LabVIEW
Linux gpib using DOSBOX
Definitely echo Bill's remark. Not sure about the details of DOSBOX-X but your application expects a driver installed as so called TSR (terminate and stay resident) DOS program. There were no DLLs, kernels and according kernel drivers. And each GPIB card back then had its own hardware driver although with the start of the 90ies more and more manufacturers started to at least simulate the NI-488 interface which had gotten the defacto standard thanks to IBM choosing the NI card as their choice of hardware for GPIB support.
But all these drivers expect to be able to directly access the IO registers of the card. There is no such thing as a address space separation, virtualization and whatever else that is nowadays the absolute standard in OSes.
I foresee real trouble to get this working. you need to find out what kind of GPIB card your application was wanting to use. You need to find the according GPIB drivers for that card, and last but not least get it installed in your DOSBOX-X and then find a card that is compatible with that driver. It's very unlikely that DOSBOX-X can fully let your driver access the hardware registers in your PC, if you even can find a PC that can accept a card still compatible with the old DOS drivers.
Back then all GPIB cards had either an ISA, EISA or some even more obscure plugin connector. The first PCI card appeared a few years after 1991 and even that is getting hard to find a PC for. Newer GPIB interfaces such as with an USB connector were generally never supported by the DOS driver since USB under DOS was simply non existent.
You're definitely in for some serious computer archeology if you plan to pursue this path further. Most likely you will find some very interesting facts that you never cared to learn, but won't get this working. The only feasible path I see is to install a real DOS system on a computer that has the necessary plugin slots for a card that is supported by the DOS drivers from around 1995. Until then DOS was an unmissable part of every computer that was not running a Unix or Mac OS, since Windows 3.1 was still running on DOS. After that DOS was quickly forgotten and support for new hardware more or less stalled shortly after for DOS.
@rolfk wrote:
Definitely echo Bill's remark. Not sure about the details of DOSBOX-X but your application expects a driver installed as so called TSR (terminate and stay resident) DOS program. There were no DLLs, kernels and according kernel drivers. And each GPIB card back then had its own hardware driver although with the start of the 90ies more and more manufacturers started to at least simulate the NI-488 interface which had gotten the defacto standard thanks to IBM choosing the NI card as their choice of hardware for GPIB support.
But all these drivers expect to be able to directly access the IO registers of the card. There is no such thing as a address space separation, virtualization and whatever else that is nowadays the absolute standard in OSes.
I foresee real trouble to get this working. you need to find out what kind of GPIB card your application was wanting to use. You need to find the according GPIB drivers for that card, and last but not least get it installed in your DOSBOX-X and then find a card that is compatible with that driver. It's very unlikely that DOSBOX-X can fully let your driver access the hardware registers in your PC, if you even can find a PC that can accept a card still compatible with the old DOS drivers.
Back then all GPIB cards had either an ISA, EISA or some even more obscure plugin connector. The first PCI card appeared a few years after 1991 and even that is getting hard to find a PC for. Newer GPIB interfaces such as with an USB connector were generally never supported by the DOS driver since USB under DOS was simply non existent.
You're definitely in for some serious computer archeology if you plan to pursue this path further. Most likely you will find some very interesting facts that you never cared to learn, but won't get this working. The only feasible path I see is to install a real DOS system on a computer that has the necessary plugin slots for a card that is supported by the DOS drivers from around 1995. Until then DOS was an unmissable part of every computer that was not running a Unix or Mac OS, since Windows 3.1 was still running on DOS. After that DOS was quickly forgotten and support for new hardware more or less stalled shortly after for DOS.
You did the gory details where I afraid to go. 😄
