On Thu, 21 May 1998, E. Seth Miller wrote:

> As the owner of a Performa 640 (the 630 with a DOS card bastardized into
> it), I have to admit that would be neat.  I can't imagine it being all
> that likely to happen, though...  IIRC, the DOS card is looking for MS-DOS
> 6.22, and while it's somewhat willing to put up with Win95, it doesn't
> want to consider NT, OS/2 or Linux (so I'm sick, and I like beating on my
> computers).  I wouldn't be surprised if what would need to be written was
> a special form of NetBSD-i386.  I can't imagine that there would be all
> that much interest, so I doubt that it will ever happen...  Of course, I'd
> be willing to settle for a way under NetBSD to still access the DOS card. 
> It'd be rather neat to be able to switch back and forth between Unix and
> its retarded cousin, DOS.  (As if I don't type ls often enough at DOS
> prompts.)
> 	Okay, back to reality.

	Presumably there is a Macos driver that sets up the environment
	such that the DOS or Win95 can run OK. If you can get something
	in NetBSD to do the same then it should be possible to run DOS
	or Win95 on the card.

	As for running NetBSD on it... hmm - the 'simple' option might
	be to write a psuedo network interface that communicates with
	other CPUs using shared memory (and whatever type of interlock
	is provided), and then run the card as a diskless NetBSD/i386
	system with only that device driver (no disk, keyboard, video
	etc). The more adventurous could add in disk drivers etc (as long
	as the different cpus used different areas of the disks :)

	Nice project for someone with the time!

		David/absolute

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