4 ms·

I 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 ther

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
Glad it worked out with Dosbox. Sometimes thats a no-go though because the software expect direct access to something or other.
phaedrus 10y ago
My 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.

eumoria 10y ago

I 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 ago

Glad it worked out with Dosbox. Sometimes thats a no-go though because the software expect direct access to something or other.

phaedrus 10y ago

My 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.