OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware

OS/2 on Virtualbox with 8 COM ports

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Rota:
Hello,
I ask them and this is the answer:

"
That is some very old equipment and OS that you are running.

Unfortunately the NEO card does not support OS/2.
This is our only serial card and even all of our network products do not support OS/2."

 :'(

Regards

Neil Waldhauer:
I got more or less the same answer from Digi 20 years ago. I got the same from Quatech.

There are a lot of Gasonics PEP out on the used market. An internet search reveals dozens available. It's hard to imagine the use for them. I can imagine that the software could be modified to run on one OS/2 computer without the network. I would have set it up, but PEP was end-of-life by the time I worked on it.

I did make a replacement computer for PEP based on an Industrial computer. That computer cost quite a bit more than the current value of a PEP on the used market. Practically, it might make sense to buy two PEP and use one for parts.

The OS needs to be real-time, which OS/2 is not. But Windows and maybe Linux are worse at real-time than OS/2. The replacement for PEP ran on a real time OS.

Making OS/2 virtual probably makes things worse. Is there such a thing as a real-time Virtual PC? Anyway, that's why there are three computers. The right and left just do precise real-time control of the robots and oven.

An OS/2 machine with a Pentium 3 would easily control 99 serial ports in not quite real time. That's why so many robotics setups were using OS/2. Windows and Linux in the same situation would generally not control even one serial port. That's why there are so many network-based serial solutions - to off-load the real-time to a dedicated processor/operating system.

mon2:

--- Quote from: Daniele on February 11, 2021, 03:31:43 pm ---Hello,
I have some old industrial tools that has Pc with OS/2 warp 4 with a multiple serials ISA board interfaced with a 8 rs232 hub. I need to replace it with a windows7 pc host with virtualbox and OS/2 guest. The VHD clone of the original HD works, but I cannot manage more than 4 COM ports (limit of emulation softwares).
I see boards PCIe or serial hub with USB connection, but none has Os/2 drivers.
Does someone know a solution of this ?
Thanks

--- End quote ---

Hi. First time here and first post. I am the CTO of a hardware design company (Est 1985) in Canada and have strong design experience with PCI, PCIe and USB products. Our company did the first design of the PCIe add-on I/O adapters for the PC industry. We have 1M+ adapters in the field and hundreds of PCIe adapters (some are listed on Amazon). Digi is no longer active on these I/O designs. Startech imports offshore goods under private label.

What are the specifics of your requirements? Will you be running eCOMSTATION? We are quite new to eCOMSTATION and have been recently approached by a customer to support our PCIe parallel adapters for dongle use on the same. However, have some experience with OS/2 and met with Mr. Sam Detweiller who is the author of SIO.SYS that we have seen referenced here.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-detweiler-a433702
* hope he is ok with this reminder :)

Sam came to our company many moons ago when he resided in Michigan (IBM), just prior to us becoming a supplier to PictureTel who used our ISA adapter (back then) on OS/2. It was the industry's first jumperless I/O adapter.

If there is a need and demand, we can review on how we can support this requirement. We are very comfortable with PCIe, uPCI bus adapter designs.

Respectively, we have numerous designs today with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 ports on PCI and PCIe bus with RS232 interface. Perhaps one of our existing models can work for your needs?

Welcome feedback and continued dialog.

Thanks.
Kumar Bhatia
Axxon (OEM) Inc.
kumar [at] softio.com
www.axxon.io (new website - we are still migrating our product offerings onto the new format)
www.softio.com (old website)

Neil Waldhauer:
I'm an OS/2 consultant. I have some picture of the few remaining OS/2 users. There are quite a few industrial automation programs from the 1990s that relied on serial ports communicating to programmed logic arrays to do their machine control. Many of these machines only lack a working OS/2 computer with serial port support to work again.

There is also the dongle situation, which traps users on old hardware. I worked at a dongle manufacturer, and I know that OS/2 was always supported, but never was a large part of the market.

OS/2 developers have the source code for the IBM serial port driver as a part of the device driver developer kit. This support is limited to hardware available in the 1990s, but if hardware documentation were available for new serial cards, someone could extend support of the existing driver.

I don't want to exaggerate the size of the opportunity. Most of my industrial customers have migrated to newer platforms. I'm hoping someone here has a clearer idea of what would be needed to extend the device driver support.

Martin Iturbide:
Hi Kumar, welcome to the forum.

I'm Martin Iturbide, the moderator of this forum and OS2World newsmaster.

eComStation seems to be no longer maintained, we haven't hear any news from that product and company since 2014. Today the OS/2 community is using a different OS/2 OEM OS called ArcaOS (Based in OS/2 Warp 4.52). ArcaOS is being actively developed and it is being sold to individuals and corporations that has the need to use OS/2 on modern machines. I would suggest you to contact Lewis Rosenthal from Arca Noae (company that created ArcaOS) and talk with him about the industrial necessity for OS/2 and serial multi port pci cards for industrial use under this OS.

My opinions are from a community point of view, and on this case, it is not commercial. I would prefer an open source driver for the modern PCI-e Multiport serial adapter and it possible can be spin off from some other open source drivers. I would love to have some reports that the Axxon multiport modern PCI-e serial adapter works on ArcaOS, but I think it will depend on the demand that you may get with this platform. Anyway, if you need any information about the platform we can help you here, as long as our time and knowledge are able to.

Regards

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