HSPICE/WIN95 Install Hints and FAQ


Introduction

The purpose of this document is to help the student with the installation of HSPICE/Win95 on their home PC.

System Requirements

Installation

See Prof. Reese (reese@erc.msstate.edu) in the ERC, Rm 231 to get the Hspice/Win95 distribution and installation instructions. The installation comes on 8 floppies, and installs three packages:

Installation Hiccups

Installation Instructions

On page 2 of the installation instructions, after you are finished with step #3 under "Installing the Utilities", you are FINISHED. The rest of the instructions deal with setting up a machine to do license serving; your machine will only be contacting the license server.

'license.dat' file

The hostname in the license.dat on the floppies is just 'cheers'. My default domain on my Win95 network setup is 'erc.msstate.edu', so this gets expanded correctly to 'cheers.erc.msstate.edu'. You may need to edit the license.dat to change it to 'cheers.erc.msstate.edu'. Edit the 'license.dat' file using 'WORDPAD' and save it as a plain text file. The HSPICE installation procedure on my home PC put the 'license.dat' file in the 'd:\META\96' directory. You must use 'WORDPAD', not 'NOTEPAD' to edit this file because it was written out as a UNIX-style text file; a Unix-style text file confuses 'Notepad' because of a different end-of-line character marking from DOS-style text files.

If you want to see what the default domain is for your Win95 TCP/IP Dial Up adapater, then open up the Control panel and double click on the 'networks' icon. In the network window, scroll through the list of network components and select the 'TCP/IP -> Dial-Up Adapter'. Click on properties; this should bring up the TCP/IP Properties window. Click on the 'DNS configuration' tab and see what the 'Domain' field is set to.

When you run HSPICE, your PPP link needs to be activated and your internet service provider needs to be able to find the 'erc.msstate.edu' domain. This basically means that if you can use Netscape to reach the the ERC home page (http://www.erc.msstate.edu) then you should be ok.

'autoexec.bat' file, 'config.sys'

In my autoexec.bat, the HSPICE install procedure added: 

SET LM_LICENSE_FILE=D:\META\96\LICENSE.DAT
I had set the installation directory as d:\META\96. The LM_LICENSE_FILE variable needs to be set in order for HSPICE to work.

Also, the installation procedure inserts into your 'config.sys' an option that sets the number of open files/buffers to '20'; you might want to set this to something higher than 50 because Win95 needs more files/buffers than 20.

'HSPUI' program

This is the program which you run as per the installation instructions in order to launch either HSPICE or MWAVES. Unfortunately, this program does not seem to understand how to display long file names; you might want to stick to short files until this is fixed.

Windows NT

You are are your own with installation under Windows NT; I have not personally exercised Hspice/Win under Win NT.

Problems

  1. Make sure you have the latest license file. This can be found in: 
    
   ~reese/EE4253/hspicewin/license.dat
    If you get a message saying that the license expired on March 31st, then you are using the old license file.

  2. Another problem has been: 
    >I get the following error related to the license server:
>FLEXlm  USER:allan  HOSTNAME:caroline.web-services-inc.com  HOSTID:10c00000  PID:-314623
>Using FLEXlm license file:
>C:\META\96\license.dat
>Cannot find SERVER hostname in network database (-14,7:11001) WinSock error code
>Unable to checkout metawaveswin

    This problem seems to be related to having DNS disabled on your local machine. My local Win95 TCP-IP dialup is setup as follows (these instructions assume that you have dialup networking only and that your machine is not connected permanently to some local network): 

    
Open up the Control Panel, and double click on the Network icon.
Scroll through the Network components and click on

  TCP/IP -> Dial-Up Adapter

then click on 'Properties'.  Click on the 'DNS Configuration' tab.
Make sure that you have DNS enabled.  In the 'Domain' slot, type
'erc.msstate.edu'.  Also Type in the number '192.208.145.139' in the
DNS Server Search Order and click 'Add' (this is the DNS server for
'erc.msstate.edu').  You could also add 'cs.msstate.edu' as a domain
with its number as '130.18.208.30' if you want to . Then you would
have TCP/IP dialup setup in the same manner as I do.  In the 'domain
suffix search order' field I have

  cs.msstate.edu
  erc.msstate.edu

In the DNS Server Search Order I have

  130.18.208.30
  192.208.145.139

    This may or may not solve your problem, but give it a try.

  3. If you have Win95 OSR2 (OSR2 is the latest Win95 release available to developers, some new machines have this version installed instead of the Win95 you buy in stores) you may get strange behaviour like the following: 
    
No window gets opened when I run HSPUI, instead I get a 
the window looks like this:

  +-----------------------------+
  | HSPUI                     |X|
  +-----------------------------+
  |   .                         |
  |  /!\    Permission denied   |
  | -----                       |
  |                             |
  |            OK               |
  +-----------------------------+

the "!" is in a yellow triangle. When I press the OK button the program
exits nothing else reported.  I can run hspice and mwaves outside of
HSPUI, just not thru the HSPUI interface.   Also, When I run MWAVES, a
greek character set is used for the signal names.
    Meta's official response to this is that Win95 OSR2 is 'unsupported'. I am certain that a patch will be released but I don't know when this will happen.