Digging up junk from the past - S5 v3.2

I'm trying to help someone extract a program from an very, very old S5-95U. Unfortunately this hasn't been touched in a long time and the old Siemens laptop which was used to program it is now dead.

We do have a copy of the application which was on the disk, but its also an antique. The interface is very clunky and doesn't resemble anything on the forums. If I enter into the menu there is a version option (F4)  which displays the versions of the files in the directory. The first indicates V3.2 - so that should may give you an idea of what I have.

My problem is getting this program to communicate with the Plc. I have virtualized windows 98 and have it communicating with a usb-rs232 adaptor. This much works and I can use a terminal emulator to communicate via com1 in windows 98.

However, when I open the S5 application and try to do pretty much anything I get an error "0306 undefined character from AS".

I have tried setting the speed from the vm host level, setting it to variously 9600,8,even / 9600,8,none / 2400,8,even amongst other variations. Nothing changes.

Inside the vm in the s5 package I can change the interface options using F5, but it only lets you select pre defined options of standard, others 1, others 2, etc. 

Does anyone remember this software and how it works? Is there any easy way to test and see if I am even able to communicate with the PLC? i.e a little test tool which would work from either win98 or the host level?

I am assuming that we do not have any rights to upgrade the software to a later version. I've found a lot of references to versions like S5 7.23, so this is obviously very outdated.

What has occured is that an old PLC died and they want to replace it with another second hand unit but can't communicate with it. This is a stop-gap until the whole machine is trashed in the near future, so redevelopment of the software on the latest plcs is not something anyone wants to contemplate. 

I don't program Plcs, I work in IT and I've been asked to help on this as they don't understand what the problem is... apart from being totally out of date.

Can anyone enlighten me/give me some pointers to tools or configurations which should work?

thanks in advance

-- Ian

Hi ianmurphy,

Maybe you contact Siemens Support and ask if they can provide you a trial license for the newest version ?

Or you ask for trial license for S5 for Windows provided by IBH ?

see: https://wiki.ibhsoftec.com/en/S5/S7_for_Windows:licensing

I hope this helps you a bit.

Kind regards,
BV

I just discovered that they actually have an updated licence sitting around so I was able to get S5 7.21 up and running. No one thought it was useful to mention that little fact to me as they wanted to get the old version working again as thats what they know! 

That should at least allow me to follow some of the problem solving posts and work out whats going on.

Thanks in any case