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Ask Slashdot: Supporting "Antique" Software?

Posted by timothy on from the why-in-my-day dept.

First time accepted submitter wolfguru writes "As the IT Manager for a large printing firm, I often have to provide hardware to support older software which is used to configure and maintain existing systems, some of which are nearly 20 years old. Much of the software uses RS-232 serial communications to connect to the PLC devices and is often 16 bit versions. Newer systems from the PLC manufacturers supports some of the equipment, but many of the older PLC consoles are essentially unreachable without the serial communications. For any of you faced with similar challenges in keeping a manufacturing environment maintenance department working; what do you use to support them and where do you find equipment that will run the older systems that are sometimes the only means of supporting these types of devices?"

1 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Please by Jappus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, newer SVN + patches builds for DosBox go much further than that:
    http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN_Builds

    The best one, if you ask me, is the SVN Daum build (alas, their website is down at the moment). To quote its set of difference to Vanilla DosBox:

    Description: The Windows build incorporates Direct3D with pixelshaders, OpenglHQ, Innovation, Glide, zip/7z mount, Beep, NE2000 Ethernet, Graphis user interface (menu), Save/Load states, Vertical sync, CPU flags optimization, Various DOS commands (PROMPT, VOL, LABEL, MOUSE, etc) and CONFIG.SYS commands (DEVICE, BUFFERS, FILES, etc), Continuous turbo key, Core-switch key, Show details (from menu bar), Nice DOSBox icon, Font patch (cp437), MAKEIMG command, INTRO, Ctrl-break patch, DBCS support patch, Automatic mount, Printer output, MT-32 emulation (MUNT), MP3CUE, Overscan border, Stereo-swap, SDL_Resize, MemSize128, Internal 3dfx voodoo chip emulation, etc.

    I emphasized the important bit. What these two little words mean is the this DosBox build can not only emulate a DOS printer to dump stuff into various output formats (PNG, PDF, etc.), but it can also pass along the output to a Windows printer driver (which allows you to print to any USB printer) as well as use a real parallel port on your computer to let the DOS talk directly to the printer.

    I know at least one company that is using this DosBox build to support printing out of a 20+ year old billing software.