Hi Bruce,

On a lark, I downloaded their demo and extracted just the ocx422.ocx to my system directory and registered the control. I loaded VFP7, created a new form, added the control, resized it so I could see all the buttons, and ran the form. I started a second instance of VFP and ran a serial port test form of mine and looped 2 comm ports (1 and 2) together. Your VTR control on COM1, my test form on COM2. By pushing the OCX422 control buttons, I consistently get all forms of garbage into my test form. I played with various settings of my form but never got anything decipherable to me. Not knowing the control protocol used by your VTR, what I was seeing may very well have been good data at one point.

This control appears to be a wrapper for the MSCOMM32.OCX with some functions of that control hidden, and a ton of functionality added to service a VTR. I don't have a clue as to what 90% of what it does, but it does do something. I tried the same test using VB6 and the results appeared the same.

Bottom line, the control appears to operate when hosted in a form here. Select the port of choice at the bottom of the control, open the port, and start pushing buttons. :-) If you don't see what I am talking about, resize the thing in the form designer - it is there.

>Just purchased a program for control of Sony protocol VTRs http://www.rs422.com.ar which gives me an rs422.ocx file that is registered in the Windows/system folder. I can drop an OLE control on a form and then point it to this file thus getting access to the PEMs. However, do I need to somehow define a path for VFP to see this? I can't enter anything in the command window that works nor get the form to function. I'm basically asking how to get started with something external as I've only used the VFP supplied tools to this point. Is there some documentation on this subject?
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>Thanks as always,
>Bruce