CASIO DT-X10 and §%&$&)!? Netgear MA401

Hi all,

after I got a bunch brand new CASIO DT-X10M30E ( INTELPX255/ARMV4T/CE.NET 4.1) I tried to use them in our warehouse to simply transmit barcodes to our website.

I happily equipped them with some old NETGEAR MA401 PCMCIA from our stock.

Now the desaster:
I virtually tried any available drivers which are available from anywhere or your site.

To name a few, these were:

http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/h/0028.asp
PRISM400XXXX
WLAN400XXXX
were only XXXX=1824 installs. All other cabs are refused as "not appliceable to the OS".

After reboot always: "PRISMSTA.exe is not a valid CE application". Bonk!

Inserting the card the device asks for the driver name. I entered the corresponding dll (PRISM, WLAN, etc) name provided by each installation cab. Bonk!
The adapter LED blinks 1x and then off.

Funny enough, if I remove all drivers and enter the driver name of a native WINCE dll called netwlan.dll I get a solid LED on the card. The downside is there is no setup tool on the device and the card doesn't show up. However this action creates a registry entry in /COMM called /netwlan1 referred from /netwlan which has a bunch of settings in a key called /parms. The card itself shows up correctly in /DRIVERS with correct references to ndis and netwlan.

Used to PEEK and POKE I tried to set the parameters manually and .... failed miserably, as the entries do not match the required settings for SSID/WEP
encryption. Hours of digging the net didn't come up with useful information. I even mailed CASIO a request for their SDK - NO ANSWER!!!

NOW, I'm lost! It would be a pity if the devices remain useless, due to my ignorance :-)

sorry for kraut english :-)

regards
Juergen

Did you try typing in prismnds for the driver name?

This has always been a very difficult card to use with CE.NET. The driver on HPCFactor is for CE.NET 4.2, not 4.1. Some people have had success using the PRISM reference driver version 3.00.08.0236 with card firmware version is 1.08.00.00.

We have a CESD on it here: http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/h/0020.asp

I have an old driver file for that card I used to use that worked on my pocketpcs that used the CE.NET 4.1 core. You might give that a try...file is attached...



Attachments
----------------
SP20429.exe (1270KB - 5 downloads)

Sure. The promt does not accept any driver coming from the cabs even when succesfully installed in the /windows directory.



I've seen that the driver was for 4.2 but, hey, I gave it a try.

I also installed http://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/h/0020.asp. No success. The device did never accept any poketpc programs whatsoever.

As a last resort I could write my own setup tool for the card, but do not have access to the CASIO SDK. They did never respond to any mails asking for that. Maybe it's high confidential
I've set up an old XP machine with VS2003. I can run applications on the emulator as well as on the device.
As posted before the card is on air with the built-in native driver. Having the CASIO SDK it would be easy to write a small configuration tool.
It would be of great help if there was any developer here who's able to access the restricted download area of CASIO homepage.

Now, I gonna check the attached driver and come back with results later.

Thanks, so far, for trying to help.

Juergen

Edited by muzzleloader 2013-10-16 4:44 PM

Well, setup refuses driver upload due to incompatible OS. I ripped the exe and installed tha cabs manually -> "Not a valid CE application".
However, it was worth a try. Thank you.

Juergen

What I've never liked about Prism-based cards is that the driver is MFC-based and seems to run into a lot of DLL conflicts. I don't know if that's what's going on here, though. The "not a valid CE application" error can be a lot of things. In newer versions of CE with some apps I've been able to clear this error by substituting another version of aygshell.dll, which I find surprising because the native aygshell.dlls for CE 4.x, 5, and 6 are generally more broadly compatible than the older ones. You could try the ones in the "aygshells" link on this page:

http://hpcmonex.net/izemize.htm

Also, it's unclear to me from your posts whether you've tried installing the 2577 CAB manually by extracting its files first on the PC. I'd generally have more confidence in 2577 files than 1824 ones in terms of compatibility - the former are generally more broadly compatible among ARM-based devices.

Well, there is no aygshell.dll in /windows. aygshell is not part of the Windows CE operating system. It is part of
the Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms.



I tried, no success.

I tracked down the incompatibility of prismsta.exe to wrong target. They all seem to be compiled for ARM(old), MIPS or other weird processors. My device is a ARMV4T.

Till now, I never found a working config tool in any package installed. Prismsta.exe should at least try to find a driver/card and then quit. Any Prismsta.exe installed in the past resulted in "NOT a valid CE app".

Is there a known working CE4.1 prismsta.exe (or compatible setup tool) for ARMV4T out there? In the first it would be enough to get that little icon, even with no functionality.

Thanks

Juergen

Normally, a special version of aygshell.dll has been included in the Platform Builder from CE 4.1 forward. (I don't recall if it's in 4.0.) But in its absence one of cmonex' versions should do the job. There seems to be more limited cross-compatibility among newer ARM processors, but in theory I'd expect that most older ARM versions of programs (StrongARM in particular) would work. cmonex has a version of the Prism driver on that same page that's supposed to be optimized for CE 4.x devices; have you tried that one? (BTW, if the page doesn't load, try opening it through the Wayback Machine at archive.org.)

Ok, now I tried installation of EACH and EVERY driver from cmonet and got always: THIS APPLICATION CANNOT RUN ON THIS DEVICE. PLEASE INSTALL THE APPLICATION SPECIFIC TO THIS DEVICE.
In particular, I did the same for EACH and EVERY driver mentioned to be applicable from hpcfactor and trillions of other sites. This is so fu(k!n9 boring...

The ONLY CAB which, at least installs, is: WLAN400.1824 OR PRISM4000.1824. Unfortunately the driver name popup does NOT accept WLANNDS or PRISMNDS and so the card doesn't show up. So what?

BTW, I verified functionality and proper operation of the MA401 card in a XP notebook.

Now, I spent tooooooooooo many hours to make these devices operational. It's the best to send them to oblivion and getting more recent devices. CE4.1 suxx a$$.

Juergen

I sense your frustration Muzzleloader....and some times that is the way it goes.

I have only one other suggestion that you might try...find a CAB file for pocketpc 2002 for the MA401 and see what happens.

Gee... another day of TRY & ERROR. No success at all.

But now, I feel a great relief, cuz I watched the devices scattering into parts in the trash can ...

You may close the thread.
Thank you all for your assitance.

Juergen

Maybe a wifi card that is not the MA401?

Too late

BTW, do not throw good money after bad!

Yeah, Rich, it's kinda hard to insert a WiFi card into a device that's been broken into pieces.

Sorry that it it didn't work out, muzzleloader.