Comment on Here’s why the best IMAX movies still need a Palm Pilot to work
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 year agoBecause nobody bothered to write the same software for more modern hardware. As long as it works, there’s no urgent need to upgrade. Eventually, it’s going to become hard to find hardware that can still run your ancient software, so at that point they’ll probably replace the whole things with a raspberry pi or something.
DolphLundgren@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They’ve already replaced the hardware. The article shows a Palm Pilot emulator running on an iPad now.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Oh they decided to emulated it then. Pretty neat. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. If you can kick the can down the road, go for it. Why do anything today that can also be ignored tomorrow.
wjrii@kbin.social 1 year ago
I have a seen a lot of systems where the interface is some ancient text-based thing running in a virtual machine on a random modern(ish) PC. I guess the funny thing here is that they even included a static photo of the physical device framing the emulated display so it would be more obviously a continuation. Maybe that's just a function of whatever emulator they adapted, but it's interesting.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I’ve seen an electronics assembly line where some board testers were made for various operating systems such as DOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, W98, W2000 and XP. Yes, they still had examples of each of these in production use. Due to security concerns, they just had to make a dedicated isolated network that allowed the testers to still save the results somewhere.
Some tester hardware required the LPT port, and they had some issues finding computers that still had one. Sure, you can use a USB adapter, but some testers just didn’t work correctly when the signal had to go through an adapter, so they literally had no choice than to use an authentic ancient computer built in the LPT era. When you open that door, you may also need to use an genuine ancient 1GB hard disk because the motherboard didn’t have any SATA ports. If a computer like that has any issues at all with any hardware parts, you’re usually in big trouble because finding replacement parts is not as easy as it once was. Eventually you have to ask yourself, how much does it cost to rebuild the entire production line out of modern parts and how much does it cost to kick the can down the road.