[rescue] Sunpc Card

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

> > [...] you're right - I was confusing it with SunPCi - which is
> > is different.  I do, however, have a Wabi CD, which the SBUS
> > cards were suppose to work well with - at least according to
> > the [limited] search I did a few months back.  If I'm wrong,
> > please correct me...

> I'm a little less aware here, as I have never run Wabi, but
> IIRC Wabi was an entirely software-based emulator.  
Correct.  In 1995 I ran WABI (which "doesn't" stand for Windows
Application Binary Interface) on a SS10 with 64MB, running
Win3.11 and MSOffice.  No, that wasn't the primary thing that
SS10 got used for--it's a long story.  Oh, and WABI does
*not* interface with or even recognize a SunPC card in the
same system.  WABI was discontinued as of Solaris 2.6 (2.5.1
was the last release that included a WABI CD).

> SunPC is a software solution, but it either stands alone
> providing x86 emulation for DOS, etc, or if present, it 
> will use the SunPC card to do x86 operations in hardware as
> opposed to software.
Umm...I'll defer to George on this, but from my testing I
thought that SunPC software was only there to enable the SunPC
card--without the hardware, the software appeared useless.
(I've got two SunPC cards, plus the 4.1 software on CD, plus
two actual sets of *licenses* for the kit-and-kaboodle.  I
haven't had much time to do all the testing I've wanted to,
other than verifying that the SW doesn't want to play nice
under Solaris 7 no matter what I do to convince it.)

> It creates a "Virtual" PeeCee, right down to emulated hard
> disks stored in files within a Unix File System.
As an aside, so does WABI.  (Which provided interesting
testing capabilities similar to some things that VMWare+Windows
on Linux can do now--backup your "disk image" and then you
can beat on things/break things/install and delete without
affecting your saved disk image...and copy it back into place
very quickly.)

I believe that the reason why WABI was dropped was the
difficulty in natively catching and emulating all the x86
instructions on SPARC, while maintaining acceptable performance.
SoftPC was still an option for a while there IIRC, and SunPC
was definitely an option.  SunPC was still fairly resource-
intensive to support, and Sun decided to stop that train at
the 2.6 release as George already stated.

When Sun got around to creating the SunPCI card, they had learned
some lessons and made it almost independent of the host processor/
OS--it's possible to install Linux/x86 (or *BSD/x86)
on a SunPCI card and have that running inside your SPARC, based
on reliable report.  The second generation SunPCI cards that
have their own on-board Ethernet are the really cool ones,
though.

Still wish that there were enough docs on the SunPC cards to
use them for non-MS systems--a 5x86/133 would still be usable
for some functions that might be interesting, if run in a 
non-GUI mode under an efficient OS.

  --Rip