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TINY: VNC for DOS
- yellowapple 10y agoAnyone know if this works with FreeDOS?
- jaclaz 10y agoYes, it should work fine, it uses it's own (actually Novell) TCP/IP external kernel (or stack) : http://freedos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Networking_FreeDOS_complete http://freedos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Networking_Fre... You can use this: http://www.veder.com/nwdsk/ http://www.veder.com/nwdsk/ for tests. It includes Tiny.
- yellowapple 10y agoSweet. I've got a couple old DOS / early Windows machines that I'd love to resurrect, preferably with remote access. This + FreeDOS (which is my more typical go-to nowadays) looks to be close to perfect.
- StavrosK 10y agoI have no words to describe how great this is. I would even, but I find myself mysteriously unable to.
- Sophistifunk 10y agoThis is excellent. I have absolutely no use for it, but I wish it was OSS just so I could poke around and see how the host works. Either way, badass geekery.
- philsnow 10y ago> Source code and protocol documentation available- have confidence that TINY will continue to be viable for decades to come (or at least until all your CMOS batteries go dead)! "source available" not being the same thing as "OSS", but it's something
- nerdponx 10y agoAt first I assumed this was some kind of toy project, but as I read more I realized this was intended to be serious industrial software. Are pure-DOS machines still deployed in industrial uses? How common are they?
- dsl 10y agoIncredibly common. There are industrial control systems in all sorts of factories that run hardware for which only DOS (XP is common too) drivers exist. The companies that make most of these systems are out of business (mostly VARs that have a lifespan of 5-10 years), and nobody wants to retool a $3 million assembly line just to upgrade an OS. Edit: I can think of a dozen times I woke up in the middle of the night to drive 20 miles to fix a DOS machine to get a plant working again. This is amazing.
- rashkov 10y agoCould you relate how you go about fixing a DOS machine? I'm imagining that technical experts get paid a lot of money and get flown across the country to get critical assembly lines working again. Am I far off?
- dsl 10y agoThis was many years ago, so it was mostly reboots, reconfiguring settings, and things like that. But a good friend of mine has a very awesome job: he is employed by a very large manufacturing company that makes consumer products. They have dozens of plants all over north america, most of which run machines from companies that are out of business or the lines are no longer supported. When one of these antiquated machines break and the on-site service techs can't fix it or don't have spares they call him in. He will basically pull an old ISA card out of a machine, troubleshoot what broke, and replace board level components. He has a stash of old harddrives from eBay. Every version of old software you can imagine. In a few cases he has made new controller boards completely from scratch (including dumping firmware off of chips and flashing it on to new ones). When you are losing $200k an hour with a line down, "screw it I'll make a new one from scratch" isn't a silly response to the plant manager.
- teddyh 10y agoTitle, “TINY: VNC for DOS”, is not original and also incorrect. It is not using the VNC protocol. From the article: “[TINY] is comparable to programs like VNC, […]“.
- mack73 10y agoIf the source for this had been on Github that BAKCSPACE issue would have already been fixed ;)
- ww520 10y agoTSR, omg, that brings back memory.
- fsiefken 10y agoAs the page says the arrangement is using VirtualPC to emulate a PC and boot DOS, I noticed that VirtualBox has an option to host an RDP/VNC server in the settings. Wouldn't that be easier to configure?
- EvanAnderson 10y agoThe VirtualPC emulation is for testing. He's running this on bare metal machines in production.
- ahoka 10y agoDamn how I miss VirtualPC, the emulation was very good, so you could test low level stuff easily. It had a complete S3 Trio VGA in software, which worked very fast, not like it's "successor", HyperV, which is unusable for Linux graphic desktops.
- fsiefken 10y agoWould it be faster then Virtualbox? I'm emulating Ubuntu on Linux with Virtualbox but perhaps switching to VmWare, Parallels or maybe VirtualPC will result in better performance.
- fsiefken 10y agoAh, that's quite nice! Although I'm not sure what use case I'd like to use it for... Although... I do have an old i486 with SB AWE32 with some sound software that only runs good enough on metal (not on dosbox). Now I can run it headless... at least if I can get an UTP cable there.
- nerflad 10y agoFor those commenting about open-source: check out the zip archive[0] provided by the author. This project appears to be about a decade old; those files have modified dates of 2007/2008 (& perhaps the post title should reflect this). Since it's freeware/"source-available", I wonder if they would consider making it publicly available or passing it on to a new maintainer. Either way, very cool project. [0]: http://josh.com/tiny/download/TinyImage.zip http://josh.com/tiny/download/TinyImage.zip
- redsummer 10y agoBefore I clicked the link I imagined that this was some sort of VNC client which worked inside a terminal window. Does such a thing exist? (I mean something like this - https://github.com/mustafaakin/terminal-webcam/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/mustafaakin/terminal-webcam/blob/master/R... - except with a VNC image)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- besselheim 10y agoI remember setting this up about a decade ago on some old electroplating control system front end. It worked very well - unlike the rest of the software on there. Unfortunately the DOS program it was being used to remote was highly picky on the hardware being used, and would refuse to communicate with the PLC if the PC was too new. Due to the harsh environment of the plant, we'd go through two or three computers per year. So there was a lot of digging around for old hardware until we realised it would run reliably in DOSBox with a suitable CPU speed set. After that, our use case for TINY was no more, and we just used a VNC server for Windows. Saved a great deal of site to site travel and plant downtime while it was set up though.
