Now on to the topic at hand... for some reason I could not get pole.exe to output to my CrystalFontz 634 20x4 LCD I know I had all the settings correct but it would always just blank the display and I had to reboot the display to get it to respond again, which is weird because I could easily write to the LCD from the command line.
So my solution was to find some info about pole.dat and thankfully dale included a code snippet on how to read the file so I took that made some heavy modifications and now have a program to output the POLE info to my CrystalFontz LCD... its quite simple but gets the job done.
Once you open the program your display will look like this...
The info on the "screen" area will be displayed on the LCD I also included the extra info for someone who either wanted to modify the screen layout using qbasic or wanted to be able to see it behind their POS window
Thought I would add that this program would probably work for almost any LCD so if you cant get your 20x4 LCD working with pole.exe try this one.
You can download it at http://www.dredx.com/pos/cfpole.zip it contains the program, the config file and the source code written in qbasic
Just extract that file to your POS dir that contains the pole.dat file (mine is in c:\pos\)
The settings in cfpole.cfg are setup for a display on COM1 but if you need it to be com2 etc just open the file in a text editor and change com1 to com2
then run cfpole.exe and WALA pole info on your display