This one was very old school, old computer with 133mhz CPU, 32MB Ram, and two old IDE 540MB hard drives from 1995 (still working)
Floppy Drive (covered in dust)
Running some 16Bit Dos software
IDE 540MB Drives from 1995
Old Cream Base unit
S3 Svga PCI graphics card
25 Pin Serial and 9 Pin Serial (RS232)
the machine had stopped talking to a Toshiba Tec Thermal transfer printer via the serial connection.
The task in hand was to re-create the same legacy system, but running on new machine hardware. Which proved tricky as two IDE caddies would not read the drives, the floppy drive was not working and there are obviously no USB sockets.
The solution was to use a Intel I5 64Bit machine, running windows 10 Pro.
Install Oracle VM VirtualBox
Configure a DOS virtual machine with RS232 Port
Install DOS 6.22 from floppies using a USB Floppy drive
Clean the heads on the old machine floppy drive
Use new floppy disks, and copy all the files required (using the Archive Attribute flag, to use multiple floppies)
Copy the files from the floppy disks to the Virtual machine running DOS 6.22
Test and Run the application in the virtual machine.
While looking at why the printing function just stopped on the old system, it was identified that a mouse or mice had been chewing the IDE cables within the machine
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