After much tinkering and moral support from onecave I got the software running on a G4 tower which has USB ports instead of the old-fashioned serial ports. (I'm not sure which the G3 Powerbook has.)I haven't had much chance to play with the software, but it's working. I love having the 780 display running in the background on my monitor. The little global monitor (smaller than the main window) is great!
For the USb setup I got a keyspan PDA adaptor which goes from USB to a DB9. It's $40 vs. $80 for the USB to round eight-pin Mac serial plug.
With the adapter I got one DB9->DB9 cord did the trick.
The big hangup for me was with the driver software for the USB->PDA adapter. Turns out there was a conflict with an extension which also sought to emulate a serial port. Once I turned the extension off (which wasn't beng used for anything) it worked fine.
With that battle won I'm working on connecting a 780 I have at work to an older Mac (it sits on my desk and stays tuned to firedispatch.com all the time) through the modem or printer ports. So far I don't seem to have the right cable setup, even though I have one that goes from the round serial port to a DB9. I'm going cable shopping tomorrow. Also need to reread the software Web page to see what it says about cables for that setup.
If I get that working I'm going to try to run two copies of the program on that Mac and connect two 780s to the machine so I'l have dual diaplay windows on the computer screen. I think I can do this by connecting one 780 to the modem port and the other 780 to the printer port. But one thing at a time...
