www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

I just posted the following on the Velleman kit service forum...
I've just built and successfully used this USB interface kit. It works perfectly...
BUT it completely trashes the most important piece of software on my computer - VirtualAcorn's VirtualRPC-SE (a RISC OS emulator). VirtualRPC runs as a DirectX application just the same as many games so it runs its emulator and writes its screen output either to a window or full screen thus providing a full-featured RISC OS operating system running on top of Windows XP. It works perfectly and does not interfere with any other software and no other software interferes with it - except the K8055 DLL!
This is not just a minor issue. As soon as the K8055 DLL runs RISC OS crashes and cannot be restarted until Windows has been rebooted.
This makes it absolutely impossible for me to implement my project of monitoring the house temperatures and power consumption continuously, because I use VirtualRPC all day, every day 24/7. The whole purpose of the K8055 was to avoid me having to take manual readings and to take readings throughout the day and night.

To this forum...
I would be grateful for any ideas as to how such a seemingly simple device can totally trash VRPC and require a reboot. In preparation for writing some control software for this kit I downloaded Visual Basic Express which downloaded 100MB including .net framework 3.5, SQL server, and a heap of other stuff. At first I thought that had trashed VRPC so I uninstalled the whole lot (took ages!). I couldn't believe the culprit was this silly little K8055 DLL.

During or after the running of the K8055 DLL when I try to run VRPC it draws the frame of the window and thats it. If I try to go into full screen the screen is all black and I can't get back to Windows with Alt-Break.

Mike

That's a weird one. This .dll must be doing something quite nasty to completely kill the VRPC. There isn't going to be a great deal we can do - although it might be possible to track down what it's
doing - in order to feed the information back to Velleman so that they can look at it.

So - assuming VRPC is running in a window and you load the .dll - what happens to VRPC?

Just so this topic isn't just left dangling I will just say that I had no reply at all from Velleman and I took the device back to Maplin for a refund so I can't answer the last question.