I know the svmi VERY well and I'd be willing to help. Best bet is to have a usb to serial adapter for your laptop so you can use a 9 pin to 9 pin straight through cable and connect to the svmi. The baud rate depends on the version of svmi so you might want to start with 9600 and work your way up. On some of the older svmi versions even after you connect occasionaly you can't refresh the terminal and you have to reboot the svmi in order for it to show. Usually you can just hit CTRL-L to refresh. The termnial emulation is Ansi. If wrap lines the excede terminal length is checked uncheck it. Once you have managed to connect PM me your info and I can give you some further info if you'd like.
