> 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 rgri...@freebsd.org _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
