
An emulator for a Sun 2 workstation - fanf2
https://github.com/lisper/emulator-sun-2
======
DonHopkins
>It now boots SunOS 2.0, 3.2, and 3.5 cleanly. You can install from the
distribution tapes. The SCSI emulation code is still shakey for tapes,
however.

SCSI was always shakey for all devices. As soon as they make the SCSI
emulation code shakey for disks as well as tapes, the emulation will be
perfect!

~~~
nullc
I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who has never had big problems with
SCSI, even with external cases and chaining a bunch of drives.

Though it sure is fun to talk about the ritual of the two terminations.

~~~
dazzawazza
You're not the only one. I've used SCSI with Classic Macs, SGI/IRIX and
Sun/SunOS and never had a problem.

On Windows/Linux/FreeBSD/x86 I've had many problems setting things up and
getting decent throughput and I think it's just I've always had
cheap/old/dubious SCSI cards.

~~~
anonsivalley652
It seemed usually only a "problem" initially when setting things up. I had a
homebuilt system with:

\- Adaptec AHA-2940U2W w/ internal and external ports

\- IBM UltraStar 9 GB (!) U2W 25L1910

\- SCSI Plextor CD burner (before DVDs existed)

\- IOmega ZIP External SCSI drive

\- Plextor External SCSI CD changer

\- SCSI scanner

\- Internal TEAC SCSI 3.5" floppy drive

\- Internal SCSI tape drive

For the era, SCSI worked pretty well. That was back in the day when I had an
early Zalman copper CPU heatsink with its 7k RPM, 1U-server-loud Delta fan.

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kev009
Much different but will probably appeal to the same crowd: a sparcstation5
fpga workalike
[http://temlib.org/site/?page_id=14](http://temlib.org/site/?page_id=14)

~~~
1MachineElf
Hey, that's really, really cool.

Temlib was mentioned in one of the comments here last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303446)

I wonder if it's been used on a Pano Logic G2.

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mustntmumble
Awesome, now I'd love to be able to run (via emulator) a NeWS (Network
extensible Window System) (networked display postscript) workstation... Google
searches have turned up nothing...

~~~
slavapestov
I think a Sun 2 is too old for that. You need a Sun 3, Sun 4 or early
SPARCstation to run NeWS.

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icedchai
I had a Sun 3/60, then later on a SparcStation 10 (bought them both used back
in the 90's.) I loved Sun equipment. Never played around wit a Sun 2 but
sounds fun.

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lproven
Also see:

[https://github.com/sigurbjornl/emulator-
sun-2](https://github.com/sigurbjornl/emulator-sun-2)

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sgt
>So I wrote this to learn about the MMU and, well SCSI. My goal is to
eventually create an FPGA version of the Sun-2.

Okay - THAT I will want to buy, if it ever materializes.

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hestefisk
Interesting work. Last commit was over 12 months ago though...

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ajross
Are you... worried that it isn't keeping up with the rapid feature evolution
of 68010 workstations?

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azinman2
All code bitrots, and no code is perfect the first time (or ever?).

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seabird
Hardware can be finished. If this faithfully implements the Sun 2, further
changes defeat its purpose.

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arexxbifs
Not saying you're wrong, but faithful hardware emulation is really hard. The
VICE team are still working hard on perfecting a Commodore 64 emulator and
recently completed their implementation of the VSP bug, which has been
discussed elsewhere here on HN[0].

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5314959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5314959)

~~~
IcePic
But that mostly means it wasn't ok (as in not faithfully emulating the hw bug)
to begin with, and that it was super hard to fix, not that the VICE code
rot'ed over time.

