Hello!

TLDR: I need a cost-effective solution to bring this press break back to life. The shop owners are considering scrapping the press for $300 since they got a quote for new controls at 2-3x the cost of the machine.

I've recently taken on a job helping a machine shop downsize. In the process of doing so I spotted the Wysong press break sitting unused - and it looks to be in very good condition. I was told the press was purchased used from another neighboring shop and was only used to run one job approx. 7 years ago then never ran after that. I have a background in computers, but have zero experience with equipment such as this. I was surprised when I opened the controls cabinet to find cards that were as old as me!

I was told that the owners had a previous technician work on the machine and essentially did a little more harm than good. I had to replace a few IC's on the i486 SBC card and got it to boot once before it crashed again. Rather than continuing to fight and pour funds getting the old cards to work, the route I took was to retrofit the controls case to take a standard motherboard and atx power supply. I was able to recover the data on the hard drive and have a fully working base computer running DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 which is what the Wysong ProForm software seems to require. The motherboard has a single ISA slot for the PMAC-PC card. I also replaced the mouse/keyboard and upgraded the monitor to a nice LCD with all new cables.

The watchdog timer on the PMAC PC lights immediately once power is supplied to the computer. I suspect there may be an internal fault on the card as opposed to an external trigger but I may be wrong. I've found a few manuals online and was able to probe Pins 1 and 3 of J8 and the card is getting a full 5V. Jumping E51 causes the timer to turn off, but I do not currently have a serial diagnostic device to connect to the card yet. I lack an oscilloscope at the moment to confirm the crystal oscillator is functioning. I've also found one thread where some DIP ram modules were bad causing the watchdog fault.

Estimates to replace the PMAC-PC (PN 602191-503) with the CPU-Gull daughter card (PN 602398-100) is approximately $3,000. (My concern with this is losing the configuration on the current card, and I am not able to find configuration details for this anywhere online)
A repair estimate to send the card out for repair is $1,900 with no guarantee.
New Controls were quoted at $30k.

I feel like I am almost there, but this PMAC-PC card is proving to be quite an obstacle. Additionally, it appears that Wysong utilized a software called ProForm that interfaces and sends commands to the PMAC-PC since the computer is not using PEWIN.

What would you suggest for my next steps? Is there an off-the-shelf solution that would not be too difficult to get the machine running again?