#Diaquest vs. Lantastic
8 messages in this thread
Jeff
Was Diaquest able to provide an answer to the interupt 14 problem? I'm
afraid I'll be running into the same problem in a few days.
JP
Joseph,
I spoke with James Gillerman at Diaquest today. He didn't have an absolute
solution.
He recommended to first check if Lantastic can be installed to use
something other than COM4 (Int14h). I don't know if this can be done.
If that isn't possible, then use the DQPORTS.bat command (requires BASIC to
be present) to change the port of the DQ50P software. He warned that he
has never had to do this before……..so make a backup first!!!
Apparently DQ50P software defaults to use COM4, but the DQPORTS.bat command
will allow you to change it to a different port, such as COM3.
It's gonna be a trial & error thing. I won't have a chance to check
further into this for a couple of weeks, so if you try it out, please let
me know if it works!!
-Jeff
P.S. we had a 900 frame animation to lay to tape, but only about 100 megs
of free hard drive space. So I was gonna start Diaquest on the first 150
frames or so, and then use another machine on the network to erase
completed files on the hard drive and restore the next ones from our tape
drive. They wouldn't run at the same time!!
Jeff
Good idea about erasing the files and restoring from a tape remotely.
It's challenging to keep the machines all active and solve all of the
limitations of putting together animations.
I'll be working on this tonight and over the next few days, so I'll keep
you posted. I left a message on the lantastic forum, so we'll see if that
angle works.
Joe
We use our tape backup unit (on an old '286) to backup TGA files from the
rendering machines remotely all the time. It's excellent……and 3DS
doesn't even make a peep!!
Only problem right now, is that we can't lay to tape and restore TGAs
simultaneously from a remote unit. We end up having to record a portion to
tape, delete the TGAs, restore the next bunch of TGAs, and begin recording
to tape again where we left off.
The drawback with this method is that restoring the backup tape typically
takes as long as the actual video recording session. This doubles the time
required to get the job done !?!
Hopefully we'll find a solution. Please let me know how it goes!
-Jeff
Jeff,
The diaquest board arrived, and so did my recorders, and after a reorder,
so did the time code generators. I'm just now setting things up, but so far
I haven't had excessive trouble with lantastic. We are using the DQ-422+,
but the TSR we load (sony422) must be very similar to yours because it goes
for Interupt 14. We got the diaquest before the recorders, so I played
with the TSR before we installed everything. I loaded the TSR on my machine
and it was creating a problem with lantastic. When our stuff came in and I
installed it on my wifes machine, it worked fine with lantastic (so far).
The primary difference between our machines is that I have a sound board
and modem and she doesn't. Do you have a modem in your machine? I'll keep
working on setting it up and will let you know.
Joe
Joe,
I do have a modem in my computer (that's how I get here <g>), however, I
remove the modem, to make room for the DQ50P……so, that's not it.
When I was messing with the problem, I noticed that whatever is loaded
last, wins. If you load Lantastic after DQ50P (or 422 in your case), then
Lantastic will work fine, but if you attempt to do a Disk to VTR command
from 3DS, you get an error about no Diaquest software available at INT14h,
but everything continues to function.
However, if you load Lantastic and then DQ50P, the network dies as soon as
you attempt a Diaquest related command. The TSR seems to install O.K.,
without affecting Lantastic, but as soon as you attempt to do anything with
DQ,…….BOOOM! System hang!
-Jeff
Jeff
What else do you have in your machine? Can you try the diaquest in another
machine? Mine seems to be running ok, but I did have a difficult time with
the digitize command. It was working fine and then quit after a reboot. It
didn't want to recognize the location for the digitize inpoint. It seemed
that it wanted the grab command after a reboot before it would do a
digitize. I also found that the tmode 17 works ok the first time but not
the second. Tmode 11 works well on multiple grabs. What is your experience
with this.
What else…….er, uhm, DQ50P, hard-drive controller, TARGA+64, network
card……yup, that's it…..
I've got a couple of other machines that we could try, but that's always
such a pain to shuffle all the boards and software. I guess if it resorts
to that, we'll be trying it.
I only digitized video for one small project, way back, just to see if it
worked. I didn't seem to have a problem at the time.
I'm not going to be doing anything too serious about it for a couple of
weeks yet.
-Jeff