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thingstodo · 02-12-2012, 10:20 PM

Some more news, a bit of progress

PCMCIA (or PC card) drivers, loading DOS high, Upper memory blocks, managing interrupts that are not *REALLY* documented any more, TCP drivers for old network cards, sharing drives without Novell ... The 'Good Old Days' were not really that good. Once you got things working, you breathed a sigh of relief. GETTING things working was a lot of time and effort. With perhaps a few superstitious things thrown in because they 'always seemed to work'.

I found a copy of DOS 7 from this site Download MS DOS Boot Disk 7.10 by Wengier | VETUSWARE.COM - the biggest free abandonware collection in the universe
. It boots to a prompt and lets me run the 6200 series software (PLC Programming software) from a USB stick. It works well with the serial port on my older laptop. It won't map the hard drive or CD, but that's OK. At least for now. Now that I have something working reliably (if you can call booting from a 1.4 MB floppy reliable), I want to get on with some programming.

The 6200 series software runs in a DOS window on XP (the offline version only) so I can type the program in, create the documentation, etc in a comfortable chair, using a modern computer. I then transfer the files to a USB stick and use the older computer, downstairs in the corner where I have the PLC mounted to a piece of plywood, to load the program in and watch the program run, perform any required corrections and debugging, then return the USB stick to the modern computer upstairs and continue. This would be the edit/compile/run cycle that you would normally use with a modern programming language like C++ using the integrated development environment or IDE.

02-12-2012, 10:20 PM	#68 (permalink)
thingstodo Master EcoModder Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: Saskatoon, canada Posts: 1,488 Ford Prefect - '18 Ford F150 XLT XTR Tess - '22 Tesla Y LR Thanks: 749 Thanked 565 Times in 447 Posts	DOS was not such a great thing. It took a lot of time Some more news, a bit of progress PCMCIA (or PC card) drivers, loading DOS high, Upper memory blocks, managing interrupts that are not REALLY documented any more, TCP drivers for old network cards, sharing drives without Novell ... The 'Good Old Days' were not really that good. Once you got things working, you breathed a sigh of relief. GETTING things working was a lot of time and effort. With perhaps a few superstitious things thrown in because they 'always seemed to work'. I found a copy of DOS 7 from this site Download MS DOS Boot Disk 7.10 by Wengier \| VETUSWARE.COM - the biggest free abandonware collection in the universe . It boots to a prompt and lets me run the 6200 series software (PLC Programming software) from a USB stick. It works well with the serial port on my older laptop. It won't map the hard drive or CD, but that's OK. At least for now. Now that I have something working reliably (if you can call booting from a 1.4 MB floppy reliable), I want to get on with some programming. The 6200 series software runs in a DOS window on XP (the offline version only) so I can type the program in, create the documentation, etc in a comfortable chair, using a modern computer. I then transfer the files to a USB stick and use the older computer, downstairs in the corner where I have the PLC mounted to a piece of plywood, to load the program in and watch the program run, perform any required corrections and debugging, then return the USB stick to the modern computer upstairs and continue. This would be the edit/compile/run cycle that you would normally use with a modern programming language like C++ using the integrated development environment or IDE.