[NTLK] OMP serial connection problems

[Matej Horvat]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2015 19:55:00 +0100, William Maloney <firedoorus at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> There seems to be no connection at all. I have done this before on an XP
> machine and it worked fine a few years ago.

Some things to try:

1. Make sure you really did choose your physical COM1 as the VM's COM1 in  
the VM settings. By default, Virtual PC doesn't give the VM any serial  
ports, and USB adapters may get different COM numbers depending on which  
USB port they're connected to.

2. In NCK's preferences, try disabling all serial ports except COM1.

3. NCK doesn't always notice that the Newton is trying to connect. A trick  
is to open NCK at the same time as you tap Connect on the Newton. This  
works most of the time.

> I tried connecting this machine to a Macintosh Classic II running NCK and
> it also failed.
>
> Beginning to feel it could be a hardware failure. I believe I recall  
> seeing
> capacitor flux near serial port when trying to put alcohol on the power
> switch to keep the machine from powering off all the time.

Then it might indeed be a hardware problem. One thing you can try is to  
use Windows 98's HyperTerminal program to see whether the Newton can send  
anything at all.