Monthly Archives: April 2013

Programming a Motorola MAXTRAC using DOSBox

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One way to program a Motorola MAXTRAC is to use a older slower computer with a serialport on it.
Another way is to use DOSBox to emulate a computer running DOS, it is also possible to emmulate a slow computer.

I did this from a PIII Laptop @ 1Ghz running Windows XP, but other operating systems are also possible to use, but in some cases these instructions needs to be modified.

And NO, I will not give you a copy of the RSS so don’t bother asking for it.

  1. Start with setting up DOSBox so you can access the serial port you wish to use. I set it up to map the usb->serial adapter that windows gave com34 as com1 in DOSBox
  2. I set up the D drive in DOSBox to be a dropbox folder so I can share my config between computers and do backups more easily
  3. Create a shortcut to the Motorola MAXTRAC RSS software like 
    "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72\dosbox.exe" -conf "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72\dosbox.conf" "C:\Radio\Motorola\MaxTrac\MAXTRAC.exe"
  4. And now we are done and can use the software to program the radio
  5. If you are getting errors and belive these are based on DOSBox being to fast, you can slow it down by adjusting the cycles value in the config file or you can use crlt+F11 to slow it down when it is running

DOSBox auto mounting a directory from conf file

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It is possible to get DOSBox to autmatiacally mount a directory from the config file.

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
mount d "C:\Documents and Settings\f15ijp\My Documents\Dropbox\Radio\ProgrammingFiles\"

This line will mount the directory specified as a D: drive in DOSBox

DOSBox using a serialport

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In order to allow DOSBox to use the serial ports of the computer you need to change the settings.

I do this in the conf file to have it in one location

[serial]
# serial1-4 -- set type of device connected to com port.
#              Can be disabled, dummy, modem, nullmodem, directserial.
#              for directserial: realport (required), rxdelay (optional).
 
 
serial1=directserial realport:com1
serial2=disabled
serial3=directserial realport:com34
serial4=disabled

So this example setting means that com1 of my computer (Windows) is com1 in DOSBox and com34 of my computer is com 3 in DOSBox