USB articles

IBM MultiPort USB Hub Tip.

By Martin Iturbide

I personally had tested this USB hub, here are my comments.

What is the IBM USB Multi-port hub?

This is a regular USB 5 port hub, but it have some additional ports.

• 5 USB 1.1 Ports
• 1 Parallel Printer Port
• 1 Serial Port
• 2 PS/2 Mouse and/or Keyboard Ports

What do you need?

• USB Basic Drivers for OS/2 (not necessary if you are using Convenience Pack)
• USB Printer Driver
• USB Serial Convertor Driver

I have been testing this device and the USB hub functionality works without problems with tested with the latest USB Basic Device Driver version (2.11). The two PS/2 ports also work without any problems. I had tested a mouse and a keyboard there. On this hub I had connected three USB mice, a USB Keyboard and one PS/2 mouse at the same time, and everything was working fine under my OS/2 Warp 4 Convenience Pack (MCP). The parallel port also works using the USB Printer Drivers. When I plugged the USB Hub with the printer (before installing the USB Printer drivers) it shows a new icon on the printers.”USB_Parallel_IBM_USB_Parallel_Converter_1”. Just make a right click on it and check that you have the corrected driver for the printer.

The only thing that seems not to work fine is the serial port. However, recently IBM has released the Serial Convertor Device Driver and offers official support for the serial port functionality of this device.

On Windows there is a special driver that will assign (in my case) COM3 to the Hub’s, it seems OS/2 requires a driver for it.

Possible the reason why the parallel port doesn’t work under OS/2 is because the “USB Printer Driver” put a new port for the printers instead of redirect the LPT2 port. And the same thing for the Serial port, there is not any kind of driver for OS/2 for USB to Serial converter.

How to Configure the Logitech USB Wheel Mouse.

by Domingos Rocha

Main board

Asus K7V

• Chipset: VIA KX133 (VIA VT8371 & VT82C686A)

Required Drivers

1. Mouse: Logitech Wheel Mouse USB (Model M-BD58)
2. Drivers: USB basic system drivers [usbbasic.exe]
3. USB Mouse driver: [usbmouse.exe]
4. XR_D002 Base Device Driver FixPak released: [1]
5. Scroll Mouse driver pak: [2]

HowTo:

1. Install USBBASIC and don't reboot yet!
2. Unpack XR_D002, find the same files installed by USBBASIC and overwrite them. Now reboot.
3. install USBMOUSE and don't reboot yet!
4. find in unpacked XR_D002 the same files installed by USB MOUSE and overwrite them. Now reboot.
5. You'd have the mouse working now. Let's get the scroll thing to work: install SCROLLMS and reboot.
6. Done!

The middle-button function does not work with this set of drivers. Maybe with that one, $paid$, from Software Choice...

This is a really nice hardware. The scroll wheel helps a lot, and not only inside a browser. Working on virtually any plain surface and not needing a pad (it is optical), this mouse is a relief to your hand and wrist.

Labtec 1040 USB Speakers and OS/2 Tip.

by Jüri Ivask

In principle, it works like any sound card.

Instead of inserting the card into computer slot, you connect the speakers to the computer USB port. So the USB port is instead of slot and the DAC converter and other electronics in the left Labtec-1040 speaker serves as electronics you find on the sound card. In the right speaker there is a amplifier and sound controls and headphone output (you can also use the speakers as ordinary speakers with your sound card).

Instead of your sound card drivers, you use the usbaudio.sys driver. To get the MMOS2 subsystem to use the usbaudio.sys driver you should write according stuff to the MMPM2.INI file. This is done by installing the usbaudio.exe package from IBM OS2 Device Driver web site. The install program installs the driver, writes according statement into config.sys, creates objects (Digital Audio, MIDI, Compact Disk) in Multimedia folder and writes the following lines in the drivers section of MMPM2.INI file:

Waveaudio=SWHTWAVEUSB01
Sequencer=IBMSEQPAS1601
Ampmix=IBMAMPMIXPAS1601

And also according sections for all of them. Now after next reboot, you should be able to hear the system sounds, but... The driver works only partially:

Applications like WarpAMP, Z, QU/2 Player, PM123 (DART??) are working OK.

Also RealPlayer8 with Odin if down sampled to 8bit.

CD player is working if digital transfer is enabled.

>From *.wav files in your mmos2 only the system sounds are working OK (C:\mmos2\sounds\desktop\*.wav). Files in c:\mmos2\sounds (like applause.wav) are not working. The difference seems to be that the system sounds are 16bit signed ones and those in c:\mmos2\sounds are 8bit unsigned. It seems that only the signed ones are playing. You can convert these 8bit unsigned files to signed ones with an application like 525_v211 found in Hobbes.

MIDI is not working. However, it should be possible to play MIDI files by installing the TimidityMCD package.

Digital Video (macaw.avi) is not working, probably due to the sound format included in the video.

Updated driver in Device Driver Fix Pak 2 brakes even that partial functionality (at least in my IBM PC300GL). So if you have installed the refreshed xr_d002 (which services the MMOS2 folder) you have to back out the usbaudio.sys driver.

As I currently do not have access to Software Choice, I have not tested the refreshed usbaudio.exe package from there.

How to Install the audio-USB-Driver

By Wolfgang

To install this driver you must first install the USB-Basic and the MMPM/2.

