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by dwood_dev
379 days ago
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I would not be surprised if many of these systems rely on several ISA cards with proprietary protocols and drivers. I am only aware of a single modern-ish motherboard with ISA, the MS-98A9, and it only supports Intel 3rd Gen Core series CPUs. That said, if it was a large enough project, reverse engineering and re-implementing using modern components would likely be feasible. Turning each of these into network services handled by something more akin to a RaspberryPi could modernize the data sources while providing a sustainable and modular replacement strategy. The problem is that its not "sexy" enough to get a major government project, and it would not grease the correct palms that a multi-billion dollar next-gen complex proprietary replacement would. |
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For example, I've looked into emulating DOS, because I don't like the existing emulators. But I don't need to emulate floppy disk drives, or their drivers, or their hardware cards. I just write some software that can fake a disk drive and hook it to the I/O interrupts. That would be a simple project.
There's nothing sophisticated about DOS.
In hindsight, I'm baffled that it took many many years for people to develop clones of DOS.
For example, EDLIN. A trivial program. I'd write it in a high level language like D, get it to work, then hand-translate it to asm. The executable loader is absurdly simple. And so on.