Jurassic Park in Silicon: Extending support of an Historic VP200 box.

This post has a slightly "Jurassic Park" feel about it as Nathaniel Stafford of University of New Hampshire resurrects a VP 200 system which must be older than many Morris Water Maze users now. The old VP112s and VP200s seem about as unstoppable and robust as a T800 Terminator and just seem to go on and on tracking. His problem was getting a modern PC to read the RS232 port of the VP. Here is how he solved it.

"The solution was to actually download a third party open-source program recommended by out IT. It is called User-Port. Basically, the I/O cable from the VP200 was attempting to write to the OS, and Microsoft XP does not allow hardware to write. User-Port simply opened the necessary port (3FF) on serial port 1, and allowed communication. It appears we only had to do this once before running the water maze analysis."