Re: 80386 support

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> Probably.  And if power consumed were all that mattered, most of us
>> wouldn't be using old VAXen at all.  There are probably almost as
>> many reasons to run the things as there are people running them; I
>> don't have a complete list of my own reasons, but three of the more
>> prominent pieces I'm aware of include emotional attachment to the
>> platform [...], a desire to check the code I run on a wide variety
>> of hardware, and the fun of surmounting a self-imposed challenge.

> Interesting - your answer above leads me to pose a question - would
> you feel the same nostalgia/attachment/satisfaction using an emulator
> for the old hardware?

The same?  No.  It would partially but not completely satisfy the
desires that lead me to keep and run the old hardware.  It would also,
of course, have various attractants and repellents of its own.

Different people will, of course, disagree on the details; for me, the
differences are worth keeping, and using, the real thing.

(Also, emulators are hard to get right, especially when, as here, they
have to be pretty much bug-compatible with the real thing.  I set out
to build a KA630 emulator, once, and promptly discovered a quirk of the
real thing I'd never run into before, but which the ROM code depended
on...and then, shortly afterward, ran into another detail, which was
not unexpected but was mildly difficult to emulate.  I stalled at about
that point; I may pick it up again someday.)

> We very rarely used to sit in machine rooms beside VAXen or PDP11s,
> so I'm trying to get a handle on the attachment to hardware.

Perhaps _you_ rarely did.  I fairly commonly did, especially the
KA630-based MicroVAX-IIs that I feel the most emotional attachment to.

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