Help required with qbasic code for communications program

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lw3eov
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Joined: Wed Jun 03, 2020 9:38 pm

Help required with qbasic code for communications program

Post by lw3eov »

Dear users,

I have a code wrote in qbasic by a guy who is in his 80's now and unable to help me because of health issues. I need to do the following with it but I don't have enough knowledge so I require some help: tide it up and add comments to help inexperienced coders like me with not much practice, check if there are things that can be done in a better way and improve them. After that it will be interesting if an option can be added in the menu for the operator to input the speed of the PC in Mhz so the loops in the program can be adjusted accordingly. This last feature is important as if the program is used in a similar PC running at a different microprocessor's clock speed it becomes unusable because the timing is quite strict. What the program basically does is it sends slow speed data using the parallel port to a home-made interface that generates four DTMF tones which are then sent to a vhf radio transceiver which transmits them over the air to a remote equipment that replies and the inverse process is done to get the information on the computer screen. It is a very rudimentary communication system for alarms (burglar, fire, etc).
Probably another improvement can be using the serial port instead of the parallel port. Even better it will be if this Qbasic code can be used in Visual Basic to make it work for the nowadays computers. Can this be done?
The program is currently being used in a 386 PC at 33Mhz, I have a few other computers that run at for example 166Mhz, 400Mhz. Making it work for those can be part of the solution. So far I tried some software to slow down the execution of the program but not all parts of the program are slowed down evenly.

I prefer not to post the code but to send it in private to anyone who can help me. Or at least to post just some parts of it to be analyzed little by little.

Many thanks
Regards

Marcelo
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