1. You must download the file usbaudio.zip and extract into a new directory (e.g.G:\usb-audio). When this done, you get following files: cardinfo.dll, control.scr, genin.dll, geninmri.dll, usbaudio.hlp, usbaudio.ico, usbaudio.scr, usbaudio.sys, usbaudio.txt, usbaudio.zip.
2. Then open a OS/2-Shell and go to this directory.
3. Start the program MINSTALL and you see following Window:
   

   
4. Select USB Audio Adapter in the Listbox
5. Now press the Button Install or Installieren
6. When the install routine is ready, you must restart the computer.

In the Config.sys-File you found now a new entry:

DEVICE=D:\MMOS2\USBAUDIO.SYS

In the Multimedia Configuration you find the information about the USB-Audio-System: USB Wave audio 2 and USB MIDI 2. In the File usbaudio.txt, there are any information about the driver.

How to Configure your USB printer under OS/2

By Martin Iturbide

First of all you need the to install the Basic USB Drivers, that are mandatory for every USB device. Then you will need to get the USB Printer Device Driver, available via download at the IBM Software Subscription, or if you are using a Convenience Pack you can find the file at the CD on the options/USBprint directory. Choose the file of your language and run it on a temporal directory. All the files should be unzipped now.

What Printer does it work with the USB port?

According to common sense, every printer that had drivers for OS/2 should work under OS/2, because the way to make a USB printer work under OS/2 is only by changing the printer port. But, you never know what can happen on the OS/2 World.

A USB Printer or an Adapter Cable with a Parallel Printer?

Sorry, I haven’t tried any USB Printer, I just had tried this on parallel printers with an adapter to make it work on the USB port. But I think that any Printer with OS/2 driver should work on the USB port without any major problems. Please contact me if you got any info.

How to Configure the USB Printer Port ?

1. Open the property window of a existing Printer or a new one created. Choose the Output Port tag.
   

   
2. Click on the Install a new Port button and a new window will appear.
   

   
3. Point the Directory field to the temporary directory where you unpacked the USB Printer driver and click the Refresh button.
4. The USB icon will appear, select it and press the Install button.
   

   
5. Reboot the system, initial program load!
6. Once you OS/2 system had rebooted and had completely booted, you can connect your USB printer and OS/2 will recognize it.
7. You can also check the properties of the printer, and check it’s Output Port and select the USB Port from there. Remember, the printer must be plugged to the USB port.
8. You USB Printer should now work without problems.

USB Resource Manager Information

Double Click on the USB Resource Manager Info icon.

Some windows will appear showing you the information about the USB devices you had plugged on your PC.

The next picture is the main window of the USB Resource Manager. It shows the ID’s of the devices that are attached to the PC. I had plugged two devices that doesn’t work under OS/2 right now, the Adaptoid (N64 controller to USB adaptor) and a USB WinTV (TV-Tunner).

To generate a report make a right click on the device name and select “View Device Report” from the pop-up menu.

A New windows will show you the report of this device.

...nice, isn’t it ?

How to Install Iomega HDD 120GB USB 2.0/FireWire External Desktop Hard Drive

By Roberto Gainza

I finally found a way to use the Iomega 120 GB HDD USD drive under OS/2. But with two HPFS partitions. There had been many weird things and problems in the process, but now it seems that works ok. Now I don't like formatting nothing with FAT32. Let's continue with the process. First you need to install the USB Basic support driver from IBM or from eCS (it's the same). Then you will need to have some config.sys parameter similar to this one:

BASEDEV=USBOHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBOHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBUHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBUHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBEHCD.SYS
BASEDEV=USBD.SYS /REQ:USBUHCD$,USBOHCD$,USBEHCD$
BASEDEV=USBHID.SYS
BASEDEV=USBMSD.ADD /V
BASEDEV=USBCDROM.ADD

Download the unofficial USB Storage driver from this page: http://cyberia.dnsalias.com/Gfd.Sys.Misc.Htm. Check for the file called CW-USB12.ZIP. Unpack this file and copy the CWusbmsd.* files into C:\OS2\BOOT. Modify the Config.sys renaming the line:

REM BASEDEV=USBMSD.ADD /V

and adding this line. (put it as is, don't add anything else)

BASEDEV=CWUSBMSD.ADD /FIXED_DISKS:1 /FORCE_TO_REMOVABLE /V

Restart the OS/2 system and that's it.

With this driver the LVM.exe will not work and it is possible that some little 64 MB and 128 MB USB key, will be unusable also. But you can always change back the config.sys and restart the system. Since LVM.exe stopped working I started to use DFSee, which allows me to see the USB HDD partition, etc. I was unable to create a single partition and format it with JFS, because I can not use the LVM. It should work with two HPFS partition, but I don't know why I had to create a third partition on the disc as small as I can to be able to format and work with the other bigger partition of the HDD.

Some Questions?

1. I guess that you are using two partition because HPFS has a limitation of 64 GB, is that right?

   Yes

2. But, is the USB HDD an encapsulated IDE with a USB Interface or pure USB?

   Pure USB

3. Is there a Part Number or where can I get more info on the Device?

   Iomega® HDD 120 GB USB 2.0/FireWire External Desktop Hard Drive http://www.iomega.com