h6Dtq5 wrote:

This does everything correctly, but the program appears blank.

It sure doesn't sound like it does everything correctly, then. 😉

I know the program has loaded correctly as after monitoring the serial port, I can see the communications are as they should be.

Are you sure about that? Communications are proceeding properly both ways? Many people use USB-to-serial adapters, and they don't always work very well.

Anyway, the first two things worth trying are the SVN Daum version of DOSBox, and booting DOS within DOSBox. (The 2GBFreeDOS image from Windows 9x DOSBox Guide (Not officially supported) should be fine for that purpose.) But keep in mind that using DOSBox for mission-critical business applications is generally a bad idea.

It displays the screen for me, but only if the 3AXLIB.PCL file can be found in the root of the D: drive, so you probably need to mount the D: drive correctly. That could be the least of the problems you'll run into, though.

h6Dtq5 wrote:
It sure doesn't sound like it does everything correctly, then. 😉

What I meant was, using a couple of virtual serial ports as connectors (and lots of messing about!), plus a USB to serial dongle, I could get this to run menu.exe and touch.exe AND use the touch screen connected via the USB dongle. The problem came with UNIMS.exe. I forgot to mention, it will give a 'touch screen error' if there is no COM2 port detected (or set as dummy in the environment). The correct COM port settings for this system are serial2=directserial realport:com1 startbps:9600 parity:n bytesize:7 stopbits:2 irq:3

I know the program has loaded correctly as after monitoring the serial port, I can see the communications are as they should be.
Are you sure about that? Communications are proceeding properly both ways? Many people use USB-to-serial adapters, and they don't always work very well.

see above - though with UNIMS.exe, I could see serial comms both ways successfully, but a blank screen appeared.

ripsaw8080 wrote:
It displays the screen for me, but only if the 3AXLIB.PCL file can be found in the root of the D: drive, so you probably need to mount the D: drive correctly. That could be the least of the problems you'll run into, though.

How did you determine this!? I have been mounting /customer as C:\. I have just mounted it as D:\ and it's loaded the screen (with errors, but I don't have the serial gear connected right now...). Thank you! I will let you know how I progress.

h6Dtq5 wrote:

How did you determine this!?

The DOSBox debugger lists file open requests in its log messages.

h6Dtq5 wrote:

I have been mounting /customer as C:\. I have just mounted it as D:\ and it's loaded the screen

The AUTOEXEC.BAT copies 3AXLIB.PCL from C: to D:\, and D: appears to be a ramdrive. You should probably run the app from the C: drive, but you can also mount D: to where the .PCL file is.

It's booting! 😎

These are the commands to get it past the errors, that emulates the touch screen - I've created a virtual port in a program called VSPE and then sent these commands [below] to pretend to be the touchscreen. Thank you for your help ripsaw8080!

h6Dtq5 wrote:

I've created a virtual port in a program called VSPE and then sent these commands [below] to pretend to be the touchscreen.

Interesting; I wonder if that might be useful for other people trying to get DOSBox to work with serial devices.