Windows 2000 was wonderful, though. At least for those of us whose best alternative option was windows 98se. I still remember it as the first time ever when my PC was stable and reliable. That was a new thing back then.
@@PhantomWorksStudios i agree with you, windows 98 was my childhood, i got a windows 8 later in 2015 (yes, i had a 98se until 2015) Edit: i then got a windows 10 in 2018 (i still have that one) but i gave it for my little brother bevause i got a new windows 10 in late 2021 (my current pc)
The company I worked for had a contract with a large hospital in the area to convert them from an old IBM server and terminals to SUN. This card required PC66 SDRAM to run stable, NT4 needed a script that was supplied by our SUN rep, and the monitors needed to be set to a specific refresh rate to not give us headaches. 3 months after the 2 year conversion, the hospital switched to just NT4 terminals.
NCommander! You had a lot of patience with that SUNpci!!! 😄 I would scream and shutdown everything in psychic attack after second failed attempt of installing XP
Back in the day my group supported Sun and Windows. I was one of the Windows admins. We got a few of these cards to try out. I could see the potential but wasn't sure how well they would work. Most of our engineers had a Windows PC and a Sun workstation for their work, why not combine them into one machine. I was tasked to load Windows on them because our Unix admins couldn't figure out how to install and configure the OS. Unfortunately there was a big difference in performance, and probably price but I was never told the cost, as it was better to have 2 separate machines occupying an engineers desk space in the end.
Unusual. With the 2001 crash after y2k spending every CIO and their brother obsessed with cheap plastic Dells running XP to replace Unix boxes as for $4000 Dell workstation were a fraction of the cost and could reduce cost by having one integrated platform for everything hence fire the Unix admins for cheap Indian MCSEs in Bangalore. Thankfully the tend of outsourcing stopped as I had to leave IT for several years as employers kept eliminating jobs for h1b1 guys who would screw them up.
The Sun PCii and especially the Sun PCiii were the ones which had adequate levels of performance, having a Socket 370 P3/Celeron at around 600 and 1.4Ghz respectively as opposed to a Super Socket 7 AMD K6-2. Which, for one is a cost reduced K6-3 with less cache and suffers from this massively. In fact the PCiii 1.4Ghz P3 Tualatin is about as fast as a 32bit x86 part could get at the time of its release. And these CPUs were mainly sold to the server market while desktop got first gen P4 (1.6 - 2.0Ghz with.... *DRUMROLL* RAMBUS which were much slower).
@@timothygibney159 Well, what with horseshit like Sun Blade 100/150 with a 550 - 650Mhz out-dated-on-release USPARC-IIe CPU at starting MSRP of 6500USD, the 4000USD Dell with a P3 at around twice the clock speed destroys Sun hardware. Not to mention AMD64 aka Opteron being released very shortly after the introduction of the Blade 150. So, this was sound financial decision making. In fact, they should've stopped buying Suns overpriced bullshit when the U5/U10 came out, which like the fore mentioned, is a half-manufacture cobbled together from chips which have fatal hardware bugs. Sun killed itself by selling bargain basement PC shitware at a 100x markup. AMD64 meant it was game over for Sun's workstations and the UltraSPARC architechture on the desktop. Sun tried to get on the AMD64 and Opteron hypetrain by introducing a new PC workstation brand using AMD64 platform but the design was rushed and the systems suffered from faulty CPU cards which often failed with intermittent faults that caused system crashes. Dunno what the warranty experience was with Sun at the time, it used to be notoriously good, but I suspect they tried to pull some bullshit and wrangle out of honoring their contract. The system used standard PC BIOS for example and AMDs reference platform chipset etc. It was overall on paper actually a half-way decent system in a stylish case that had equitable build quality to contemporary mid-tier Dell, Compaq and IBM systems. But, it didn't sell well. So, their jump turned out to be fall on their face at speed. I can't remember did it come with Solaris x64 on release or was it stuck with the 32bit version or how that story went... It most likely did not and this was one of the reasons nobody gave two shits. Other reason is marketing was neglible. Not Invented Here syndrome at its best. They did later on come out with a competitive line of Intel Core 2 Xeon based servers and I think some workstations(?). The Servers were built into same kind of cases with identical designs as the T1 and later UltraSPARC servers and the very last UltraSPARC workstation the Ultra 45. Which had for example PCIe bus and finally industry mainstream standard memory, that wasn't outdated. They released in an identical case a AMD64 workstation named the Sun Ultra 20. Which didn't sell any better than the short lived brand the first AMD64 Opteron PCs were introduced as.
@@Meton12765the K6-2 had no internal L2 cache, while the K6-3 had 256KB of internal L2 cache. AMD did release the K6-2+ sometime later, although that was essentially a K6-3 with half of the cache disabled.
FWIW, these cards (at least 3 generations of those) were aimed also at servers - so a single Sun-branded box in a branch office could serve different Solaris services natively (NFS/CIFS homedirs, mail, etc.) as well as be an MS AD controller also natively.
You're way too rough on the machine. I bought an Ultra 5 in 1998 with a SunPCI for only $2,500. $2,000 for the machine and $500 for the SunPCI card. The correct software to run was Solaris 8 and Windows NT 4.0. With that combination, this system friggin' rocked! In 1998, that is. I could run Forte4Java (today known as Netbeans), Mozilla nightly, MP3 music in the background, various command line programs (including that nightly compile of Mozilla), a P2P program, and numerous other desktop utilities on the Solaris side. All simultaneously with little to no slowdown. On the NT4 side, I ran Office and occasionally IE5. I tried installing IE5 on Solaris, but Microsoft's installer f**ked up my Solaris desktop. That pissed me off so much that I trashed the thing and never looked back. Overall, I loved my Ultra 5/SunPCI back in the day. It was a beast for daily development tasks. I'm sorry you're having some challenges here, but you're hardly using an original shipment with MediaKit software. You have a cobbled-together solution that doesn't really represent the system of the time.
I had this setup too but much later and not as my main computer. Maybe in 2007. I think I was running Win98 on the card some years later just to test it. I think I was mostly running OpenBSD, not Solaris, hence I couldn't even utilize the fancy card.
Amazing as always. That you got XP running in the end is above and beyond the call of duty! I think the production of this video might give more enjoyment that this card ever gave during its production lifetime.
I could see the appeal of PHB IT management wondering why can't we buy plastic cheap Dell workstations running Windows 2k to replace these? What a pita if you had 100 of them to support
Is it possible sun intentionally broke windows disk manager cause they didn't trust it having access to the shared drives? Cause I know I'd do that if I were sun lol
When I joined a computer science dept in 2000 everyone had an Ultra 5 on their desk with a sunpci card running NT4. It worked fine as all it was used for was working with MS office files. A couple of years in and we moved to PCs running Redhat or XP.
Oh yeah! You got me there! I had this setup plus the Creator 3D Graphicscard and 1GB Ram. And yes, despite its weaknesses on the Windows side, I loved that machine more than anything else I previously had (with exception the AlphaAXP pci).
Running XP on a K6/2 is a feat in itself, not to mention the fiddling with drivers and custom installers you had to do. Still, part of me wants to see this taken to the cursed, horrible end.
@@joeturner7959 K6/2. There was no more COAST with these, i believe. In fact, the SS7 boards all came with at least 256KB of L2, and the K6/2+ and K6/3 also had L2 cache on them. XP on a K6 would be downright torture!
@@andreewert6576 The K6-2 had a K6-2E still only 64 cache. The K6-3 had 64K L1/256K2 and a 20 byte prefetch decode pipeline. CPUworld says that both parts @400Mhz, w/100 Mhz FSB are not diffrent, but they were night and day in performance.
pretty much, it's annoying to even install Windows 2000 with any SP's on this as well. And even if he had gone with a newer Solaris version, it would have created other workarounds jut to get the card working as this SunPCIi card isn't supported past Solaris 9 anyway, so you have to tweak its drivers for Solaris 10 or 11. A slightly better route is getting the next gen of this card in one of these. It has a Celeron 600Mhz, can run windows 10, has an option of using a separate Ethernet from the host Ultra5/10 machine but does support passing audio to the system so you can just have audio through it.
