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What is SunPC?

SunPC is an SBus card plus add-on software that provides a hardware-accelerated system-level PC-compatible runtime environment to SPARC systems running SunOS/Solaris. It should not be confused with the later SunPCi cards which are PCI-format add-on cards and which cannot be installed in SBus slots.

IIRC, Sun's application-level PC runtime environment, WABI, can also make use of the SunPC hardware for acceleration.

There are three versions of the SunPC hardware, each based on a different CPU:

SunPC transparently emulates PC screen, keyboard, mouse, storage, RAM and an NE2000/NDIS network interface, using the host system resources to do so.

The SunPC software (below) includes a licenced copy of Caldera DOS ("MSDOS-compatible"). SunPC can run most DOS programs, and Windows 3.1 can also be installed. If using the driver software below, then the original release of Windows 95 can also be installed. Note that Windows 95 will run quite slowly on the 20 MHz and 25 MHz versions of the SunPC card.

Storage for the PC runtime environment is provided by both emulated hard-disk drives ("drive-image" files in the host filesystem) and transparently emulated network-shares of selectable folders of the host filesystem.


Host Hardware Requirements

To attempt using Windows 95, you really need at least 64Mb of host RAM. For background information, see the SunPC 4.2 User Guide.
SPARCstation-10 Notes
The SunPC card is officially not supported in quad-processor SPARCstation-10 systems, due to power and heat concerns. It works, but may overstress the system PSU or harm other internal components. For similar reasons, you should be careful using SunPC in SS10 systems with pairs of the relatively very hot 90MHz, 150MHz or 166MHz HyperSPARC CPUs (dual-133 are fine, and dual-180s seem OK). Similarly, I would advise some caution using SunPC with a pair of 85MHz SM81 SuperSPARC CPUs in an SS10. See http://mbus.sunhelp.org/systems/sun/ss10.htm for my own SS10 CPU-heat/power ratings.

SunPC 4.2 Host Software Requirements

Note 1: The required Solaris 2.x kernel patches to be able to use SunPC are not provided here. Those particular patches were available on SunSolve from 1998-2005 (the very last Sun Recommended Patch cluster for Solaris 2.6 was released in 2005).
Note 2: SunPC 4.2 is not supported on Solaris 2.2 or 2.3, for that you need SunPC 4.1 software.
Note 3: SunPC 4.2 is not supported on SunOS 4.1.4, for that you need SunPC 3.1 software.

SunPC 4.2 Software

Note that as a special bonus, this particular CD image also includes the very last SunPC 4.2 software jumbo patch.
5th February 2018