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Comment by icantdrive55 | Hacker News Reader

So many auto shops/machine shops would be lost without access to older computers. So much equipment needs to be plugged into parallel ports.

"If it works, why muck with it?"

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Or new computers with $20 parallel port/serial PCIe cards...

Good luck getting old applications requiring ancient OSes to work on those.

Run them in a VM? Guess that would be complicating things?

I think the initial setup would complicate things, but if setup correctly couldn't it just be an icon that boots up the VM or set the VM to start up on boot in batch script?

Yes - I mean WHY would you buy another computer, interface card, setup a VM, move everything over, test, make sure everything is compatible.... if the current offline system with its software works just fine?

Because doing all of that while the current system is still working is much easier than trying to do it after the old system has failed.

You can still buy most components for the C64, and failing that, there are a number of FPGA systems that reimplements it, as well as the C64 Reloaded reimplementation by Individual Computers [1] who have also licensed the Commodore name and is about to produce replacement cases.

Odds are that you'll still be able to replace a C64 with pretty much cycle exact replications long after you'd need to scramble for replacement for your current PC hardware...

[1] http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/C64_reloaded

That's crazy when you can buy a working commodore or whatever for peanuts.

Anything with critical timing that runs over a parallel port can be very tricky to get working in a VM. It means running a realtime OS on top of a non-realtime OS, with some abstraction layers added. A C64 is very deterministic in comparison.

I've had luck getting DOSEmu to interact with parallel port hardware. Don't know how well it would work on x64 though.

Getting the hardware access to work properly (especially for systems as old as this, where I wouldn't be surprised if they do port timings by counting cycles) in a VM would be difficult. Not unsolvable, but for the engineering effort you can buy a lot of old machines as spares. (Or an FPGA-based C64 clone or something)

Apart from complicating it, we're talking about an auto shop, not a tech company. I doubt they have lots of computer engineers hanging around.

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