Just thought it worth posting that you can actually install another processor into the SunPCI Penguin card and get CMOV support. Such as the Cyrix MII/M2 like the MII-233GP or others. Granted it's not nearly as fast as the AMD K6-2 400. But it's an i686 level processor (Mostly a 486 that cheats) What's not to love XD
@@NCommander Yes the Cyrix is *very* slow. About the only worthwhile upgrade would be the K6-2+ 570ACZ with unlocked L2 cache. But even then, the SunPCI BIOS doesn't enable the L2 cache of the 2+ processors and it has to be done manually with software.
@@NCommander The CPU isn't the problem. A K6-2 400 can run all of that stuff with no issue. The problem is with Sun's dreadful implementation of getting a PC-on-a-card to work with their workstation. Apple did better with their versions, using much weaker CPUs that that K6-2. This is an example of the reasons why Sun started to go downhill about that time and no longer exists today. If Apple could make a PC-on-a-card work with their janky classic Mac OS, then doing it with a then-modern OS like Solaris should have been doable. Do you know if these can be used by themselves, as ordinary PC systems-on-a-card outside of a Sun workstation?
@@johncate9541 I have these cards, tried configuring them in a different PC under Linux. But the logic of the PCI-to-PCI bridge chip and the hardware bringup process used on the Sun requires some intensive reverse engineering to make work outside the Sun ecosystem. Not something to be taken lightly.
If it has Windows 2000 (in any shape or form) I approve. Reminds me of installing XP on a 12" PowerBook for no reason whatsoever, of course it took ages to install and was totally unusable. Excited to see this! EDIT: This was excellent, and exactly as terrible as I could have hoped for!
The moment you said it was the updated DR-DOS (i.e. the OS I grew up on), I got interested. When you mentioned that you downloaded the games from GOG, I knew you were toast. Those games are preinstalled, and configured for MS-DOS compatibility (because that's what DOSBox emulates). DR-DOS does not handle graphics or TSRs in the same way as MS-DOS, and unless you have access to the install media to set them up to run on DR-DOS, you're kinda toast.
I just love that they called a card that goes into PCI slot "SunPCi". What a wonderful name. Jokes aside, your patience is just incredible, especially the fact that you've got XP working on the card that was never meant to run XP. I would've gave up as soon as I hitted BSoD :D
For video compatibility problems, my guess is that SunPCi software emulates the entire VGA card. I don't think Sun would've put actual VGA capture hardware inside the card, as it would increase the price of the card. When you pass '-vga' to software, it probably tells card to use actual VGA chip instead of software emulation. And for storage, they might be using some kind of proprietary protocol between driver(and BIOS) and host. This would explain why DOS applications work just fine, while booting Windows NT as-is just crash during boot: Windows NT would try to find the boot device through IDE, but in reality there's no actual IDE devices. I think the lack of mouse support during WinNT installation is going to be similar situation as well.
Honestly I just setup a SunPCi II in a V240 and run Sun Ray clients off of it. Really didn't have any issues including using a Solaris VM as a jumpstart server, installing the Sun Ray server software, or getting the SunPCi card to work. Windows 98 installation went flawless the first time. I'm using all supported hardware and software. Literally can't complain about it.
This brings back so many memories. We put these cards in “Sun Blade” and Ultra 5 workstations and they were such a pain. We wound up replacing most with a remote desktop solution. And yes, thank you for reminding me of Jumpstart. 😝
I managed an engineering college's 100+ Sun Solaris workstations and dozen or so servers using jumpstart during this era and I don't recall there being any issues with it. I'd been a Solaris admin for several years at this point though. There's some set up of course, but you could completely automate the install and configuration of Solaris. I could send out a student to do installs or just have the users run the installer themselves.
Sounds interesting. Well, I got my hands on Solaris only in 2005 when 10 was out. And I was amazed with how much documentation SUN had for the software. At that time I was managing a couple of FreeBSD gateways for sharing Internet between offices and always was amazed with its Handbook, but then Solaris appeared to be the bible of all what I had previously seen. 🙂
i love that after the sunpci gives you all the signs that it doesn't want to play nice, you go a step beyond and install XP. love the determination and the hacker mentality!
Yaknow... For all the discomforts you describe... The quality and integration of this would have blown my mind at the time. And I was running a K6 PC and SparcStation Classic at the time.
What amazed me about these old Sun machines is how slow they were despite all the fancy hardware. I had a Sun Blade 2500 with dual USIIIi 1.2ghz chips decked out with 8GB of dual channel DDR memory, XVR-1200 graphics and Seagate 15K SCSI hard drive but it still felt sluggish and the obligatory ioquake III on sparc didn't run too well either. Left wondering if all that great hardware was let down by the infamous "Slowlaris 10" OS!
Around 2001 I was running a lab full of Ultra 10s and 5s for CFD plus my own desktop PC (P3 running Linux.) When the HDDs started failing in the SUNs I installed Linux on a few of them and got a very decent performance improvement for our workload. Mind you, my PC was still much faster than any of them despite being a fraction of the price!
In my knowledge, the idea for those cards were more in the Sun Solaris Server world. Many companies and corporations were Microsoft-infested and based everything on Acrive Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, ... That board allowed having a minimal Windows NT / Windows 2000 installation to have an Active Directory for the users, and Sun had some Kerberos parameters to let Sun's NFSv4 Kerberos implementation play with AD.
11:05 The 8.3 versions of filenames & directories are quite bizarre in this setup. Note the MICROSOF.* directories, for instance, rather than MICROS~1, etc. I wonder how much this impacts the file system issues you ran into.
That's due to VFAT mapping being patented by Microsoft I suspect. The Windows CD however has all files in 8.3 format, and I did try multiple things like copying them across as well.
@@NCommander To a small extent, some of the 8.3 names can be controlled within certain limitations inside of various Windows versions. Outside Windows, though, you can generate some short names that wouldn't ordinarily be legal inside of Windows. I've seen scenarios where *NIX will embed colons and other characters which Windows NT will interpret as the token to separate the file name from the alternative data stream, for instance. In a nutshell, it can get really messy when multiple OSes touch the filenames.
I had an Ultra10 I purchased for about $30 a few years ago which was one of the biggest headaches to get working in terms of my retro machines. I ended up giving it away but I think I should've revisited it or even track down a SunPCI for some double-cursed computing
Thanks for making this video - the amount of work you have been willing to put in in order to push the PCi card beyond its software support limits is just incredible. It does feel like you got 99% the way to the cursed zone, and it seems that all you need now is to recompile QEMU for a smaller x86 instruction subset than what it was built for. That's a lot less effort than what you have already done. I encourage you to not give up yet!
Now, if you want something *ridiculous* - I did this on a Sun Blade 150, for reference - run Solaris 10 on the metal, Solaris 8 with MAE in a zone displayed on a second monitor, and a SunPCI on a third with Windows, and *really* confuse people. For even further confusion, run LuBu OpenMagic under Solaris 10 (a repackaging of OPENSTEP for Solaris to work right on 10).
The soundblaster compatibility should be outstanding - the chip on the SunPCI is an ESS 1868 Audiodrive, which is basically a Soundblaster Pro 2.0 plus an ESS-specific 16-bit sound mode.
Reminds me of the PC x86 cards for the Amiga a decade prior. Also, ATI? I would've preferred an S3 Trio64V+. ATI Rage back then was synonymous with crash and buggy. I quit ATI after Mach 64 and didn't buy ATI again until the original Radeon.
