GPS mouse and Windows 98 - advice needed, please.

[ThereAndBack]

Following upon the advice received on this forum, I recently bought a GPS mouse on eBay. I am now trying to get it working on an old Toshiba laptop running Windows 98.

The GPS mouse is plugged into the only USB socket on the laptop. I have installed the USB to UART bridge controller.

The mouse is as shown here: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/32-Channel-USB-GPS...1QQcmdZViewItem

It is a MediaTek G-mouse MR.

System setup in Tsunamis 99 can occasionally trace the port but receives a signal it can't identify. I guess this suggests I have the wrong driver installed, or does it?

Perhaps someone out there has already unravelled this problem.

Any help appreciated.

Alan

 

[nigelmercier]

My first post on these forums, but I know more about PCs than boats!

Does the USB to UART bridge controller have a setting for the Baud Rate and protocol? If so, try setting it to 4800 / 8 bits / No parity.

 

[EDM]

Windows 98 - sometimes needs a USB Driver to patch the OS.

Does it work on a more modern machine - someone may have sold you a broken GPS mouse ?

I know what you are thinking - what criminals on E-Bay never !!!

Tim

 

[Guest]

As far as I know ... Win 98 vers 1 didn't have USB support ...... not until Win 98 SE came out was USB supported.

??

With a Win98 machine ... it would have been better to have gone for a RS232 Serial connection GPS .. IMHO of course !

 

[Danny]

I don't think that's right, sbc. I inherited an old laptop a few years ago and it had W98 on it. It also had a USB port which I'm sure worked - though I never tried it with a GPS mouse. It's now got W98SE installed so I can't check the above statement. Fairly sure I've got it right though.

 

[david_bagshaw]

did you get the instruction book @ web page

from recent experience with another nav product after the GPS had not been used for a long while not only had it lost its almanac , but also it defaulted to an entirely different type of communication protocol.This was re set with extra software from the manufacturer.

 

[Guest]

[ QUOTE ]
I don't think that's right, sbc. I inherited an old laptop a few years ago and it had W98 on it. It also had a USB port which I'm sure worked - though I never tried it with a GPS mouse. It's now got W98SE installed so I can't check the above statement. Fairly sure I've got it right though.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have 2 Win 98 machines in the office and a couple at home ... they all needed add-on utilities to use the USB ports ... But the Win98 SE machines of which I have a few were all working straight of. The IT guys who service my office gear told me that win98 1st edition had no built-in usb support and add-ons were required ... Seemed true with our gear.

Of course I reckon if you get drivers with a piece of gear as most do - then that is not a problem - as then you will be installing the required utility ...

One thing that really annoyed me when Win98 went SE ... we had a brilliant sheet fed scanner for docs ... HP Scanjet. Any Ops sytem later than Win98 1st edition ... no drivers or updates and it doesn't work !! Tried everything ... HP techn. advised that the comment on their HP scanner site about not working with Win98se and later was 100% fact !! and no way to get round it ... GRRRRRRR !!

 

[ThereAndBack]

Thanks for the replies.

<span style="color:blue"> Aquarius Yachting </span> - Nigel - welcome to the forum and thanks for the advice.
The settings you advise are the ones I already have so any other suggestions will be welcome.

<span style="color:blue"> EDM </span>- welcome to the forum, Tim. The GPS Mouse works reasonably well on my desktop PC (XP Pro). Of course the eBay supplier has not replied to my question about a Win98 driver. /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif

<span style="color:blue"> SBC </span> - thanks for the suggestion. I am able to use other USB devices (memory stick) on the laptop so it must have some kind of USB support.

<span style="color:blue"> Danny </span> - yes, I think you are right - see above, thanks.

<span style="color:blue"> david_bagshaw </span> - thanks for the link to the manual - it is very similar to the one that came with the mouse BUT this one does say Win98 is supported. As said above, it works fine on my desktop PC.

Can anyone tell me what the 'USB to UART bridge controller' actually is or does?

Thanks for the replies so far, please keep them coming.

Alan

 

[2Tizwoz]

The UART bridge is software which creates an additional serial port. It is a bridge between the USB mouse and the navigation software which requires a serial port input.

The version of NMEA which this mouse uses as standard without its being returned to the Taiwanese factory for alteration is 0183 v3.01 with requirements as stated in the ebay advert of 9600,N,8,1.

You should have been supplied with a CD with the UART software.

This is the manufacturer's website. There is more information regarding the mouse and necessary software downloads.

I run mine with Maxsea which can be configured for a variety of data speeds for various connected equipment input and output configurations. I cannot give advice as to whether Tsunamis will accept the higher speed (9600) data rate than the more common (4800) speed in the same way. I haven't a copy of the NMEA standards as they are rather expensive, so cannot advise on the difference between NMEA 0183 v 1.5, 1.8 or as in this case v3.01. The later standard seems to specify higher data speeds, up to 128,000.

 

[ThereAndBack]

<span style="color:blue"> 2Tizwoz </span>
Thanks for that useful information.

My problem apparently lies with the laptop (on Win98) and maybe with the lack of a driver (or a wrong driver).

