Today marks some more incremental progress: Successfully cloning with clonezilla a backup of a computer that ran one of these machines way back when (another thanks to Sam from Trifoil). This was a rather annoying process where again I had to learn about computing protocols and whatnot that are now obsolete. 

What's prompting me to write this now is that I just got it to actually boot: The hard drive was stuck on an infinite loop at the windows XP loading screen, not a huge surprise, but I was expecting another long an arduous process fixing drivers and whatnot. The solution happened to be much easier: I plugged the drive into a really old computer, where it successfully booted. Then I activated using that new XP activation tool:

https://old.reddit.com/r/windowsxp/comments/wwjy5j/windows_xp_web_activation_is_finally_dead/ilmr5s3/ 

And when I brought the drive back to the new computer, whammo! It boots! Woohoo! 

Now I get to explore the system, install the drivers for my wifi stick and chrome and serial port card and whatnot, and see if I can do things like turn on that shutter server. And maybe there's a menu for switching on manual mode too. Woohoo! 

Edit: I found something I spent quite a bit of time looking for: Files related to the "FGT FRAME GRABBER" and "COMMCAM" software. More keywords: FGT508, ATMEL, CAMELIA, COMMCAM650, THOMPSON, LVDS . 

if you find this log through a google search while looking for those files, they're uploaded to the main project page! 

Edit 2: had to run out before I could mention this. But I managed to connect to the machine again with this new drive. Already paid a dividend --- there's a utility for conditioning the source and as part of that, it brought the source to 20 KV... And held it there. Awesome! So I know it's stable at 20 KV. I'll bet I can use the serial port monitor to see what kind of signal it's sending to the controller to get it there, and then maybe I can get the x-rays themselves to turn on (i.e heat up the filament) at that voltage.