Which turned into the rotten pumpkin in 2 years 🤐 But it was a right decision as it was possible to upgrade to XP and drag its butt up until AthlonX2/Core2Duo
Great video! You should make a ghost image of the xp machine so future users can just apply the ghost image to their machines instead of going through the same process.
Windows 2000 was rock solid. It's still the most stable OS Microsoft has ever created. I have NEVER had a crash with 2000 no matter how hard or for how long I beat on it
I had it break on me a couple times, but it was damn hard - especially compared to the 98SE I'd previously been using. One of the best OSs I've ever used.
need to watch it twice or more... i just got the u5 ... my u10 and my u45 out of the basement. the u5 had a sunpci. but i never got it to run. i get no screen output now. the u45 with sol10 just resets when starting sunpci. ok, just installed a patchcluster. need to try harder. sol7 and sol8 failed gratefully. i need sol10 on my u5/10 too. if everything is up and running i spent them to our retro museum. yay. nc channel is an endless source of knowledge :D thank you.
Blandest??? You've got Sun workstation which can also run Windows applications! This is a technological feat to achieve. Sure, there would be quirks and limitations, but how many vendors achieved similar thing?
Nice, I had one of these once upon a time from the university recycling room in an Ultra 10 but the hard drives were removed and I didn't have any Solaris media so I never did anything with it, just ran Linux and BSD's on the Ultra 10.
I have been waiting a SunPCI card video! I have one sitting idle in my Ultra 5 (my SunPCI card never came with disks)! I can't wait to duplicate your video! I also have a spare Ultra 10, but the Ultra 5 takes up less space on my desk.
@@NCommander If it's not too much to ask, would you be able to upload the SunPCI CD as a ISO to the Internet Archive? Those CDs and disk contents are starting to fade off the internet. SUNWspci_13 can be found, but not the original disk. Kevin Hooke has some great blog posts too if you ever want to try this process on Solaris 10. Loved the video!
This was like the PC horror show! Another example of why you should never combine OS-es in any way on a single computer. Bless you for your endless patience for making this! Amazing how many errors you got through, man... amazing!
Keep in mind this was for corporate environments. Not PC enthusiasts. Ssh was not out yet so no port X11 forwarding with telnet. You needed a second Unix workstation at their desk. Bill Gates said most Unix users had a 2nd machine at their desk so why not use Autocad and Light wave with Windows NT soon to be Win2K with one PC? The sluggish experience was normal for any 1997 era PC as we are spoiled with ssds, gigs of ram, and cores running 100x faster. Waiting 30 seconds for MS access to load was normal. This killed the Unix cad market but gave birth to Linux as this was bad. For a $1500 PC from 1999 you could simply buy a second 20 gig drive for $175 and dual boot a real Unix like FreeBSD or Linux and keep Windows NT or 98 like I did back then. Accelerated 3d GPUs rather than video cards out the last nail in the coffin for Sun as well as Lintel and ssh made owning a crappy super expensive sgi or sun box unpractical. Anyway in 1998 this was to run Outlook and Office while you ran CAD jobs or system admin work on the side at a university or office. Nothing sexy
Many years ago I worked for a large company that had a lot of servers including the legendary SUN with uptime of more than 10 years without interruptions. Just finish a basic cleaning of the hardware and turn on the Server. It should be working without problems until today running Debian.
I usually avoided webstart for installs, which could be done from one of the software cd's rather than the install cd. Jumpstart was really powerful and I found it easier to deal with than pixieboot. At a previous job I had one of these cards in my Sun Blade 1500. That made it easy to deal with the required Windows tools but I could live entirely in the Unix environment.
I became obsessed with Sun hardware in the late 90s. I eventually obtained a sparcstation 20 and an Ultra 30. Solaris, without a doubt, was the absolute worst to administer in those days. Like straight torture. Eventually I ended running FreeBSD on them since I had it with the platform.
Ages ago I worked for UCLA (a nice place to work other than the politics). During student move in we basically not only fixed PCs but also helped get them on the internet (which was pretty new to most people back then). At the time many PCs still didn't come with network adapters. This one kid pulls up in a new red ferrari and has a brand new Sun 20 in the back. I'm going to guess he was giving the car and PC by his parents. Many of the PCs seemed to be the dreaded gateway and packard bells but several of them were better PCs were far more expensive than I could afford.
Ultra 5/10 had a horribly bad IDE chipset (CMD64x), still wondering if one could have replaced them with a UDMA capable one - you even see the "DMA2" message there, this is one of the critical & worst product decisions of IT history. I also still got the training materials for Sol9 / Jumpstart stuff.
Had came across some Sun workstations & servers back in my eWaste job. Never knew where we got them, but I thought the case was pretty cool. I forget which model we had, but we came across a unit that had nothing working except for the PSU & RAM.
That was like trying to dig a hole in dry sand. Working with Socket 7's. I found it a nightmare trying to get PCI bridges to play nice with dos games like Ultima 7 and sound cards that expect true ISA busses.
I had such devices. At the time it was indeed much better than software emulation and even using a virtual machine. I had played modern games on it without too much issues with a second monitor. Granted it was a $500 card that gave a $400 separate PC experience.
They are almost exactly the same under the hood. XP did require CMOV to be present, but there's not much else different other than the front end. Win2K is Windows NT 5.0 internally, and WinXP is Windows NT 5.1.
So many memories, I gave up long before you did trying to get the thing up and going with the selection of "supported" operating systems, but I remember facing all of the same problems. Unfortunately I didn't get to try the original SunPC SBUS card that came with a 486DX CPU and could run Win3.11 apparently quite well.
LOL! I almost had an obsession with those Sun ultra. because our country's №1 IT magazine printed articles and ads about Sun's hardware. But it was poor eastern europe and there was no market for them except growing banks and tech universities in the capital. So once I got Solaris 2.5 x86 CDs but failed to install it in 1998 due to lack of skills and experience or just the CD set wasn't full and was broken. Then it was such a disappointment to have Solaris 10x86 running in Jan 2005. Comparing to my improved user and admin experience with RedHat Linux and freeBSD. I used to think that Motif and CDE were way better & powerful monsters comparing to Windows98.... And then finally my dreams let me touch them in reality. What a crap I felt!! Lol!
I mean they were in comparison to their contemporaries (Windows 3.1). Windows 95's shell was a vast improvement but the underlying design of the thing was also trash by comparison. Namely, the UI elements were draw in kernel space. They finally made the jump to 32 bit, at least, but memory protection for it was still kind of crude and it had all the flaws of the early OS designs from Microsoft. It really wasn't until later NTs and windows 2000 did stability really improve and they started to make reasonable design decisions that their UNIX big brothers had been for a while. And that still had the legacy cruft of the Chicago shell design.
@@BrianMoore-uk6js Exactly!!! There are pics in this video, probably it was SUNN's press release showing off bicycle in CAD these pictures stuck so much in my memory!! That ad made me think that Solaris was quite a powerful engineer's desktop and fancy looking StarOffice5. My imagination put too many colors in one thought. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@kungfujesus06 Give Windows 95 a break, the poor thing had to fit in just 4MB of RAM. Meanwhile, a real OS like Windows NT 4.0 required 16MB of RAM. So, of course Windows 95 had to do some things like UI drawing and font handling in the kernel and of course didn't have full memory protection.
@@kungfujesus06 Still, Windows 95 holds a special place in my heart because UI-wise it was years ahead of anything else. I mean, more than 25 years later, Desktop Linux still doesn't have something like device manager where you can right-click on a device (any device) and load drivers from a directory. Also, when paired with a nice 3D accelerator card, a Windows 95 PC felt like a window to the future.