I have the GPS mouse installed on the desktop (XP Pro) where it feeds info to Tsunamis with no problem. The port settings are 4800, N, 8, 1. It has no problem with these.

On installing to the laptop I get the new com port (3) showing USB to UART bridge controller.

I did find a driver called 'CP210x_VCP_Win98SE.exe' but this seems not to be right, although the name suggests it may be the one, I don't have 98SE, only 98.

The manufacturer's website only offers the driver called 'CP210x_VCP_Win2K_XP_S2K3_VISTA.exe'. Which is obviously not a 98 driver.

Any other input will be most appreciated.

Thanks again

Alan

 

[Danny]

[ QUOTE ]
Of course I reckon if you get drivers with a piece of gear as most do - then that is not a problem - as then you will be installing the required utility ...

[/ QUOTE ]Yes, that'll be it - I must have installed the drivers for whatever I was using on it.

Understand your frustration re the scanner. I've found that mine, which worked fine on previous windows OS's, isn't supported on Vista - "yet" according to the manufacturer but I'm not holding my breath...

 

[Guest]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Of course I reckon if you get drivers with a piece of gear as most do - then that is not a problem - as then you will be installing the required utility ...

[/ QUOTE ]Yes, that'll be it - I must have installed the drivers for whatever I was using on it.

Understand your frustration re the scanner. I've found that mine, which worked fine on previous windows OS's, isn't supported on Vista - "yet" according to the manufacturer but I'm not holding my breath...

[/ QUOTE ]

The scanner ... all they could do was offer me the later version at 3x the cost etc. The old one is still perfect nick ... even had a small utility that you could embed into the scan to produce a file viewable on other pc's without the software etc. making the file even smaller than sending jpg / tiff etc. Of course later one didn't !!

 

[Guest]

Sometimes it's worth searching generally for drivers - Prolific USB / Serial cable converters are an example ... use the supplied driver of from manufacturers web-site - I couldn't get mine to work. By accident found by google an alternative 3rd party site ... bingo ! Not only did it do the prolific cable but near all others I have as well ........

So worth searching with the GPS name / model and not manufacturer .........

I bet you don't want to install 98se over top either !! I know I didn't !!

 

[ThereAndBack]

[ QUOTE ]

I bet you don't want to install 98se over top either !! I know I didn't !!

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, I would be a bit reluctant, but I don't even have a 98SE disk so the matter doesn't arise.

I guess I will have to continue the driver search.

Alan

 

[Searush]

Have you tried your GPSmouse with any other programmes like Autoroute or Navigator? It takes quite a long time for the mouse to acquire a signal the first time.

I have NctLite to show me that it is acquiring satellites.

 

[2Tizwoz]

This mouse is based on the MTK chip which is new and apparently going into the latest Garmin handhelds, as yet not released. It has low power consumption and high sensitivity.

I am running mine on XP and they do seem to have developed a Vista driver which you have located on their website.

Windows 2000, ME and XP have good USB support but 98 is poor.

Some drivers are backwards compatible to windows 98 also but whether you have a setup problem on your laptop or the driver is the shortcoming is not certain. It seems unlikely that a driver for a new chip will have been specifically written to accommodate a Windows 98 USB connection.

 

[Phoenix of Hamble]

As a last resort, it might be worth deleting the com port, and reinstalling it....

Also, what other ports do you have on the laptop?.... if you have several other serial ports, then Com 3 might be a bit earlier in the order of things... often Com 5 is the first sensible port to use.... although with 98 you don't always get a great deal of say in the matter....

Have you looked to see if there are any conflicts showing in the resource manager?

I suspect, as you seem to have figured yourself, that the real problem is that the driver isn't quite right.... and is probably for 98SE, and not 98....

 

[ThereAndBack]

<span style="color:blue"> [ QUOTE ]
Have you tried your GPSmouse with any other programmes like Autoroute or Navigator? It takes quite a long time for the mouse to acquire a signal the first time.

I have NctLite to show me that it is acquiring satellites.

[/ QUOTE ]</span>

Thanks for the tip. I have downloaded NctLite and a very nifty little thing it is. I am using it happily on the desktop but it isn't finding anything (yet) on the laptop.

Alan

<span style="color:red"> [Later] - YES, YES, YES - NctLite is reading the mouse on the laptop - I will post again when I get over the shock. </span>

Alan

 

[ThereAndBack]

<span style="color:red"> A big THANK YOU to everyone who posted on this thread.

At last everything is working fine on the laptop.

I can't claim to know just what was wrong so I 'started from scratch' and spent several hours cleaning-up the laptop (deleting the junk, cleaning and de-fragmenting the registry, deleting almost everything I wasn't sure I would need and defragmenting the hard drive).

I then did a 'clean' reinstall of the USB to UART Bridge controller and the Windows 98SE driver and - BINGO.

Thanks to all you peeps who posted here I have saved the cost of a new laptop. To say I am happy is an understatement.

BTW, once I got back into it I realised what a nice simple to use OS Windows 98 is. What price progress, eh?

Again, thank you all.

Alan

/forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif </span>