fa: Generic CADD 3-D Drafting

Hmm ... "pretty much any computer" yet it won't work on most of my computers -- Sun Workstations with SPARC and UltraSPARC CPUs. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

I thought there was a PC emulation package for Sun - I know that there was a windows emulation package, I used it for a while, but before that, I think there was a DOS/8088 emulator

I am the Sword of my Family and the Shield of my Nation. If sent, I will crush everything you have built, burn everything you love, and kill every one of you. (Hebrew quote)

It depends on which Sun -- and which vintage of hardware, too.

There was a board which would fit in the sBus slots which would be a PC running under the control of the Sun. (You ran DOS or Windows on the "PC", but the Sun caught keyboard and monitor activity to display it normally.

Also -- a much larger board doing the same thing for the VME bus based Sun-3 machines. Again -- even if I had the card, I don't have the software to drive it. And those computers consumed too much power anyway -- glad that they are retired, especially in the summer. :-)

I don't have any of those cards, let alone the software to drive them (which was an add-on).

There was a semi-early Sun "i386" which ran on an Intel CPU, the

I do have earlier Suns -- Motorola 68020 and 68010 CPUs (Sun3 and Sun2 machines) -- fully retired now, though I got a lot of use out of the 68020 CPU versions.

And the later Suns -- you've got choices depending on the model. Some are Intel CPU based, and thus have the ability to run Windows under "Wine". Others (including all of mine) have either SPARC or UltraSPARC CPUs, which have totally different instruction sets than the Intel ones, and can't run Wine (which only emulates the PC environment around the CPU, not the instruction set of the CPU itself.

I do have an AT&T Unix-PC/7300/3b1 (Motorola 68010 CPU) which has a plug-in card to emulate the PC (with its own 8088 CPU chip), but I don't have the drivers to run it.

For that matter -- even Macs have differing situations. The older ones run the PPC (Power PC) cpu -- a RISC instruction set similar to the SPARC -- but include a setting to use either big-endian math (most significant bytes come first like the SPARC) or little-endian math (least significant bytes come first, like the Intel CPUs.)

Later MACs now run on Intel CPUs -- and *those* can run Windows emulators.

For that matter -- some of my (currently retired) systems don't use any of the above. They use the National Semicondutor 32016 CPU (or is that 16032?). And one which uses the Fairchild Clipper.

Or my first computer, an Altair 680b with the Motorola 6800.

And the Technico 9900 -- using the Texas Instruments 9900 CPU chip.

End of list which *I* have or had. :-)

And this does not count the weird beasties like the Acorn (from the UK) with a totally different RISC CPU.

Or the Commodore PET (6502 CPU), Apple II (6502 also), or the Radio Shack TRS-80 (Intel 8080 CPU -- too early to run even the simplest MS-DOS.)

There are *lots* of computers which would not run your software.

And this is not even counting mainframes or minicomputers.

Enjoy, DoN.