I’ve been getting rid of a lot of stuff to down size and discovered an old Laptop with Win95 hidden away that I totally forgot about. It had a damaged LCD screen and I thought I might be able to run trains with it and get rid of my large desktop that uses up a lot of space. The laptop is a lot smaller and I could mount it up under my layout with a LCD monitor mounted on the wall instead of the laptop screen and maybe a wireless keyboard and mouse. I will only be using it to run trains and nothing else.
Not sure what version of JAVA you can install on it. The latest levels of JMRI need more recent versions of Java. But, if you can get an older JMRI version, no reason why it wouldn't work
Win95, Win98, and WinMe were all a strange hybrid where they were based on a DOS kernel, with a Windows 32-bit runtime planted on top of that. They had a very different architecture from WinXP, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10, each of which are a pure protect-mode OS from the ground up. This would lessen your chances of finding any software that you actually care about which will run under Win95. Also, the amount of RAM in your Win95 machine is probably too small to run any application that you would care about.
Thanks, but I don’t believe that that I need much to operate my 50 turnouts since I will only operate maybe 3 or 4 at a time at the most which shouldn’t use much memory. Anyway I’m thinking about removing Windows and installing Linux or something just to operate JMRI. I don’t plan on using it for any other applications and will not be going on the internet. The only real reason I’m even using JMRI is for routing through multiple turnouts as in my yard or staging area and also to have a visual on the status of my switches.
If you have an old keyboard, mouse and monitor lying around, you can run JMRI flawlessly on a Raspberry Pi 3 computer. The computer is a single board about the size of a 3x5 index card. The board, a simple plastic case, a power supply and a micro SD card to load the operating system and for file storage will run about $65. I just set one up as a dedicated JMRI machine for my layout in about 30 minutes flat. See the following: http://www.therailwire.net/forum/index.php?topic=39427.0 John C.
Oh wow John that’s a great idea, Thanks. Since the whole idea is to get rid of the big desktop computer that might work exactly for what I want to do. The laptop is small, but very heavy for a little thing. I used to build computers for my friends and have a lot of parts that I’m getting rid of. I was just entertaining the idea of attaching an old motherboard directly to the underside of my layout along with a hard drive and power supply to use as my controller. The power supply was the only thing that was going to be a problem because of the size, but I could use some of the outlets to provide power to some signals and turnout controllers. I was thinking of mounting the I/O ports to the front panel for the monitor keyboard and mouse. This way the computer will be part of the layout to make it completely portable.
It would be a cinch to attach the Pi 3 to the underside of a layout. Just glue the plastic case to something, or use velcro. The only downside of the Pi is that it outputs video only over an HDMI port. A lot of older monitors don't have HDMI inputs; but many of them have a DVI port, and you can buy a DVI-to-HDMI adapter for about $3 (this is what I did, so I know it works). You can even run the Pi headless and control it via SSH from another computer. The power supply is just a wall-wart so it takes up virtually no space at all. It's hard to believe this thing is a full-fledged computer, but it is. It's got 4 USB ports; integrated WiFi and Bluetooth; and is expandable via a 40-pin GPIO header that allows you to add on "hats" - boards dedicated to one function or another - I'm going to get a second one with an audio amp/DAC hat to use as a dedicated music streamer in my bedroom. I had an old laptop that I was using for JMRI, but I wanted something dedicated to just JMRI without all the crapware that comes on most computers. The Pi is perfect; it runs a stripped-down version of Linux and it comes with a web browser and even a simple Office-type suite. But if all you need is JMRI, you download the Linux version of JMRI, install it, and off you go. John C.
Thanks John, actually HDMI works perfect because I got rid of all my old monitors years ago because they were too big and took up too much space. My existing Monitor is HDMI and mounts on the wall although I may have to come up with a better way of mounting it so I can easily move the layout between rooms if I need to..
