>> I bet Freedos could be in place of MS-DOS if you only use HIMEMX. Q-Soft for the Tyco QSP-2 installs to MS-DOS 5.22 and is a real time system on the DOS side. It installs via actual floppy disk. If you are running the GUI computer (Windows 9x) on say QEMU and emulating the floppy... but that would involve reengineering the system. The real time system for example uses ISA heavily. There are PCI variants of many of the cards where four ISA cards are replaced by say one PCI card, but that would involve reengineering of a 20 year old system.
> Which reasons do you have to use MS DOS instead of FreeDOS? > Reasons to use FreeDOS could be to have more free RAM and > the FAT32 support. You can use most FreeDOS drivers together > with MS DOS if you like, too. Q-Soft is available as an executable designed to run on MS-DOS 6.22. May work just fine in Freedos, may not, have not been able to try it because of floppy disk issue. > Floppy drives do not break easily and most have the same > geometry and interface, so finding one might be easier > than finding any supply of still working disks for them. Understood, but I'm pretty sure my Teac USB floppy drive has failed. I fished a disk cover that came off out of it and there could be a smaller part loose still inside the drive. The drive simply does not work now. I doubt that disks that are generally new are suddently all bad let alone that sector 0 is magically unwritable on all of my disks. > Regarding your security concerns, you are right that flash > chips make it hard to securely wipe data due to built-in > distribution of writes to load-balance. You could avoid > the problem by having only encrypted files on the portable > drive. Then destroying the key effectively zaps the data. > DOS versions of infozip at least support some encryption > and you can use other tools such as 7zip for DOS as well. If I run Linux and KVM I can emulate the floppy on a flash drive. Sadly, that won't work well on an old Pentium 4 where it would work much better on say a modern i7. Going from PICMG 1.0 though to PICMG 1.3, forget about the ISA shared memory card. The real time system which is ISA only would have to be completely reconsidered. A Tyco QSP-2 is a 20 year old system now that depends on MS-DOS and Windows 98SE or Windows ME. You don't just replace the two computer heads with one without a lot of reengineering. PPM owns the system now and has reengineered it around Windows 7 and possibly Windows 10... different system with different bugs. Considering that this is a $30k plus piece of equipment for placing small electronic components on a circuit board, surface mount packaging, fixing the old system makes more sense than switching to the newer variant. You can't just upgrade the heads either as computers have changed so much in twenty years. Most people don't even know what a floppy drive is anymore. For the color computer 3 there is a floppy replacement that uses a 2GB flash memory card and stores 360k images on it. That device could be adapted I bet to work with an SBC that has a floppy controller. No emulation needed, direct hardware replacement. As far as DOS is concerned, that is a floppy disk in a floppy drive. In reality, it's flash memory holding multiple disks. > Eric > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user Oh, the EVOC board lacks a floppy header. It has 3 USB 2.0 channels and of course it expects you to plug in a USB floppy drive if you need one. Sadly, I don't think Freedos 1.3 RC2 can use a USB floppy drive even on an EVOC supported through some weird AMI BIOS. I tried an ISA multi I/O plus floppy card, but without BIOS support for it I don't think that will work either. I currently have the disable jumper set for the floppy controller. If only I could get the source code for the AMI BIOS on this thing and add support for the ISA floppy controller... _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
