Scope xtrol on WinXP/2000/NT
Bill J Gray Feb 8, 2002
Grant Blair, thanks for the reminder. You're right, I _did_ fix
scope control on XP; the last few months have been chaotic enough
that I'd forgotten exactly what I did. The current GUIDE7.ZIP will
fix the problem (for that matter, use of GUIDE8.ZIP would do it.)
Here's the post I originally made on the subject on 3 December 2001.
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This problem has cropped up from time to time over the last half year
or so. By coincidence, I found a solution a few days ago.
It mostly affected Win2000 systems, and more recently, XP
systems. As best I could tell, Guide would send data, but couldn't get
any data back from the scope. So (for LX-200 control) "Slew Scope" would
send data to the scope and the scope would move, but Guide never got an
acknowledgment message from the scope. "Slew Guide" wouldn't work at
all, since it requires getting the RA/dec from the telescope.
This had me baffled until I got a message from Eric Vesting, who
distributes Guide in Germany. A friend of his provided a little code
snippet; comparison to my code revealed a segment labelled "this is
different in NT/2000/XP from the 95/98/ME version." I changed about five
lines of my code to match the example, verified that it worked on my WinME
box, and sent it off to a gent who verified that it fixed the problems
he'd run into in Win2000.
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