Developing Your Application
Chapter 3
NI-488.2M UM for Windows NT
3-20
© National Instruments Corp.
Running Existing DOS and Windows GPIB Applications
You can run existing DOS and Windows GPIB applications under Windows NT by using
the GPIB Virtual Device Driver,
gpib-vdd.dll
, which is included with your
NI -488.2M software.
To run DOS GPIB applications, load the special GPIB device driver
gpib-nt.com
instead of
gpib.com
, which you normally use with DOS. When you install the
NI -488.2M software,
gpib-nt.com
is copied into a new subdirectory called
doswin16
. To use
gpib-nt.com
, you must modify your
config.nt
file to load
gpib-nt.com
whenever a DOS application is executed. The
config.nt
file is
located in your
<winnt> \system32
directory, where
<winnt>
is your Windows NT
directory, for example
c:\windows
. To load
gpib-nt.com
, add the following line
to your
config.nt
file:
device=
<path>\doswin16\gpib-nt.com
where
<path>
is the directory where you installed the GPIB software (the default
installation directory is
c:\gpib-nt
).
To run 16-bit Windows GPIB applications, the system uses the special GPIB dynamic
link library,
gpib.dll
. When you install the NI-488.2M software,
gpib.dll
is
copied into the
<winnt> \system32
directory, where
<winnt>
is your Windows NT
directory, for example
c:\windows
). As long as
gpib.dll
is in that directory, it is
automatically accessed whenever you launch a 16-bit Windows GPIB application.