Handbags   (The sad, the bad and the ugly. Non-productive stuff here.)

Not sure if emulator would work for this stuff. It is environment sensing and control stuff, and makes use of the ability which DOS had to directly address ports to input and output binary data.

Most of it, I don't have the peripheral hardware to make use of.

First lot: Used a general purpose input and output card. I have kept this card. It was very expensive when purchased: it cost MORE than did the rest of the PC.

Alas, it has ISA interconnect, and I no-longer have any devices sporting ISA sockets.

Had intended to modify it to use on PCI, but it proved cheaper to construct a PCI card from scratch. here

I think this PCI card got left in one of the PCs which I gave away when I had a big clear out a couple of years back. Whilst remake would be simple, unfortunately the German manufacturer who supplied the pre-programmed logic array appear to no-longer be in existence.

So the programmes written for PCI, also I can no longer use.

However, there remain a third set of DOS programs, and these all re-purpose the PC's parallel, serial, and games ports to manage digital input and output channels. Some of the stuff is written in x86 Assembler code.

As Microsoft's Operating Systems, post DOS, do not permit direct addressing of input/output ports from the OS (need system calls) and I never progressed to writing kernel modules for Windows, I was thinking of experimenting by way of dropping machine code input and output modules as subroutines into high level language running on current Windows.

Guess though, I really ought to stick to Linux, where such tasks are a mite easier.