(This was a reply to Nocholas's offline message.  I see he also sent
a copy to the list, separately...so...(^&)


Pre-script: I have been fiddling more with bochs for amusement.  You
can *definitely* improve the perceived speed of the thing by juggling
some of the emulation speed parameters.  For amusement, I set the ips:
to 10000 and booted.  NetBSD flew through most of its startup checks
that way, but the process of loading the kernel seemed much slower and
it now seems to have seized up after announcing that there are no
isapnp devices.  I'm about ready to pull the viritual power plug.


On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 07:30:33AM -0800, Nicholas Jackson wrote:
> 
> I'm surprised that nobody has come out with a complete PC on a PCI card 
> option, perhaps using a 2.5 disk. Then, with the proper interface built 

As others have said, this has been done (so it's a good idea! (^&).
I would add, for more completeness, that I believe that the Mac might
have had one of these a few years ago.  I know that the Amiga had one,
using its proprietary Zorro II bus in the A2000 model.  It had a
numboer of Zorro II slots, and a few ISA slots.  Two of the Zorro slots
overlapped two of the ISA slots, and you would put in a "Bridgecard"
to get the IBM PC compatibility.  (It came in two models: 8088 (8086?)
and 80286, I believe---though I have a fuzzy memory of someone making
an 80386 model.  Maybe CBM made a 286 and 386?)

It used special drivers to talk between the two of them.  Without some
kind of bridgecard, the ISA slots were just dead wires (the bridge
brought over control signals and power, I think).

It was useful enough for some things, if an 8MHz 286 running MS-DOS
was useful.  (^&  (I had one that was part of a package deal, back
in 1989.)

Additionally, the Amiga 1000 had a "sidecar" option that was
similar.  But, lacking an internal expansion card cage, it
forced the sidecar to be a separate box that lived next to it.

Going even further afield, when the Mac couldn't do a Video Toaster
natively, New Tek re-engineered some Amigas to talk to the Mac (over a
SCSI link, I think) so that the Amiga + Amiga-Video-Toaster would look
like a Mac-Video-Toaster.  This was presumably so that Mac users
would not have to deal with multi-button mice or such.  (^&  I don't
know if the Macs could use the Amiga to run Amiga applications, then,
or if New Tek had sufficiently butchered the Amigas to just be
controllers for Video Toasters.  Most Mac users probably didn't really
care.


> into the hardware, it might be possible to run a second machine inside 
> of your main OS, without the performance hit.
> 
> I wonder if it would sell?

Depends.  Probably less so to the "I already have a PC" market, since
they could just use something like VMWare, for comparable or less cost
and performance that scales with whatever their current PC is.  (Or
else they could set aside a spare PC to do whatever.)


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/