- eumoria 10y agoI worked for a CNC router manufacturer and fought the same issues. ISA interface cards, extremely picky software that would just not run on certain chipsets/cpus and good luck finding documentation for 25 year old German software! At the time (~2009) there was still a company that produced motherboards with an ISA slot but many controllers would throw a fit... never really found the root of it.
- digi_owl 10y agoGlad it worked out with Dosbox. Sometimes thats a no-go though because the software expect direct access to something or other.
- phaedrus 10y agoMy first paid tech project (I was a high school student) was to get CNC control software working on newer PC hardware for a local metal fab shop. Through debugging the machine code, I determined the cause of the problem was that code that tests a hardware security dongle counts the number of (milli)seconds a tight loop takes to execute N times, so it can use that value to calibrate a communication protocol. On modern CPUs the time measured is often "0", leading to division by zero later on. If the binary is patched to fix that bug, the rest of the software runs fine on faster hardware.
- fao_ 10y agoThere's a spelling error in the software on the first screenshot. BAKCSPACE -> BACKSPACE
- jug 10y agoI read VNC but my mind interpreted it as "VLC". I was mighty confused there for a while, yet intrigued. I expected something like video streaming to DOS and being encoded into ASCII art on the fly.
- Arnavion 10y ago(Probably) won't run on DOS, but libcaca is a thing that VLC, mpv, etc support that does exactly that. Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h8g5NGUbDM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h8g5NGUbDM
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoFWIW whilst the FAQ claims VNC send passwords in plaintext. TightVnc docs claim: >"for password encryption, VNC uses a DES-encrypted challenge-response scheme, where the password is limited by 8 characters, and the effective DES key length is 56 bits" Which seems better than nothing at all. I wonder if there's an SSH for DOS to tunnel the UDP packets over to avoid adding an intermediary to the system (though I guess a rasberrypi would be sufficient).
- digi_owl 10y agoYeah i would thing it would be easier to set up some kind of VPN tunnel using a Pi or similar small board than try to get even more running under DOS without everything destructively interfering.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoPoor security is worse than no security. At least the latter doesn't give you any false assurances.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago>Poor security is worse than no security. // Not sure on this. Mostly the security on houses only has to put people off a little, it doesn't need to actually be effective at keeping people out, it only has to do enough to stop a random passer-by. So don't keep your wallet open on the front porch and you're probably a million-times less likely to be stolen from. That said I think if the author meant to echo this idiom he should have just said that. The way the FAQ put it sounded like "we really should have security here and I'm embarrassed about it enough to claim that it's what everyone else does to try and diffuse any suggestion it's a deficiency" rather than "we don't have security by choice". Perhaps I'm just being over-critical of the one thing I noticed that was not quite right.
- qz_ 10y ago> I can honestly say without any exaggeration that this screenshot shows what is, by far, the most amazing thing ever done with a computer in history. If you look carefully, you will see that this is a Windows XP SP2 machine on which I am using Sun's Java Runtime Environment 5.0 to run the TINY client bytecode and connect over the network through a Linksys WRTP54 router back to a virtual machine running on the same XP computer using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to boot up MS-DOS 6.22 to load the TINY host and execute an old EGA version of Tetris that was compiled with TASM 2.0. Through this arrangement I am able to achieve performance comparable to a 16Mhz IBM PC-AT using my 2.8Ghz Intel Core2. Wow. If you are not impressed, then you probably do not fully understand what is going on here. Why is this so impressive?
- zimpenfish 10y agoI suspect sarcasm. > performance comparable to a 16Mhz IBM PC-AT using my 2.8Ghz Intel Core2
- walrus01 10y agoIf you don't need MS-DOS bare metal hardware, it's worth noting that a Xen hypervisor HVM setup for an MS-DOS guest can provide a "VGA" + keyboard console over VNC. It's basically QEMU.
- relaxitup 10y agoBTW, the Josh who wrote this (Josh Levine), also wrote The Island Trading system (which ran on DOS I believe). Pretty brilliant guy; he was a subject of a very good book (IMO) called Dark Pools. Not sure if he's still doing this or not, but of your name is Josh xyz, he'll delegate xyz.josh.com to you (if not already reserved).
- andylynchnz 10y agoLooking at the Background, Josh wrote this to run Island. Bonus- you can read the original matching wbighe code at http://www.josh.com/notes/island-ecn-10th-birthday/ http://www.josh.com/notes/island-ecn-10th-birthday/. It's written in FoxPro. Make sure you read the bit about hard drives.
- scraft 10y agoAlthough not the same, it brings back memories of having webcams facing TVs/monitors, which allowed people from multiple locations to view the output of programs they had written running on actual harware (where the hardware itself allowed code to be executed over the network, but didn't offer a remote display option).