I've been keeping my eyes open for affordable industrial motherboards and "little guys" that could make more compact retro PCs for DOS / Win3.11 / Win95 recently. This really weird Advantech unit was being sold on eBay by a seller who was walking distance from me, and while I paid quite a lot less than the asking price, I'm still not sure I'd call it a bargain. Still, it's very interesting!

This Advantech PPC-102 is just really weird, in lots of ways! It's got a Pentium-S 166Mhz, 32Mb 72-pin RAM, SiS 5571 chipset, Chips 1Mb dedicated VGA, ESS 1688 ISA sound onboard. The layout is really weird, with all of the I/O on a daughterboard. All of it sits behind a 10" TFT touchscreen!

Even weirder is the secondary IDE and floppy connectors on a separate daughterboard, so they can only be accessed externally! That daughterboard has a custom connector on the right, but a PCI connector on the left, with only the short part of it actually having contacts. Weirder still, it is labelled as "ISA Connector ", and in the manual as 8-bit ISA. What's going on here?!

When it collected it it was only working intermittently, but as soon as I had it open it was obvious the soldered coin battery was really badly corroded, and there was loads of baked on grime around the SIMM slots. I managed to replace the battery with a 2032 holder, and clean the first SIMM, and all seems to be working smoothly now!

It boots into Windows NT 4 and automatically runs a bespoke packaging control system, branded for Kraft Jacobs, with the product set to a type of Kenco Coffee granules!

I still haven't been able to get the touchscreen to work yet. I've hunted down the original drivers (I think I managed to remove them by mistake when trying to get the mouse to work - turns out it just doesn't like new PS/2 mice), but the ones from ELO seem to only accept COM1 or COM2 as input, whereas the touchscreen module is hard-wired to COM4. I guess the original drivers were probably customised for this system, but I haven't been able to find them. (and the way WinNT 4 deals with drivers seems very confusing - I haven't been able to re-add the old ones).

I imagine the resistive touch screen is probably awful? It certainly obscures the picture a lot (quoted as 75% light transmission when new ... so probably much worse) and has also got a few scratches on it, and the manual exploded view suggests it's a distinct part from the screen, so removing it altogether might kill two birds with one stone? I've tried popping it out, and it leaves a big gap at the front (i.e. the actual screen hasn't got room to move forward), so considering replacing it with a sheet of ultra clear cast acrylic to the same dimensions.

Interested in anyone else's thoughts on trying to get the touch screen working? (as an interesting oddball thing?) or ditching it?

Not really sure what I'll use this for, but it's certainly an interesting weird "little guy"! Certainly thinking of replacing the 40Gb HDD (a replacement?) with an SSD and installing Win95 or DOS