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Introduction
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More than 40 characters to a modem
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Many modems out there only allow you to send modem commands up to 40 characters in length. This is fine for most situations. However, there are times when you might want to dial a phone number using a calling card. If this is the case, it is more than likely that you will bump into this limit. To make dialing by calling card work, you usually put a lot of commas in the dial string to make the modem wait for a specific amount of time. Each comma makes the modem wait two seconds. For example, to dial a phone number, then wait 10 seconds, and finally dial a calling card number, you might do this:
ATDT 0 206 555 1212,,,,,206 555 1212 4455
You can immediately reduce the number of characters used by getting rid of spaces. Spaces are ignored by the modem, so you could just as easily have done this:
ATDT02065551212,,,,,20655512124455
Then, you might consider changing the way the comma works. Make it wait for a longer period of time. This is done by changing the value in S register 8 to something other than 2. Example:
ATS8=5&W
Note: The &W at the end saves the setting to the modem, so even if you turn the modem off and back on, it will be remembered. If you change the setting for S8 to 5, you will only need two commas and you could send the following string to your modem:
ATDT02065551212,,20655512124455
See the difference in size? Here they are side-by-side:
ATDT 0 206 555 1212,,,,,206 555 1212 4455
ATDT02065551212,,20655512124455
MicroPhone w/o MPToolBox?
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If you are tight on disk space and you do not use any special graphical features of MicroPhone, i.e., you just want emulation and file transfers, plus some scripting, then you can safely remove MPToolBox. However, MicroPhone will always ask you about its non-existence every time you start up the program. To prevent this from happening, take the existing MPToolBox and open it with ResEdit. Remove all of the resources except for the vers resources. That will save you over 200K and MicroPhone will work without asking you about MPToolBox.
Using a New Modem with MicroPhone
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MicroPhone has modem drivers for many popular modems. However, there are new modems coming out every day. If you have a new modem that MicroPhone does not support, you may be able to use an existing modem driver. There are three major AT command sets out there and your modem probably uses one of them. You'll be able to tell which command set your modem uses by looking in the modem manual and checking how handshaking, error correction, and data compression are configured.
For many modems the commands are as follows:
handshaking \Q
error correction \N
data compression %C
Write down the commands that your modem uses. Then, open the "Configure" script in each of the modem drivers in MicroPhone until you find one that sends out the commands that your modem uses.
