[PLUG] ISA shared memory card by Tyco...

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> Floppy disks are an antiquated technology, but that is how the old Tyco made system was set up.
> 
> Mass storage is nice to have because networking such an old system is dangerous and besides this there are many things
> like drivers for the NVIDIA 6200 that don't fit on a floppy disk.  Sure you can burn a driver CD, but reusable usb memory
> flash drives are more convenient.

If you just need to get data on and off usb flash drives that is a fairly easy set of fixes for win98se, readily avaliable and well tested (by me personally as I do use that to help support win98.)

> Even getting good floppy disks these days isn't exactly easy.  To have to install everything via floppy would be a pain.

What are you installing?  Windows 98 is not going to install from anything much other than a CD or cd image.  I might be able to make a tftp ramdisk cdrom iso boot work using syslinux, not tried that.

> The Trenton based SBC being used by the way has Intel nics on board that are hard to support in Windows ME, so there is a driver block to networking the SBC.

I would avoid ME at all cost, back to 98 or forward to 2k.

> 
> Ideally, you take Windows and MS Dos completely away and implement Q-Soft on a stripped down Linux and the real time system on Freedos.  Open systems are supported and more current, but there is the fact that the ISA shared memory card exists in small quantities and is proprietary.  There may only be 1k to 10k of these shared memory cards.  Chances are, the drivers require MS-DOS 7.  Windows ME was tried because of it's improved mass storage support in hopes that Q-Soft would run better too.  No telling if the shared memory card will work with Windows ME though.  Sadly, getting drivers for ME is a nightmare.  Google exacerbates the problem by sending you to Microsoft where Microsoft gives you a 404 for anything older than Windows 7.  Pretty soon, the pages for 7 will disappear too.

Your hitting one of the reasons I say avoid ME at all cost.

Shared memory should be a 0 issue, that is how almost all graphics cards work, and I do not believe windows has killed support for a very basic dumb svga console, even in windows 10.  That -requires- the shared memory region to just work.  You are facinga possible ISA bus issue, but even that should be supported due to legacy devices still in most hardware.

> The stupidity of Microsoft thinking everyone can just upgrade ignores that not all computer based systems that use Windows are cheap.

I do not think there is a MS-DOS 7, unless you mean what is in Windows and that 7 and 8 are reported by various API calls.
And if the app runs in MS-DOS why futz with windows at all?

Also q-soft, can you be more specific?  Security card stuff, I certainly hope not that!

-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org