NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/comp/sys/sun/apps/2853

Text File | 1992-12-23 | 2.5 KB | 48 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.apps
Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!swanee.ee.uwa.oz.au!peterj
From: [e-mail] (Peter E. Jones)
Subject: Re: PC Emulator on X-Terminals
Message-ID: <peterj.725085121@infs1>
Sender: [e-mail]
Organization: Elec Eng, Univ of Western Australia
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: 23 Dec 92 04:32:01 GMT
Lines: 36

[e-mail] (Alan McRae) writes:

>Does anyone have experience of a SPARC based PC Emulator (with
>or without hardware) that will allow PC applications to be run on
>a Sun displaying their (VGA,...) output in an X-Terminal window.

We have (on loan) from Sun an accelerator card with a real 486DX on it
running at 25MHz with some other ASIC for VGA/memory support.  There's
a product to use it called SunPC (actually from Insignia and also available
on DECs & Macs) which can be used as a software only simulator (a 286
that clocks in as an 8MHz on an IPC and a 20MHz on a Sparcs).  We found
that with the sbus accelerator all our DOS software ran, the later
version of the software was robust.  Time to startup the PC is (on an
IPC with 28MB RAM) is about 45 secs, time to start up Windows 3.1
is 30 seconds, time to start up Word for windows is 12 secs, in word
paging down a file 10 times takes about 4-5 secs.  The VGA is 800X600
with 16 colours.  It's VGA is slower than a real 486DX25, about 2/3
of the speed if you go to an IPX.  THe disc speed (using the DOS files
as Unix files rather than the simulated C and D drives is pretty fast.
The Norton tests and others show that the 486 speed is about what you
would expect.  You can also get a 16MHz SX board which is cheaper.  At
the moment there is no physical port to hang on a dongle.  Emulation
of all the other bits of the PC works fine.  DOS people here were quite
impressed with how well behaved it was.  Running the VGA over the net
to a X terminal will give slower performance than writing to the local
frame buffer (I assume).  Of course the cost of the board+s/w is nearly
the same as buying the real thing - but then desk space is expensive!
You do need a lot of RAM in the Sun - we initially tried it with only
16MB and it did a lot of paging and kept the CPU 100% busy.  We gave the
PC 8Mb of RAM and also tried it with 16MB (with no paging in WIndows).

--
Peter Jones                             .-_!\   Phone: [phone]
Electrical & Electronic Eng            /     \  Fax:   [phone]
University of Western Australia --->>  P_.-._/
NEDLANDS, Western Australia 6009            o   E-mail: [e-mail]