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New Hardware for Old Software

jejumpjejump
in Hardware

Hello All,

I just became a registered WinWorld user minutes ago and have spent some time browsing threads and looking at old software. I wanted to share the name of one company I came across recently that makes Single Board Computers that use relatively little power and produce very little heat. These are x86 machines capable of running most (or all) of the software available here on this site and offering the legacy parallel and serial ports found on older machines PLUS some added GPIO ports, LAN, USB, IDE-44, etc..

Their name is ICOP (Intelligent Control On Processor) and their boards use the Vortex86 line of processors. I got mine from an eBay listing. I currently am running MS-DOS 6.22 with QUICK BASIC 7 and VISUAL BASIC for DOS installed and running without issue on an SD card IDE adapter. I tried installing WFW 3.11 but it hangs at bootup. The company's technical support (which is fantastic, IMO) said the particular board I purchased isn't capable of running the Workgroups edition of 3.11, but the NON Worgroups edition should work fine. We'll see...

Anyway, besides sharing that little tidbit of info, I also hope to learn about other hardware makers in the world making similar products from fellow WinWorld users. If anyone else could recommend a company to me, I'd love to know about it. I've always enjoyed programming in the DOS and early Windows environment and never really embraced PC programming much later than about VB6. I like building my own gadgets using computers and writing code for my projects. I got pretty excited about maybe using the Raspberry Pi computer when that first came out a few years ago, but I never really embraced LINUX programming that much either and have never really done much with my Pi. The ICOP board is bigger than the Pi by maybe about 2/3 and it's also a good bit more expensive. It should serve me well for most things I'll create with it, but if there are cheaper alternatives out there, I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading. Excited to be a part of the WinWorld community!

=D

John

Comments

  • jlanghamjlangham

    I'm trying to use modern hardware to run my wafer fabrication machines that have Win311 and Win98. I looked at these boards on their website. I may look into these.

    So far, I've tried DOSBOX and installed Win311 on Raspberry Pi with some limited success. The UDOO x86 board is my next project to load Win98 on to see if I can make it run my machines.

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