But in the 90s even installing a sound card drove you mad because it used the same interrupt as your printer and you never noticed why the heck it won't work and the driver won't tell you either it just won't sound. Fast forward to today I built my application server the only thing that I missed was the unplugged monitor cable. After that everything just worked no troubleshooting required. It used to be Plug and Pray now it's Plug and Bore.
Things became modern with the Pentium motherboards and PCI (which would auto-config itself just fine). But anything before that was a nightmare to set up.
So you mentioned that you couldn't see how Sun found the product ship-able without mouse support in the installer. Back then, Microsoft used similar installation images between all of their operating systems. Since most of them were running with older drivers support, some newer PS/2 style mouses did not work during setup but the drivers would be detected and installed after first boot. This was a Microsoft issue during the day, not a Sun issue. So Sun had no control over fixing this without using different hardware on the add on board for the mouse. If you used a Linux OS with PS/2 support during boot such as Mandrake or Corel OS, then the mouse would have worked fine. IBM OS/2 also had built in PS/2 support because it is an IBM hardware standard.
If it can’t handle Windows very well, I’d imagine Linux would hate it too. I wonder if it could boot into puppy Linux or perhaps Damn Small Linux ? This was An interesting video of an interesting yet obscure computer. The idea of an entire PC in place of what a modern GPU would go is a nice concept for a cluster server in a single case.
The fact that these cards are the same idea as the Comodore Amiga PC cards and do essentially the same thing is both funny and amazing. The fact you can buy a core Intel CPU and put in in an Amiga today is bonkers, though no direct tie in to AmigaOS like the original.s
Back in the early 90's I always got the vibe that companies like Sun / Sco / Novell built a lot of their reputation on hubris and exclusivity that put them into a certain 'desire' category but not one that enough pursued directly. They would never be able to be fully mass-market as you should almost feel honoured for being allowed to use their stuff... which was overrated (especially on the UI front). When Windows NT came out it put a lot of focus on availability to the point NT looked like 95 to give people a familiar place to be as well as being Enterprise ready. Not long after Linux took the blinders off Unix to reveal the 'man behind the curtain' was within reach of mere mortals on commodity hardware for free!
Tried these back in the day and similar cards to go into Macs. Didn't take them up because the price and performance just weren't selling them to us. But… One of the maddest things you might hope to never see was: a Mac with a PC card installed on which was loaded Linux running… a skanky Apple System 6 emulator.
What we actually had back in the day was BOCHS. That was how one ran Windows as slow as possible from whatever machine we wanted. It was unusable slow, but it was just so amazing to see a complete Windows desktop *emulated* under another OS. Fun fact: The ReactOS project started up at this time. They still haven't released a working OS some 24+ years later.
I had one in my work Ultra 5 also. It was indeed rough. Basically it was a workstation too slow for the intended task with a PC inside that was also too slow for it's intended task..
this is kind of like doing a GPU pass through on Linux on modern systems with KVM/QEMU and VFIO in that you are adding hardware to your machine to sort of emulate a Windows machine in a way
I had one of these in my Ultra 30 and loved it. My Windows needs were very light at the time. It was enough to run whatever Windows apps I didn't have FOSS alternatives. Both the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 sucked badly vs the Ultra 30. Jumpstart worked great, even back on Solaris2.6 but it was more an option for either large deployments or headless systems, even then you can still do a full install over serial console. Not sure why you'd want to do Jumpstart with just one system, especially if it has a video card.
Jumpstart here was just because I could, and I didn't want to deal with the hassle of doing a lot of disk swapping. Plus I often reset my machines to clear setups, so this makes it easy to do in the future with other suns.
I enjoined this video because it safed me hours of my life to do the same. Despite your described problems I personally still think it’s a fascinating piece of technology. I do not really think trying games as a benchmark makes sense in this case. I think it was never meant for that. So, probably Office was the Killer app for this hardware. Also remembering how “stable” NT was, this is not so bad. Hey, we also had crashes under NT. Win98 was just worse. Cool video!
XP on a real AMD K6-2 is pain and suffering. At least the onboard ESS1868 sounds nice. :P As for Sun's ATA fails. 32GB limit, really guys? That's CHS addressing fail! It looks like the OpenFirmware supports 48-bit LBA, or at least recognizes the drives. Why couldn't Sun figure it out for Solaris?
does the card work in any non-Sun machine? it would be fun to see it running modern Linux as guest or host 🤔. tho maybe implementing the drivers would be a rather dreadful task 😅.
At least the battery is not one of the Varta batteries some people fear because of their tendency to leak as they age. It reminds me of using something a long time ago finding it with the batteries still in but having leaked and the item ruined. Then people wonder why I like to remove batteries from things that I am not using if they are going to be stored for an extended period of time. It is just that I don't like the heartbreak of finding my item damaged from leaky batteries!
Yeah the real problem so many people hit with Jump start was it didnt tell you what mistakes you made. It just sat there waiting for you to realise and fix it. Which is why so many dont have any fond memories of it at all. Lets face it, muddle through and make out like you do were the words of the day back then.
Oh this sums it up way better than I did. I cut a lot of it out, but way too often it would give me the SunOS banner and then die. I spent a good amount of time w/ wireshark trying to figure out what went wrong.
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
Windows 2000 was wonderful, though. At least for those of us whose best alternative option was windows 98se. I still remember it as the first time ever when my PC was stable and reliable. That was a new thing back then.
Coming from NT 3.5X and 4.0, Win 2k pro really was a pleasure to work with. Slim, fast and stable.
arfffff!!!! yes it is and its still pups favorite os with 7 being second and xp being 3rd
@@PhantomWorksStudios i agree with you, windows 98 was my childhood, i got a windows 8 later in 2015 (yes, i had a 98se until 2015)
Edit: i then got a windows 10 in 2018 (i still have that one) but i gave it for my little brother bevause i got a new windows 10 in late 2021 (my current pc)
@@CutieFakeKirby I had windows 2000 all through the xp era,vista era, and begining of 7 era
@@PhantomWorksStudios woaw, that's impressive
The company I worked for had a contract with a large hospital in the area to convert them from an old IBM server and terminals to SUN. This card required PC66 SDRAM to run stable, NT4 needed a script that was supplied by our SUN rep, and the monitors needed to be set to a specific refresh rate to not give us headaches. 3 months after the 2 year conversion, the hospital switched to just NT4 terminals.
NT4 Hydra?
I'v got my popcorn and I'm ready to see this sunny train wreck!
NCommander! You had a lot of patience with that SUNpci!!! 😄 I would scream and shutdown everything in psychic attack after second failed attempt of installing XP
Back in the day my group supported Sun and Windows. I was one of the Windows admins. We got a few of these cards to try out. I could see the potential but wasn't sure how well they would work. Most of our engineers had a Windows PC and a Sun workstation for their work, why not combine them into one machine. I was tasked to load Windows on them because our Unix admins couldn't figure out how to install and configure the OS. Unfortunately there was a big difference in performance, and probably price but I was never told the cost, as it was better to have 2 separate machines occupying an engineers desk space in the end.
Unusual. With the 2001 crash after y2k spending every CIO and their brother obsessed with cheap plastic Dells running XP to replace Unix boxes as for $4000 Dell workstation were a fraction of the cost and could reduce cost by having one integrated platform for everything hence fire the Unix admins for cheap Indian MCSEs in Bangalore. Thankfully the tend of outsourcing stopped as I had to leave IT for several years as employers kept eliminating jobs for h1b1 guys who would screw them up.
The Sun PCii and especially the Sun PCiii were the ones which had adequate levels of performance, having a Socket 370 P3/Celeron at around 600 and 1.4Ghz respectively as opposed to a Super Socket 7 AMD K6-2. Which, for one is a cost reduced K6-3 with less cache and suffers from this massively.
