Guest post by A great intro to a classic platform by way of emulation and optionally even adapting a real physical keyboard:
Back in the late 80s and through the 90s, Unix workstations were super powerful, super cool, and super expensive. If you were making 3D graphics or developing applications, you wanted a high-performance workstation and Sun made some of the best ones. But unless you worked for a huge company, university, or government, they were probably too expensive.
More than twenty years later, we have much more powerful and affordable computers, so let’s emulate the old systems and see what it was like to run some of the coolest computers you could buy in the 90s.
This is another in the series from the same author as the recently linked virtual NeXT machine, that also includes an entry for a virtual BeBox to experience BeOS.
The BeBox is not really a BeBox… it’s an Intel PC. The NeXT machine is not really a NeXT machine, it is an OpenSTEP machine running on Intel. Neither are very hard to set up, you are just emulating a PC. There’s no way to emulate a functional BeBox, as that has dual PowerPC processors, and there is a 68000 Emulator for NeXT hardware called Pervious that they could have used. Kind of sad that the people writing these articles are using bottom feeding techniques to dupe people in to assuming they have some amazing revelation.
Fair enough, but on the other hand, what’s the advantage of emulating non-Intel if an Intel option exists? What’s strange this article with Solaris is that it’s had Intel builds for a very long time and a lot of its software ecosystem exists on Intel, so it’s not clear what the advantage is of emulating SPARC.
One frustration I’ve had with Solaris Intel though is it’s limited to 640x480x16 until Solaris 10. It’s possible to have a Solaris 8 VM and interact with it over X, but that requires getting the server to include the fonts etc that Solaris expects. Solaris 10 on Intel is still quite good for anyone who wants to relive CDE.
Actually you probably just didn’t configure the older versions right. I had higher resolutions under older Solaris x86 versions working fine.
The issue is that Solaris 10 added generic VESA support. Prior to that, higher resolutions are possible, so long as you’re running on a video card that has a Solaris x86 driver. Oracle still has the list posted:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-7720/x86hcl-3486521/index.html
VirtualBox doesn’t emulate any of these cards. It may be true that another piece of virtualization software can – S3 and CL cards have been emulated for this purpose before. Although Oracle bought VirtualBox, they didn’t update previous Solaris releases to work well with it, nor update VirtualBox to emulate a video card that Solaris desires.
Another option would be to compile Xorg in Solaris x86, which would have broader hardware support.
Well – authenticity. You are not really running NextStep if you are running OpenStep. The API is different, for a start. It’s like running MacOS X and claiming you are running OpenStep. Yes, technically Cocoa is based on OpenStep. But it is a bit of a stretch.
BeOS and the BeBox had a whole life before Intel. The Developer Releases of BeOS were extremely different, for example. There is no way to emulate any of that. Also – BeOS circa the Preview Release era had a port of Java. So running PR2 is actually quite interesting.
With NeXT – almost all the interesting software was for black hardware, and therefore was all 68000. Intel came at the end of the NeXT lifetime, so there is a lot less interesting and quirky stuff. The “white” hardware era of NeXT was actually the prelude to the demise of the platform.