John Robertson wrote:
KIP says to contact my local dealer, and the dealer isn't interested
in supporting this ancient device (1999 being ancient).

Contact the next dealer over. Have an address in their territory handy
in case they ask.

The basic machine runs fine - copies from the scanner to the printer
clearly, and the computer does recognize the scanner but the earlier
(DOS TSR)version of software that I have appears to be broken in that
the files are zero length when scanned.

You might be doing this already, but: are you running the DOS TSR
software under real DOS on a vintage PC with a reasonably-sized hard
drive? Some DOS applications don't deal too well with 2+ GHz CPUs and
multi-gigabyte hard drives, even if late-model DOS itself will run.

Running on a 15-year-old PC is probably not ideal if you want to do 20
scans a day with this machine, but it will at least tell you if it can
successfully talk to *a* PC.

Do you know if the PCI interface card wants 5 V, 3.3 V, or both? If
the motherboard is late enough to have an ATX power connector, this
probably doesn't apply, but: at the transition from 5 V to 3.3 V PCI
cards, some motherboards had the PCI slot keying to accept either.
Since AT power supplies didn't usually have 3.3 V outputs, the 3.3 V
lines from the PCI slots went to a separate power connector. It
looked like a 6-pin AT power connector but didn't live next to the
standard two 6-pin power connectors in line.

I had an Intel Socket 5 motherboard from early 1995 that was like this.
I kept it long enough that I tried to use a 3.3 V PCI card with it and
nothing happened; the card physically fit in the PCI slot but none of
the software could see it. A LM317 provided enough juice to the 3.3 V
input on the motherboard to make the card work.

If you don't have any documentation, sometimes you can get a hint on
what the command-line switches are by looking at the program with a hex
editor. Sometimes there are switches the program can parse that aren't
in the documentation or the /? output. This doesn't work if the program
was packed with one of the executable compressor tools; some unpackers
are available if you Google.

Matt Roberds