In fact the PCiii 1.4Ghz P3 Tualatin is about as fast as a 32bit x86 part could get at the time of its release. And these CPUs were mainly sold to the server market while desktop got first gen P4 (1.6 - 2.0Ghz with.... *DRUMROLL* RAMBUS which were much slower).
@@timothygibney159 Well, what with horseshit like Sun Blade 100/150 with a 550 - 650Mhz out-dated-on-release USPARC-IIe CPU at starting MSRP of 6500USD, the 4000USD Dell with a P3 at around twice the clock speed destroys Sun hardware. Not to mention AMD64 aka Opteron being released very shortly after the introduction of the Blade 150. So, this was sound financial decision making.
In fact, they should've stopped buying Suns overpriced bullshit when the U5/U10 came out, which like the fore mentioned, is a half-manufacture cobbled together from chips which have fatal hardware bugs.
Sun killed itself by selling bargain basement PC shitware at a 100x markup. AMD64 meant it was game over for Sun's workstations and the UltraSPARC architechture on the desktop.
Sun tried to get on the AMD64 and Opteron hypetrain by introducing a new PC workstation brand using AMD64 platform but the design was rushed and the systems suffered from faulty CPU cards which often failed with intermittent faults that caused system crashes. Dunno what the warranty experience was with Sun at the time, it used to be notoriously good, but I suspect they tried to pull some bullshit and wrangle out of honoring their contract. The system used standard PC BIOS for example and AMDs reference platform chipset etc. It was overall on paper actually a half-way decent system in a stylish case that had equitable build quality to contemporary mid-tier Dell, Compaq and IBM systems. But, it didn't sell well. So, their jump turned out to be fall on their face at speed.
I can't remember did it come with Solaris x64 on release or was it stuck with the 32bit version or how that story went... It most likely did not and this was one of the reasons nobody gave two shits. Other reason is marketing was neglible. Not Invented Here syndrome at its best.
They did later on come out with a competitive line of Intel Core 2 Xeon based servers and I think some workstations(?). The Servers were built into same kind of cases with identical designs as the T1 and later UltraSPARC servers and the very last UltraSPARC workstation the Ultra 45. Which had for example PCIe bus and finally industry mainstream standard memory, that wasn't outdated. They released in an identical case a AMD64 workstation named the Sun Ultra 20. Which didn't sell any better than the short lived brand the first AMD64 Opteron PCs were introduced as.
@@Meton12765the K6-2 had no internal L2 cache, while the K6-3 had 256KB of internal L2 cache. AMD did release the K6-2+ sometime later, although that was essentially a K6-3 with half of the cache disabled.
FWIW, these cards (at least 3 generations of those) were aimed also at servers - so a single Sun-branded box in a branch office could serve different Solaris services natively (NFS/CIFS homedirs, mail, etc.) as well as be an MS AD controller also natively.
I love how every project consists in you entering a valley of tears and then emerging victorious.
This Solaris graphical user interface looks so cool, there's something about that aesthetic that I love, I even find it ... nostalgic.
jurassic park feels
@@juniorsilvabroadcast That was an SGI Irix machine.
it was a turd
@@thewiirocks i know
@@juniorsilvabroadcast …this! This is UNIX!”
You're way too rough on the machine. I bought an Ultra 5 in 1998 with a SunPCI for only $2,500. $2,000 for the machine and $500 for the SunPCI card. The correct software to run was Solaris 8 and Windows NT 4.0. With that combination, this system friggin' rocked! In 1998, that is.
I could run Forte4Java (today known as Netbeans), Mozilla nightly, MP3 music in the background, various command line programs (including that nightly compile of Mozilla), a P2P program, and numerous other desktop utilities on the Solaris side. All simultaneously with little to no slowdown. On the NT4 side, I ran Office and occasionally IE5. I tried installing IE5 on Solaris, but Microsoft's installer f**ked up my Solaris desktop. That pissed me off so much that I trashed the thing and never looked back.
Overall, I loved my Ultra 5/SunPCI back in the day. It was a beast for daily development tasks. I'm sorry you're having some challenges here, but you're hardly using an original shipment with MediaKit software. You have a cobbled-together solution that doesn't really represent the system of the time.
I had this setup too but much later and not as my main computer. Maybe in 2007. I think I was running Win98 on the card some years later just to test it. I think I was mostly running OpenBSD, not Solaris, hence I couldn't even utilize the fancy card.
Amazing as always. That you got XP running in the end is above and beyond the call of duty! I think the production of this video might give more enjoyment that this card ever gave during its production lifetime.
I could see the appeal of PHB IT management wondering why can't we buy plastic cheap Dell workstations running Windows 2k to replace these? What a pita if you had 100 of them to support
Kyoom?
The determination to get XP running was amazing, hats off to you!
Is it possible sun intentionally broke windows disk manager cause they didn't trust it having access to the shared drives?
Cause I know I'd do that if I were sun lol
When I joined a computer science dept in 2000 everyone had an Ultra 5 on their desk with a sunpci card running NT4. It worked fine as all it was used for was working with MS office files. A couple of years in and we moved to PCs running Redhat or XP.
Oh yeah! You got me there! I had this setup plus the Creator 3D Graphicscard and 1GB Ram. And yes, despite its weaknesses on the Windows side, I loved that machine more than anything else I previously had (with exception the AlphaAXP pci).
Running XP on a K6/2 is a feat in itself, not to mention the fiddling with drivers and custom installers you had to do. Still, part of me wants to see this taken to the cursed, horrible end.
K6? Oh my! \m/ \m/ /m\ /m\ . I suffered through one, and then finally got the cache COAST
@@joeturner7959 K6/2. There was no more COAST with these, i believe. In fact, the SS7 boards all came with at least 256KB of L2, and the K6/2+ and K6/3 also had L2 cache on them.
XP on a K6 would be downright torture!
@@andreewert6576
The K6-2 had a K6-2E still only 64 cache.
The K6-3 had 64K L1/256K2 and a 20 byte prefetch decode pipeline.
CPUworld says that both parts @400Mhz, w/100 Mhz FSB are not diffrent, but they were night and day in performance.
pretty much, it's annoying to even install Windows 2000 with any SP's on this as well. And even if he had gone with a newer Solaris version, it would have created other workarounds jut to get the card working as this SunPCIi card isn't supported past Solaris 9 anyway, so you have to tweak its drivers for Solaris 10 or 11. A slightly better route is getting the next gen of this card in one of these. It has a Celeron 600Mhz, can run windows 10, has an option of using a separate Ethernet from the host Ultra5/10 machine but does support passing audio to the system so you can just have audio through it.
Just thought it worth posting that you can actually install another processor into the SunPCI Penguin card and get CMOV support.
Such as the Cyrix MII/M2 like the MII-233GP or others.
Granted it's not nearly as fast as the AMD K6-2 400.
But it's an i686 level processor (Mostly a 486 that cheats)
What's not to love XD
It is a standard Socket 7, but considering how slow it already is, I don't think we can spare the performance.
@@NCommander Yes the Cyrix is *very* slow. About the only worthwhile upgrade would be the K6-2+ 570ACZ with unlocked L2 cache.
But even then, the SunPCI BIOS doesn't enable the L2 cache of the 2+ processors and it has to be done manually with software.
Maybe a Pentium overdrive would do the job?
@@NCommander The CPU isn't the problem. A K6-2 400 can run all of that stuff with no issue.
The problem is with Sun's dreadful implementation of getting a PC-on-a-card to work with their workstation. Apple did better with their versions, using much weaker CPUs that that K6-2.
This is an example of the reasons why Sun started to go downhill about that time and no longer exists today. If Apple could make a PC-on-a-card work with their janky classic Mac OS, then doing it with a then-modern OS like Solaris should have been doable.
Do you know if these can be used by themselves, as ordinary PC systems-on-a-card outside of a Sun workstation?
