At work, I have a machine with an PC based operator interface. The OS is called QNX 2, and has been obsolete since the late 80s.

 

I have been running the machine for the last 5 years or so by having a Win XP PC running VMWare workstation 6.5, with QNX running inside a VM. The virtualisation includes providing access to two RS232 serial ports on the PC. The operator interface uses these to communicate to serial peripherals on the machine.

 

In the past I've tried Microsoft's Virtual PC but QNX wouldn't run in it for some reason.

 

We need to replace the XP PC and replace with Windows 7. VMWare Workstation and VMWare Player only seem to come in 64-bit versions.

 

Any recommendations please?

 

thanks

 

Martin

 

 

ps - as for replacing the obsolete OS with something more current like an abacus, don't ask.

The VM isn't reliant on the host operation system being  64bit.  You should be able to run a  32bit OS VM using WMWare 64bit. You should be able to migrate you "old" VM to the new host OS.

The target host OS would be Win 7 32 bit.

 

That is, a Windows 7 32 bit physical PC, running VMware, running the QNX VM.

 

Is that what you meant?

No, As you would need the physical PC to be running W7 64bit to run VMware.  

No, As you would need the physical PC to be running W7 64bit to run VMware.  

 

That's what I thought. Thanks.

I hesitate to suggest running anything "Linuxy". Presumably "RS232" means serial port (old style D12 or D25 sort) and possibly 12V. Though it's possible the signalling would work driven off 5V converted USB.

 

The entire thingy reads intriguing. Would guess it's an early form of computer driven cutting machine, mill or saw. Or..... possibly a knitting machine.

Have you tried Oracle's VirtualBox?

Any reason not to run 64 bit Windows 7, since everything should now work as 64bit has been the standard for sometime now. The server side is now 64bit only and has been for many years, Windows 8.1 is the last 32bit desktop OS, with Windows 10 going to be 64bit only IIRC.

 

With my experience of Win7 64bit in an office environment, we have not come across anything that does not work.

 

You'll have no issues running your 32bit OS inside a 64bit VMWare based environment.

 

Virtualbox maybe a problem due to the RS232 interfaces, they need very precise timing plus you need the ability to tunnel through and directly attach the RS232 ports to the virtual machine.

The problem with obtaining a 64-bit desktop PC will be with our IT department, which was outsourced to India a couple of years ago. As a result, everything takes twice as long and costs three times as much. And if it's not in their terms of supply, it won't happen. It'll be Windows 7 or nothing, as we don't implement anything until it's already obsolete.

 

I haven't tried VirtualBox, but I'll look it up, thanks.

 

Yes, the RS232 are serial ports using low voltage levels (5V IIRC) to run a keyboard (!!) and send communications to a PLC. The PLC was also obsolete in 2000.

 

Mannyo, you're right about the serial ports. QNX looks for the hex addresses for the serial port (02F8 and 03E8 IIRC) and writes to them directly. Earlier versions of VMWare Workstation allowed the virtual OS direct access to them but it may be that option has been removed now.

I have an instance of Microsoft 2012 Hyper-V r2 running  (MS 64bit virtual machine server) at home - I'll have a look at that and see what support that gives to RS232 as the pc it is running on has a serial port (GA-C1037UN-EU) which is a bit of a novelty these days.

Well Hyper-V VM doeant support virtualisation of serial ports  and I found this;

http://www.serial-server.net/port-redirector/

 

which sort of implies that none f the new hosts support serial ports.