I have a cRIO running a new piece of hardware that arrives today. I have done all the development in LV 2012/13, but we still have some older machines running LV 8.6.1. These machines will be upgraded soon-ish, but the code is byzantine and so it will probably require some downtime to do the switch. In the meantime, I found conflicting information online (e.g., here and here) about whether I can communicate between these systems using shared variables. I do not want to do a lot of this, but it would greatly ease the transition if I could write a few booleans and doubles from the old computers to either the cRIO or to the new computer as a stopgap.
In LV 8.6.1, I can see the cRIO and the names of the shared variable libraries on the Distributed System Manager. However, MAX says the system is unsupported if I try to connect that way. The Distributed System Manager also seems unreliable--just poking around this morning, it has frozen a few times, and right now for some reason it doesn't show any of the variables, just the target's IP address (although it's not grey). In LV itself, I can't figure out any way to make the shared variables appear, but I have never tried to use them in a pre-2012 version of Labview, so maybe I just don't understand how to do that.
Is there any way I can make this work, or do I have to do something stupid like communicate with text files and while loops between these systems until I get them all upgraded to the same version of Labview?