@@johncate9541 I have these cards, tried configuring them in a different PC under Linux. But the logic of the PCI-to-PCI bridge chip and the hardware bringup process used on the Sun requires some intensive reverse engineering to make work outside the Sun ecosystem. Not something to be taken lightly.
I have been recently been suffering from a schadenfreude deficiency. Watching you struggle has been nothing short of a miracle cure.
The fact this has so good of Sound Blaster support makes me think this was more meant to run Windows 9x instead of anything NT based
If it has Windows 2000 (in any shape or form) I approve.
Reminds me of installing XP on a 12" PowerBook for no reason whatsoever, of course it took ages to install and was totally unusable.
Excited to see this!
EDIT: This was excellent, and exactly as terrible as I could have hoped for!
The moment you said it was the updated DR-DOS (i.e. the OS I grew up on), I got interested. When you mentioned that you downloaded the games from GOG, I knew you were toast. Those games are preinstalled, and configured for MS-DOS compatibility (because that's what DOSBox emulates). DR-DOS does not handle graphics or TSRs in the same way as MS-DOS, and unless you have access to the install media to set them up to run on DR-DOS, you're kinda toast.
I just love that they called a card that goes into PCI slot "SunPCi". What a wonderful name.
Jokes aside, your patience is just incredible, especially the fact that you've got XP working on the card that was never meant to run XP. I would've gave up as soon as I hitted BSoD :D
For video compatibility problems, my guess is that SunPCi software emulates the entire VGA card. I don't think Sun would've put actual VGA capture hardware inside the card, as it would increase the price of the card. When you pass '-vga' to software, it probably tells card to use actual VGA chip instead of software emulation.
And for storage, they might be using some kind of proprietary protocol between driver(and BIOS) and host. This would explain why DOS applications work just fine, while booting Windows NT as-is just crash during boot: Windows NT would try to find the boot device through IDE, but in reality there's no actual IDE devices. I think the lack of mouse support during WinNT installation is going to be similar situation as well.
You really have to admire the sheer determination that goes into a project like this. Kudos!
Fight-club programmers edition.
Honestly I just setup a SunPCi II in a V240 and run Sun Ray clients off of it. Really didn't have any issues including using a Solaris VM as a jumpstart server, installing the Sun Ray server software, or getting the SunPCi card to work. Windows 98 installation went flawless the first time. I'm using all supported hardware and software. Literally can't complain about it.
Qemu .. Q-emu. There's even an Emu on the icon.
This brings back so many memories. We put these cards in “Sun Blade” and Ultra 5 workstations and they were such a pain. We wound up replacing most with a remote desktop solution.
And yes, thank you for reminding me of Jumpstart. 😝
I managed an engineering college's 100+ Sun Solaris workstations and dozen or so servers using jumpstart during this era and I don't recall there being any issues with it. I'd been a Solaris admin for several years at this point though. There's some set up of course, but you could completely automate the install and configuration of Solaris. I could send out a student to do installs or just have the users run the installer themselves.
Sounds interesting. Well, I got my hands on Solaris only in 2005 when 10 was out. And I was amazed with how much documentation SUN had for the software. At that time I was managing a couple of FreeBSD gateways for sharing Internet between offices and always was amazed with its Handbook, but then Solaris appeared to be the bible of all what I had previously seen. 🙂
i love that after the sunpci gives you all the signs that it doesn't want to play nice, you go a step beyond and install XP. love the determination and the hacker mentality!
My first computer was a Commodore64, just updated my new gaming computer to a 12700k and 3080ti. Can you imagine. I don't missed the 90's PC world.
Yaknow... For all the discomforts you describe... The quality and integration of this would have blown my mind at the time. And I was running a K6 PC and SparcStation Classic at the time.
What amazed me about these old Sun machines is how slow they were despite all the fancy hardware. I had a Sun Blade 2500 with dual USIIIi 1.2ghz chips decked out with 8GB of dual channel DDR memory, XVR-1200 graphics and Seagate 15K SCSI hard drive but it still felt sluggish and the obligatory ioquake III on sparc didn't run too well either. Left wondering if all that great hardware was let down by the infamous "Slowlaris 10" OS!
at least my blade 150 runs quake III super fast at 1600x1200 using the xvr600 pci
Around 2001 I was running a lab full of Ultra 10s and 5s for CFD plus my own desktop PC (P3 running Linux.) When the HDDs started failing in the SUNs I installed Linux on a few of them and got a very decent performance improvement for our workload. Mind you, my PC was still much faster than any of them despite being a fraction of the price!
I had this exact machine and PCi card when I worked at Sun in the early 2000s... as I remember I mostly used it for uping my Seti@Home stats. :)
In my knowledge, the idea for those cards were more in the Sun Solaris Server world. Many companies and corporations were Microsoft-infested and based everything on Acrive Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, ...
That board allowed having a minimal Windows NT / Windows 2000 installation to have an Active Directory for the users, and Sun had some Kerberos parameters to let Sun's NFSv4 Kerberos implementation play with AD.
11:05 The 8.3 versions of filenames & directories are quite bizarre in this setup. Note the MICROSOF.* directories, for instance, rather than MICROS~1, etc. I wonder how much this impacts the file system issues you ran into.
That's due to VFAT mapping being patented by Microsoft I suspect. The Windows CD however has all files in 8.3 format, and I did try multiple things like copying them across as well.
@@NCommander To a small extent, some of the 8.3 names can be controlled within certain limitations inside of various Windows versions. Outside Windows, though, you can generate some short names that wouldn't ordinarily be legal inside of Windows. I've seen scenarios where *NIX will embed colons and other characters which Windows NT will interpret as the token to separate the file name from the alternative data stream, for instance. In a nutshell, it can get really messy when multiple OSes touch the filenames.
They had it mastered by Sun Chimera card, but you might need a PCI-X enabled workstation, a Sun Blade perhaps.
I had an Ultra10 I purchased for about $30 a few years ago which was one of the biggest headaches to get working in terms of my retro machines. I ended up giving it away but I think I should've revisited it or even track down a SunPCI for some double-cursed computing
Thanks for making this video - the amount of work you have been willing to put in in order to push the PCi card beyond its software support limits is just incredible. It does feel like you got 99% the way to the cursed zone, and it seems that all you need now is to recompile QEMU for a smaller x86 instruction subset than what it was built for. That's a lot less effort than what you have already done. I encourage you to not give up yet!
Now, if you want something *ridiculous* - I did this on a Sun Blade 150, for reference - run Solaris 10 on the metal, Solaris 8 with MAE in a zone displayed on a second monitor, and a SunPCI on a third with Windows, and *really* confuse people. For even further confusion, run LuBu OpenMagic under Solaris 10 (a repackaging of OPENSTEP for Solaris to work right on 10).
The soundblaster compatibility should be outstanding - the chip on the SunPCI is an ESS 1868 Audiodrive, which is basically a Soundblaster Pro 2.0 plus an ESS-specific 16-bit sound mode.
Reminds me of the PC x86 cards for the Amiga a decade prior. Also, ATI? I would've preferred an S3 Trio64V+. ATI Rage back then was synonymous with crash and buggy. I quit ATI after Mach 64 and didn't buy ATI again until the original Radeon.
This video makes me feel better about spending $1,000.00 on a Gateway computer 500mhz with windows 98 se in 1999-2000 😆
Which turned into the rotten pumpkin in 2 years 🤐 But it was a right decision as it was possible to upgrade to XP and drag its butt up until AthlonX2/Core2Duo
Am I the only person saying "Q-Emu"?
No. I have no idea what inspired the pronunciation here. :-)
it depends on the native language you speak. Mine is also hard or soft [Qu/Q-yu]-[emoo]
Great video! You should make a ghost image of the xp machine so future users can just apply the ghost image to their machines instead of going through the same process.
