Re: EMC, ISA and other Questions...

zestronad54529

The problem with a port of EMC to MS-windows is that there are a limited
number of ways to approach the real-time loops that make the software as
powerful as it is. (You can't do it at all with Pella-Windows or
Anderson-Windows.)

You can purchase a real-time extension to NT, 2000 or XP but that is a
rather costly approach. You can buffer motor and IO signals in hardware
somewhere off the PC as some have done, or you can tweek the
multiprocessor timers on the motherboard as one vendor has. Yes you are
welcome to use the interpreter any way that you like. Master5 and its
kin started by doing that.

You will still have a very difficult time using something like
IO_BASE_ADDRESS, a variable, or any near relative to attack the hardware
if you are using a product from one of those other window vendors. These
kinds of things are rather easy under OS's that use X-Windows.

Yesterday I wrote a small script in Tcl/Tk that used some of the EMC
stuff like inb and outb so that I could set up and read an 8255 DIO card.
That script is available from the dropbox at www.linuxcnc.org. Programs
like these work pretty slick with Linux. Reminds me a lot of peek and
poke back in the old days. Oh yea, it works equally well for ISA or PCI
cards.

---rant---
I'd suggest that you'd better start keeping your eyes open for "unix"
boxes. Orbitz recently saved 6 mil up front with a small upgrade to
Linux. One movie theater chain switched 4000 ticket vendor boxes to
Linux and just the savings in yearly extortion gave the owner a pretty
good pay raise. Linux/Beowolf gave George Lucas's Industrial Light and
Magic a 10x rendering boost. And then there's Apple's BSD that gave them
an awesome batch of new products! I know, Mom, I owe you breakfast and
dinner at NAMES. Flames welcome off list.
---eor---

Ray Henry
Michigan's U.P.

>    From: "zestronad54529 <dpeter@...>" <dpeter@...>
> Subject: EMC, ISA and other Questions...
>
>     I haven't gone hacking into EMC yet, but has anyone tried to port
> it to windows?  I normally work in VB and VC++ and as of yet not
> played in Linux and haven't even seen a Unix box in 15 years.  
>     What peaked my interest was a previous post that mentioned
> IO_base_address.  If it works off the I/O address, it should talk
> directly to an ISA card just like the parallel port.  I have ISA
> controller cards, but no developable software so I'm reverse
> engineering them to write code.  If I can pull g-code conversion from
> another piece of software rather than doing it from scratch...