source code for the GenPOS point of sale application owned by Georgia Southern University and now open source.
This is the updated and extended version of the original NeighborhoodPOS point of sale software that ran on the NCR 2170 point of sale terminal and was then upgraded for the NCR 7448 point of sale terminal.
In 2002 NCR donated version 1.4 of the NeighborhoodPOS product and source code which ran on the NCR 7448 terminal to Georgia Southern University along with equipment to continue development. Georgia Southern, supported by grants from the University System’s Intellectual Capital Partnership Program (ICAPP) and funding provided by the Georgia state legislature, created the NCR Project lab which employed student employees to assist in further development. https://www.usg.edu/news/release/governor_announces_ncr_corp._gifts_to_create_software_enterprises_at_two_ru
In 2003 NCR inked an exclusive license agreement with Georgia Southern University. The NCR Project team at Georgia Southern Univeristy worked with NCR to provide new versions of the software with new features to NCR customers and NCR point of sale dealers.
Georgia Southern ported the NeighborhoodPOS software from the NCR 7448 terminal, a Windows CE device, to Windows NT and Windows XP in 2003 supporting the general Intel x86 architecture. Changes made for this new release of NeighborhoodPOS, Version 2.0, included support for touchscreen terminals as well as support for Datacap electronic payment software components and internationalization support by changing mnemonics storage from ANSI 8 bit text characters to UNICODE 16 bit text characters.
During the NCR relationship, NCR decided to change the marketing and branding from NeighborhoodPOS (NHPOS) to GeneralPOS (GenPOS).
Georgia Southern University continue to support the product through the years, working with NCR to provide changes for NCR customers. Beginning around 2010, NCR made changes in their strategic direction regarding point of sale due to a number of changes in the point of sale industry as electronic payment processors began to bundle a point of sale with their services for small merchants. The result was that NCR begain deemphasizing much of the dealer network of small or low sales dealers and small merchants
In 2020, Georgia Southern Univesity made the decision to shutdown support for the GenPOS product as NCR transitioned its final customers away from the product. As there were a few remaining dealers interested in GenPOS due to its features and flexibility and their knowledge of the product, Georgia Southern University decided to open source the application.
There was some propietary information in the source code in the areas of electronic payment interfaces and biometrics sign-in. As part of making the source code open source, those portions of the source code were eliminated in cooperation with those vendors.
This version of the source code is based on Release 2.3.2 of GenPOS. This was the final version of the source code however this version was never released into the field. Release 2.3.2 was based on Rel 2.3.1 which was released into the field however it does contain one large change 64 bit totals. This change means that Third Party applications for Release 2.3.1 will probably not work correctly.
Relase 2.0.0 of NHPOS, since rebranded as GenPOS, contained the following major changes from Release 1.4 of NHPOS.
Release 2.3.1 includes support for:
LAN kitchen printers
USB devices such as scales
500 Thousand PLUs
changes and improvements to the PEP utility and PCSample utility
Out of Scope Datacap electronic payment to eliminate need for PCI-DSS assessments
support for Out of Scope EMV card processing using the Datacap electronic payment control
Release 2.3.2 added support for 64 bit totals along with some improvements in the PEP and PCSample utilities.
The source code base in this GitHub repository contains additional changes from the code base of Release 2.3.2 in order to eliminate proprietary information as well as to eliminate no longer needed source code. Over the years some functionality was added which made some existing functionality obsolete however the source code remained. With the initial version of the source code uploaded to this repository, the source for that functionality is being removed in order to make the source code smaller and easier to understand.
using Datacap Out of Scope software components
storage of account holder information for Preauth as well as Store and Forward
Journal printing replaced by Electronic Journal
Due to the age of some of the functionality that has gone unused and not been reviewed and updated, some features may not be compatible with more recent devices or the device may need to be set to use an older protocol. See Peripherals and Protocols.
As part of reaching agreement for making GenPOS open source, some proprietary information was removed from the source code before putting the source up into this GitHub repository at the request of the owners. To use these software components, a development agency must arrange a licensing agreement with the suppliers in order to access the necessary components and documentation.
NHPOS and GenPOS both used the Microsoft SQL Server Express database engine for the PLU totals database since Rel 2.0.0 and moving off of the NCR 7448 terminal with Windows CE. SQL Server was used for the database engine even though the same kind of builtin, default database engine available in Windows CE was also available in Windows NT/2000. Changing the ADO ODBC logic for the PLU totals from Windows CE to support the new SQL Server interface was straigntforward.
With OpenGenPOS we desire to move away from SQL Server and to SQLite in order use an open source database engine which could be embedded into OpenGenPOS and eliminate the need for additional software to be installed. We also want to have all of the files used by OpenGenPOS within the same folder in order to make device backups easier and by using SQL Server we have the issue of the SQL Server databases being within the SQL Server file directory hierarchy rather than the OpenGenPOS hierarchy.
As a first step we are using the SQLite ODBC driver from http://www.ch-werner.de/sqliteodbc/
We are experimenting with several different database technologies. In the include file ECR.h there are a
set of Preprocessor defined constants which provide a way to choose the target database technology.
#define USE_PLU_TOTALS_SQLSERVER // the standard SQL Server Express database engine used since 2004 and NHPOS 2.0.0
#define USE_PLU_TOTALS_SQLITE // the SQLite embedded database engine from experiments around 2008
#define USE_PLU_TOTALS_JET // the Jet Access database engine, Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0
#define USE_PLU_TOTALS_SQLSERVER_EMBEDDED // the SQL Server localDB embedded database engine