Need recommendation for replacement of Procomm Plus terminal emulator

[etothejtheta]

I work for a company engaged the design and manufacturing of WIFI wireless access point products. For the various software loads needed on the main circuit board during the “programming” production phase, we use Procomm Plus and several ASPECT WAX scripts. I was told that our company brought in a contractor to write those scripts many years ago. Because the latest release of Procomm Plus (version 4.8) is a 10-year old product and was not targeted to run on Windows XP and beyond, because Symantec no longer supports the product and because we want get current with our tools, I’ve been tasked with locating a Procomm Plus replacement. While I’m not a scripting whiz (really a hardware guy), I’ll be handling any new script writing necessary to automate software loading with the new emulator (the more c-like or java-like scripting language, the better).

All of the production test/programming stations at our contract manufacturers currently run Windows XP, but we may upgrade to Windows 7 some time in the future. For terminal emulator replacement the top choice would be an emulator that is current (i.e., runs on the latest MS Windows OS releases and looks like it will be supported for technical assistance in the foreseeable future) and runs ASPECT script directly (though I’m guessing that ASPECT is proprietary and therefore direct porting of current scripts to another emulator is highly unlikely). The next most attractive candidate would be an emulator that is current and runs a scripting language similar to ASPECT (for minimal script modification). Since contract manufacturers could easily modify interpreted scripts at their will, I would prefer to have an emulator that uses compiled scripts for tight revision control.

I began investigating both SecureCRT and Indigo as possibilities mainly because I expect there will be plenty of “open forum” support for Jscript (preferred) and VBscript for a long time to come. However, from my reading I believe neither is compiled (I expected to find an emulator that would run something akin to JVM p-code, but I could be missing something). I’ve also looked into ZOC and DynaComm Asynchronous as candidates.

I’m open to all opinions and suggestions (whether from personal experience or information passed on from colleagues) that make good engineering/production/business sense. Thanks.

 

[HDS]

I have heard hyperterminal is not included with windows 7. So that would not be an option.

 

[drawoh]

etothejtheta,

If you have access to a Linux box, you can install minicom. It has scripting capability, although I have never used this.

JHG

 

[etothejtheta]

Thanks for the feedback. Using a Linux box is not possible. For the sake of uniformity management wants all of our test/programming station PCs to run the same OS. For now that means all will be running some version of MS Windows.

I need to clarify one thing: The production station PCs that are now being used for AP code loading with Procomm Plus are running Windows 2000 and are planned for upgrading to Windows XP as it is the OS that all the rest of our production station PCs run.