Infrared device

Well... maybe...

You see the Windows 95 driver stack recognises IR as either binding to a COM port allocation or a LPT port allocation (for IR printers). So in theory, if the USB part of the device is simply a USB Serial Port adapter (as presented to Windows) and the IR part is just a driverless serial adapter at the end of that... in theory, it *could* be driverless. Whether the 95 driver stack has a native driver for a USB Serial port, I do not know.

If the USB device itself presents as a USB IR adapter directly, then no, it will not work.

The problem is that without testing we cannot know and without knowing the PnP Device ID, we cannot do any research.

If it had free returns, then it's Amazon's problem if the guy is lying. Annoying really!

This was his last reply:
Windows 95 supports plug and play, so any computer device does not require a device driver and only needs to be connected to the computer to function properly.
I might try to get it and return it if necessary.
But it costs a lot. Maybe I should get this one and be on the safe side.


Edited by NarakuITA 2023-12-30 6:24 PM

Just check that you get free returns, don't want to get stung for it. Oh and if order from the affiliate link, you'll make the site £0.20, lol

Ask the seller how he tested it and claimed it to be working
So that was the reason he only showed the box originally.


What you need is a simple serial RS232 SIR adaptor. These are a few bucks more than the other crap on ebay but this is because they are the only things that will work.
When USB became mainstream around 2005 then noone cared for IR anymore and so noone cared for USB-IR (or FIR)

An USB to serial adapter (and the serial IR) won't work because you won't get the USB usable for anything but memory. There is no genuine USB-support for DOS and Win95/98 and the drivers that came up recently for DOS are only to support USB-memory. No other use possible.


The thing from Amazon is not exactly a fake. I assume it will work under some circumstances. This is often the case with these chinese things: they don't think it through, they just throw it into the market. Unchanged for years even if it is unusable. One comment claims that the driver is from 2007 and won't work with actual systems. So I assume it is just an USB-to-serial adaptor with a serial IR.

So to make it clear: To get IR running with Win95/98 you will need an RS232-serial-IR-Adaptor with drivers for Win95 (and of course an RS232-plug, 9pin, on your system). Anything else is totally useless (and therefor cheaper) for universal configuration. All these IR-USB-stuff depends on WinXP/win2K.
No later OS because noone needed to develop anything new for IR after 2005 and definitely not for W95/98 because there was no USB that time.

USB came up around 1999 and the USB-update for one of the last W98-versions is not much more than the actual hobby projects for USB for DOS.

Edited by dl1av 2023-12-31 5:13 AM

Doing a search and finding a RS232-serial-IR-Adaptor device, I found this:
http://www.irxon.com/english/products/ir220_e.htm
I wrote to support to find out if it is compatible with Windows 95. What do you think?
Unfortunately it seems that the seller no longer exists on eBay.
The only thing I can do instead is take this? (I wanted to know if there is a shorter one, without wire.)

and this?


Edited by NarakuITA 2023-12-31 11:24 AM

@dl1av sorry to be disagreeing with you here, as we seem to be talking over each other in this thread, however:

I've used USB to to Serial adapters on Windows 98, 98 even supports USB 2.0. There are plenty of USB to Serial chipsets with legacy 98 drivers floating around - here is one of them https://tripplite.eaton.com/support/owners-manual/753949

The OEM SR 2.1 and OEM SR 2.5 USB supplement's for Windows 95 are from 1996, with limited OHCI support being added in 1997 via a further update. Not 1999. Windows 98 FE and SE both had native USB support. Windows 95 OEM SR 2.1+ didn't ship with scanner or native mass storage support and its PID support was limited to third-party only.

There are also extended USB supplements for Windows 95 - https://archive.org/details/XUSBSUPP

As I said above though, I do not know if there is a serial mapper in the Windows 95 USB stack (I'll assume not), or any of the extended mods (again I'll assume not) and if not, have no direct experience on whether 95 compatible driver files are floating around to add one from an early third party chipset manufacturer.

That said, after a couple of minutes of languid searching I found - https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=123484
Which does indeed have a WIN95 folder in the driver and the signature header on the INF is CHICAGO, suggesting that it is a Windows 95 driver INF. The inf is for PnP ID VID_067B&PID_2303 which is still a chipset that Prolific supports today https://www.prolific.com.tw/US/ShowProduct.aspx?p_id=225&pcid=41 and appears to be the PL2303

Stick in to eBay and you still get results back. So find an old PL2303 adapter and as I said in my previous post *maybe* it will work.


You are however right, the simplest way here is to either find the COM2 IR header cable (which I am pretty sure that I did find details on for him in a previous thread) or to sacrifice COM1 and stick a header on that.


@NarakuITA

For the Actisys range, you want this one: https://www.actisys.com/ac200-220.html as it has fully stated Windows 95 support.

I think I'll take this one then, to be on the safe side.

However what is this RS232? Because I would need a male connection, given that, as previously shown in the photo of the back of my PC, the connection where to insert the cable highlighted with the red circle is female, if I'm not mistaken. Would I need a male to male RS232 adapter?


EDIT:
Yes, it has a female connection, as you can see from the photo. I need a male, male adapter.


The only thing I can do instead is take this? (I wanted to know if there is a shorter one, without wire.)

I found this adapter, is this what I need?

I found this. Too bad it costs too much!


Edited by NarakuITA 2023-12-31 12:06 PM

Interesting. I know that we used USB-Scanners with Win98 but it was all proprietary. No generic support via the OS.

I have newer seen an USB-to-Serial back in the days but maybe this was because all our computers had RS232-9pin and there was no need for an adaptor

I thought of the newer Prolific-stuff, too, but I have never seen a pre-XP driver for them and even today with Win10 it is not an easy stuff to geht these chinese programming cables working.
First you have to install the Prolific-driver, then the program editing software. And there are many incompatible hardware/software combinations out in the field, depending on the chips version you need a different driver.

Pain in the..... I have spent hours to get it running on some systems And I really don't want to do so for Win98 without the genuine plug-and-play-support

I personally think the easiest solution for a guy who is not necessary experienced with that kind of stuff is to use a serial-RS232-device after installing the appropriate driver. Only one protocol-stack to handle

I quite agree

Ok, but what about what I wrote? Are the devices I listed on eBay any good?

Noone can really say...

They can be defective from the start or there may later be problems to get it together with your individual hardware combination.

There are so many unforseeable use cases with these IR-adaptors, you will just have to buy one or two and to see where you get from here.

As a reward you get a better understanding what problems one could have had 25 years ago and how to solve it. Finally you will have an interesting testbed and a real use case scenario for a historic palmtop-artefact with infrared.
Thats an authentic user-experience from the nineties

Ok, if I decide to get this infrared adapter, would this 9pin connector be good for connecting the device to my PC?

Where do you want to solder it? This is a soldering male plug that should be inside your PC/laptop/whatever.

This is the kind of connector you need already installed to put your external serial device in.

If you *really* want to solder something, the pin-out for the IR connector is on Page 32 - http://ps-2.kev009.com/pccbbs/commercial_desktop/s78h5083.pdf

The official IR part number is as page 12 - http://ps-2.kev009.com/psref/dwbook.pdf

No, I don't want to "weld" the cable I need an adapter to connect the cable to the PC, since from how the image you see, the cable has the same connection as the PC, I can't connect them!


Edited by NarakuITA 2024-01-04 5:59 PM