Ghost 8.0 for DOS is my favorite DOS program.
Windows 2000 was rock solid. It's still the most stable OS Microsoft has ever created. I have NEVER had a crash with 2000 no matter how hard or for how long I beat on it
I had it break on me a couple times, but it was damn hard - especially compared to the 98SE I'd previously been using. One of the best OSs I've ever used.
need to watch it twice or more... i just got the u5 ... my u10 and my u45 out of the basement. the u5 had a sunpci. but i never got it to run. i get no screen output now. the u45 with sol10 just resets when starting sunpci. ok, just installed a patchcluster. need to try harder. sol7 and sol8 failed gratefully. i need sol10 on my u5/10 too. if everything is up and running i spent them to our retro museum. yay. nc channel is an endless source of knowledge :D thank you.
These were often used with VGA switch boxes since it was... challenging... to use the shared framebuffer mode.
Blandest??? You've got Sun workstation which can also run Windows applications! This is a technological feat to achieve. Sure, there would be quirks and limitations, but how many vendors achieved similar thing?
I have used Windows 2000 for many years. It was a great OS.
Nice, I had one of these once upon a time from the university recycling room in an Ultra 10 but the hard drives were removed and I didn't have any Solaris media so I never did anything with it, just ran Linux and BSD's on the Ultra 10.
I have been waiting a SunPCI card video! I have one sitting idle in my Ultra 5 (my SunPCI card never came with disks)! I can't wait to duplicate your video! I also have a spare Ultra 10, but the Ultra 5 takes up less space on my desk.
If you use Solaris 9, you need to change some links so the SunPCI kernel driver can be loaded
@@NCommander If it's not too much to ask, would you be able to upload the SunPCI CD as a ISO to the Internet Archive? Those CDs and disk contents are starting to fade off the internet. SUNWspci_13 can be found, but not the original disk. Kevin Hooke has some great blog posts too if you ever want to try this process on Solaris 10. Loved the video!
This was like the PC horror show! Another example of why you should never combine OS-es in any way on a single computer. Bless you for your endless patience for making this! Amazing how many errors you got through, man... amazing!
I don't think my bank balance can take watching any more of your videos as I really need one of these now...
Ncommander: releases normal length video
Me: pog
See you all in 7 months
Keep in mind this was for corporate environments. Not PC enthusiasts. Ssh was not out yet so no port X11 forwarding with telnet. You needed a second Unix workstation at their desk. Bill Gates said most Unix users had a 2nd machine at their desk so why not use Autocad and Light wave with Windows NT soon to be Win2K with one PC? The sluggish experience was normal for any 1997 era PC as we are spoiled with ssds, gigs of ram, and cores running 100x faster. Waiting 30 seconds for MS access to load was normal. This killed the Unix cad market but gave birth to Linux as this was bad. For a $1500 PC from 1999 you could simply buy a second 20 gig drive for $175 and dual boot a real Unix like FreeBSD or Linux and keep Windows NT or 98 like I did back then.
Accelerated 3d GPUs rather than video cards out the last nail in the coffin for Sun as well as Lintel and ssh made owning a crappy super expensive sgi or sun box unpractical. Anyway in 1998 this was to run Outlook and Office while you ran CAD jobs or system admin work on the side at a university or office. Nothing sexy
Neat video! I happen to own a SunBlade 100, with a SunPCI II (and a SunPCI in a bin somewhere).
I need successor of SunPCI with ARM SoC like raspberry pi.
It'll be used to aid android development, emulation, imagine possibilities
Many years ago I worked for a large company that had a lot of servers including the legendary SUN with uptime of more than 10 years without interruptions. Just finish a basic cleaning of the hardware and turn on the Server. It should be working without problems until today running Debian.
Finally the SunPCI video with extra cursed computing, I have to watch this right away :D
I usually avoided webstart for installs, which could be done from one of the software cd's rather than the install cd. Jumpstart was really powerful and I found it easier to deal with than pixieboot. At a previous job I had one of these cards in my Sun Blade 1500. That made it easy to deal with the required Windows tools but I could live entirely in the Unix environment.
Wow! Impressed you've got so far and deep.
Wow, you have a lot of knowledge in this! Another great video
Michael, I am not even two minutes into the video and I already know it's going to be as captivating as always. Your channel is really a gold mine!
I became obsessed with Sun hardware in the late 90s. I eventually obtained a sparcstation 20 and an Ultra 30. Solaris, without a doubt, was the absolute worst to administer in those days. Like straight torture. Eventually I ended running FreeBSD on them since I had it with the platform.
Ages ago I worked for UCLA (a nice place to work other than the politics). During student move in we basically not only fixed PCs but also helped get them on the internet (which was pretty new to most people back then). At the time many PCs still didn't come with network adapters. This one kid pulls up in a new red ferrari and has a brand new Sun 20 in the back. I'm going to guess he was giving the car and PC by his parents. Many of the PCs seemed to be the dreaded gateway and packard bells but several of them were better PCs were far more expensive than I could afford.
Excellent as always. I love your patience and voice. Lovely :3
Ultra 5/10 had a horribly bad IDE chipset (CMD64x), still wondering if one could have replaced them with a UDMA capable one - you even see the "DMA2" message there, this is one of the critical & worst product decisions of IT history. I also still got the training materials for Sol9 / Jumpstart stuff.
Cool! I wonder if some version of Linux might be easier to get running on this.
Nope, doesn't see the hard drive. There are ways to do it with an NFS root from the Solaris host.
@@NCommander good god the performance must be horrifying
@@NCommander do it do it do it do it
@@NCommander Alternative option is to connect a HDD over IDE directly to the card, but that might be less fun I think.
Had came across some Sun workstations & servers back in my eWaste job. Never knew where we got them, but I thought the case was pretty cool. I forget which model we had, but we came across a unit that had nothing working except for the PSU & RAM.
That was like trying to dig a hole in dry sand. Working with Socket 7's. I found it a nightmare trying to get PCI bridges to play nice with dos games like Ultima 7 and sound cards that expect true ISA busses.
I had such devices. At the time it was indeed much better than software emulation and even using a virtual machine. I had played modern games on it without too much issues with a second monitor. Granted it was a $500 card that gave a $400 separate PC experience.
Windows xp was quite different to 2000. in the early days it was a nightmare to get xp running on some older machines but it was possible
They are almost exactly the same under the hood. XP did require CMOV to be present, but there's not much else different other than the front end. Win2K is Windows NT 5.0 internally, and WinXP is Windows NT 5.1.
@@johncate9541 Funnily enough, Windows _7_ was internally 6.1.
It's funny that you mention FrameMaker as I found a Boxed Copy of FrameMaker 3.0 at a Thrift Store
Hey Ncommander! Congratulations, your vídeos are Just amazing! I'm here for nearly 2 hours jumping from one to the next hahaha
So many memories, I gave up long before you did trying to get the thing up and going with the selection of "supported" operating systems, but I remember facing all of the same problems. Unfortunately I didn't get to try the original SunPC SBUS card that came with a 486DX CPU and could run Win3.11 apparently quite well.
Win2k was just awesome! It was the first time Windows was truly stable.
LOL! I almost had an obsession with those Sun ultra. because our country's №1 IT magazine printed articles and ads about Sun's hardware. But it was poor eastern europe and there was no market for them except growing banks and tech universities in the capital. So once I got Solaris 2.5 x86 CDs but failed to install it in 1998 due to lack of skills and experience or just the CD set wasn't full and was broken. Then it was such a disappointment to have Solaris 10x86 running in Jan 2005. Comparing to my improved user and admin experience with RedHat Linux and freeBSD. I used to think that Motif and CDE were way better & powerful monsters comparing to Windows98.... And then finally my dreams let me touch them in reality. What a crap I felt!! Lol!
