP. I do have the original win '98se disc but I'd like not to have to switch between operating systems if possible. Yakumo
You could try putting a copy onto a USB device if your motherdrive/bios supports it. If that fails you can always buy a cheap old HD and put it on that, would only take a a couple of minutes to swap out if your case doesn't involve screws. It would be better in the long run to dual boot though.
Accessing the parallel or serial port under xp is not allowed by the system, so you have to use an alternate set of drivers for all sort of old hardware devices with dos and win95/98 only software. Straight from the super wildcard dx2 faq
Microsoft Virtual PC Same thing as VMWare really but I prefer it more. Will let you run a self contained Win98 inside of XP. Very nifty. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/overview.mspx
Thanks for the help guys. It's bloody stupid taking out suport for some ports don't you think? I'll download the ntdriver.zip file first to see if it works but if not then Virtual PC or VMWare sound ideal. Yakumo
Well, got Win '98se running under virtual PC and that works fine. Wildload can now see the LTP connection and will load a rom but bugger all happens at the Wild Card's end. Should the game automatically come on or do I need to do something on the Wild Card? Yakumo
Now the problem of the software not recognizing it could have been that the program does not work well with XP. Another way is to check the IRQ settings and addresses of the port. Try different ones. You can usually do this in the BIOS under Device Settings or something similar depending on your motherboard. I'd double check them and try different settings to see if you can get it working properly and be able to load the game. Another possibility is to open up the wild card and see if there are jumpers on it with labeling indicating address location and IRQ setting. If so, get those matched up with your computer.
Thanks for the tip, madhatter. I'l take a look tonight if I get time. If nothing happens then I'm going to have to install a floppy drive on to my PC so that I can copy roms to it that can then vbe loaded by the Wild Card. man, what a pain in the arse back in 1996 I remember just connecting the Wild Card to my crappy Win 95 PC and then on to Win 98 when that came out with no problems at all. Yakumo
XP is Windows NT and NT is a protected operating system so it won't let just any program access ports which in theory isn't stupid. There are numerous ways to get around it though, use Direct-IO with any transfer program or use uCON64 which supports transferring to and from Wild Cards and works with external kernel mode drivers to allow port access.
