Quoting "Rodney W. Grimes" <[email protected]>:
Windows 98SE is poorly supported on a lot of SBC's, nonetheless, we
are trying to work around that.
We are using a passive PICMG 1.3 backplane in the gui which has PCI slots.
The RTC is an ISA only passive backplane, because the RTC requires a
lot of ISA cards.
Windows 98 or ME is the max version of Windows that Q-Soft works with
because everything that
came after is without dos underneath it. We've never gotten ME to
work by the way.
A Quad QSP-2 is a pick and place machine for surface mount
electronics. The machines cost about $15k-$30k dollars refurbished.
Microsoft's push for everyone to go to ten has not even affected
current models yet. Older machines that are ISA based like ours
cannot run Windows NT style operating system on the gui because of the
ISA shared memory card.
While the real time system may work with Freedos which is better
potentially than MS-DOS 6.22, the gui is trickier. Most of the SBCs
are 20-30 years old. Many are being reworked because the bios battery
is dead, etcetera. We are
trying two Pentium Pro Trenton boards, but we will have to use a buck
converter for the RTC which is ISA only. Original system uses a
Pentium and a 486 SBC. Again, even Pentium Pro boards are old these
days where getting anything older in working condition is going to be
tricky.
You have to find a supported SBC that works well with Windows 98SE.
You have to confirm that the bios battery is good, that you have a
good cpu, and that you have good memory. You have to round up any
important 3rd party drivers. Hopefully, we can use the Intel 430TX
chipset and a Pentium no problem, maybe a Pentium Pro, in the gui.
Ideally, a Pentium or Pentium Pro board that Windows 98SE works with
out of the box.
The reason for looking into replacement of Windows 98SE is that a lot
of SBC manufacturers failed to support it well due to the release of
Windows XP which we cannot use. Another problem, if I'm not mistaken,
is that Windows 98SE has a memory leak issue and issues supporting
modern amounts of memory. Think close to a gigabyte on memory.
Instead of hard drives we have decided to use 1 gigabyte CF cards
plugged into the EIDE. The thought is that CF cards take power
failure better than hard drives and they are easier to get than hard
drives of this era. With two CF cards you can have a backup if the
running CF fails. Pop the backup in and you're pretty much back up.
A power failure by the way will ruin a run of circuit boards. The
machine itself draws enough power that PPM doesn't recommend a UPS for
it, even for the SBC's alone. The Quad QSP-2 is originally a Tyco
made machine.
Any chance of a kernel patch from a 3rd party for Windows 98SE?
Preferably a free one? There was a project to replace Windows 95 but
they switched and renamed the OS to ReactOS going after Windows XP and
newer. Sadly, they seem to be stalled at the moment. The 0.4.11
release is decent, but they have a long ways to go.
Any recommendations on getting the two heads up whether they be
hardware recommendations or open source patches for the Windows 98SE
OS are most welcome. My brother and I need to learn how to calibrate
the camera system and actually place a surface mount part on a small
board. After that, we need to create a full program for placing
multiple components. A prototype will come next once we have a
program ready. After a prototype is satisfactory, we reproduce it in
a small run. As we get the hang of programming the QSP-2 and running
it, there will be boards
for me to develop firmware for. Finally, I will be programming again ;-)
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