I mean they were in comparison to their contemporaries (Windows 3.1). Windows 95's shell was a vast improvement but the underlying design of the thing was also trash by comparison. Namely, the UI elements were draw in kernel space. They finally made the jump to 32 bit, at least, but memory protection for it was still kind of crude and it had all the flaws of the early OS designs from Microsoft. It really wasn't until later NTs and windows 2000 did stability really improve and they started to make reasonable design decisions that their UNIX big brothers had been for a while. And that still had the legacy cruft of the Chicago shell design.
@@BrianMoore-uk6js Exactly!!! There are pics in this video, probably it was SUNN's press release showing off bicycle in CAD these pictures stuck so much in my memory!! That ad made me think that Solaris was quite a powerful engineer's desktop and fancy looking StarOffice5. My imagination put too many colors in one thought. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@kungfujesus06 Give Windows 95 a break, the poor thing had to fit in just 4MB of RAM. Meanwhile, a real OS like Windows NT 4.0 required 16MB of RAM. So, of course Windows 95 had to do some things like UI drawing and font handling in the kernel and of course didn't have full memory protection.
@@kungfujesus06 Still, Windows 95 holds a special place in my heart because UI-wise it was years ahead of anything else. I mean, more than 25 years later, Desktop Linux still doesn't have something like device manager where you can right-click on a device (any device) and load drivers from a directory. Also, when paired with a nice 3D accelerator card, a Windows 95 PC felt like a window to the future.
@Zaydan Naufal It was further eastward out of EU.
But in the 90s even installing a sound card drove you mad because it used the same interrupt as your printer and you never noticed why the heck it won't work and the driver won't tell you either it just won't sound. Fast forward to today I built my application server the only thing that I missed was the unplugged monitor cable. After that everything just worked no troubleshooting required. It used to be Plug and Pray now it's Plug and Bore.
Things became modern with the Pentium motherboards and PCI (which would auto-config itself just fine). But anything before that was a nightmare to set up.
So you mentioned that you couldn't see how Sun found the product ship-able without mouse support in the installer. Back then, Microsoft used similar installation images between all of their operating systems. Since most of them were running with older drivers support, some newer PS/2 style mouses did not work during setup but the drivers would be detected and installed after first boot. This was a Microsoft issue during the day, not a Sun issue. So Sun had no control over fixing this without using different hardware on the add on board for the mouse. If you used a Linux OS with PS/2 support during boot such as Mandrake or Corel OS, then the mouse would have worked fine. IBM OS/2 also had built in PS/2 support because it is an IBM hardware standard.
Aimed at Server applications. They still use Solaris but very lightly at Oracle, still with the Sparc chip too.
Whoooo the Ultima Soundtrack hits hard!
If it can’t handle Windows very well, I’d imagine Linux would hate it too. I wonder if it could boot into puppy Linux or perhaps Damn Small Linux ?
This was An interesting video of an interesting yet obscure computer. The idea of an entire PC in place of what a modern GPU would go is a nice concept for a cluster server in a single case.
Consider Sun were a Unix developer this explains a lot of things.
The fact that these cards are the same idea as the Comodore Amiga PC cards and do essentially the same thing is both funny and amazing. The fact you can buy a core Intel CPU and put in in an Amiga today is bonkers, though no direct tie in to AmigaOS like the original.s
I love watching your retro software adventures!
I got myself a Sparc Ultra 5. I'm looking at getting hold of a SunPCi just for the hell of it. It's just so beautifully silly.
Back in the early 90's I always got the vibe that companies like Sun / Sco / Novell built a lot of their reputation on hubris and exclusivity that put them into a certain 'desire' category but not one that enough pursued directly. They would never be able to be fully mass-market as you should almost feel honoured for being allowed to use their stuff... which was overrated (especially on the UI front).
When Windows NT came out it put a lot of focus on availability to the point NT looked like 95 to give people a familiar place to be as well as being Enterprise ready.
Not long after Linux took the blinders off Unix to reveal the 'man behind the curtain' was within reach of mere mortals on commodity hardware for free!
Windows 2000 was my favorite for a long time, went from daily win 98 bsods to none ever.
You say "meh" but this was top notch in Latin América in the 90s. Affordable compared with other workstations and powerful enough for most needs.
The PC part was still garbage, which is what I'm referring to.
Tried these back in the day and similar cards to go into Macs. Didn't take them up because the price and performance just weren't selling them to us. But…
One of the maddest things you might hope to never see was: a Mac with a PC card installed on which was loaded Linux running… a skanky Apple System 6 emulator.
What a gorgeous font!
That cursed computing idea was a brilliant one :D Too bad qemu didn't run. Maybe some time in the future as episode 2?
What we actually had back in the day was BOCHS. That was how one ran Windows as slow as possible from whatever machine we wanted. It was unusable slow, but it was just so amazing to see a complete Windows desktop *emulated* under another OS.
Fun fact: The ReactOS project started up at this time. They still haven't released a working OS some 24+ years later.
Oh sweet new NCommander video
I had this on my Ultra 5. It was rough.
I had one in my work Ultra 5 also. It was indeed rough. Basically it was a workstation too slow for the intended task with a PC inside that was also too slow for it's intended task..
this is kind of like doing a GPU pass through on Linux on modern systems with KVM/QEMU and VFIO in that you are adding hardware to your machine to sort of emulate a Windows machine in a way
I had one of these in my Ultra 30 and loved it. My Windows needs were very light at the time. It was enough to run whatever Windows apps I didn't have FOSS alternatives. Both the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 sucked badly vs the Ultra 30. Jumpstart worked great, even back on Solaris2.6 but it was more an option for either large deployments or headless systems, even then you can still do a full install over serial console. Not sure why you'd want to do Jumpstart with just one system, especially if it has a video card.
Jumpstart here was just because I could, and I didn't want to deal with the hassle of doing a lot of disk swapping. Plus I often reset my machines to clear setups, so this makes it easy to do in the future with other suns.
I enjoined this video because it safed me hours of my life to do the same. Despite your described problems I personally still think it’s a fascinating piece of technology. I do not really think trying games as a benchmark makes sense in this case. I think it was never meant for that. So, probably Office was the Killer app for this hardware. Also remembering how “stable” NT was, this is not so bad. Hey, we also had crashes under NT. Win98 was just worse. Cool video!
This video feels like it could have been made by Michael MJD, so good job on that!
XP on a real AMD K6-2 is pain and suffering. At least the onboard ESS1868 sounds nice. :P
As for Sun's ATA fails. 32GB limit, really guys? That's CHS addressing fail! It looks like the OpenFirmware supports 48-bit LBA, or at least recognizes the drives. Why couldn't Sun figure it out for Solaris?
I was deeply unamused to have to deal with the 32 GiB geometry limit just to hit the 137 GiB limit.
does the card work in any non-Sun machine? it would be fun to see it running modern Linux as guest or host 🤔. tho maybe implementing the drivers would be a rather dreadful task 😅.
At least the battery is not one of the Varta batteries some people fear because of their tendency to leak as they age. It reminds me of using something a long time ago finding it with the batteries still in but having leaked and the item ruined. Then people wonder why I like to remove batteries from things that I am not using if they are going to be stored for an extended period of time. It is just that I don't like the heartbreak of finding my item damaged from leaky batteries!
I would love to see Ncommander go crazy on Solaris :)
Yeah the real problem so many people hit with Jump start was it didnt tell you what mistakes you made. It just sat there waiting for you to realise and fix it.
Which is why so many dont have any fond memories of it at all.
Lets face it, muddle through and make out like you do were the words of the day back then.
Oh this sums it up way better than I did. I cut a lot of it out, but way too often it would give me the SunOS banner and then die. I spent a good amount of time w/ wireshark trying to figure out what went wrong.