if the add-in card is running it's own ram and your envisioning this as something you'll vnc into you might as well just buy a seperate x86 system, stick 2 motherboards in the case, and pretend they are the same computer, vnc'ing into the x86 machine when necessary
X86/legacy support via add-on cards?
Caleb Hall
Christian Baker
Sounds great, now you know what would be even better? Shrinking that motherboard down to a smaller size so I could fit it into a standard connector, like I don't know, a PCIe slot. Then I'd have the added advantage of being able to use it in any machine I wanted. I could even drop in multiple cards if I felt the need and needed all that processing power.
Oh wait, that's exactly what this thread is about. I know I can do this with multiple machines. I think you're all missing the point which is: With an add-on card you could make it a standard feature. You could take it one step further and make it normalfag friendly and integrate it with a new OS on a non-botnet platform. You could even sell these machines to normalfags who'd buy them because they know their old games/software will run on it because of that nifty add-on card.
But I guess all that is dumb. Let's all argue about which license is the cuck license, suck Stallman cock, and talk about how GNU HURD is going to come out any day now and change literally everything.
Liam Thompson
Some versions don't, but the high end ones do. You would have to get an early 486.
Levi Wood
The latest Isaiah architecture chips were pretty good. Athlon 64 level IPC (but with lowish clocks), up to quad-core. Quite functional for a basic desktop.
Levi Lopez
SL-enhanced models have SMM, the others apparently don't have it: pcguide.com
Ergo, I guess you're safe with a DX4.
Luis Rivera
Wouldn't it be possible to get one of those old Mac PC cards to run in a modern non-x86 mobo?
Dominic Diaz
Aren't those proprietary and/or super obscure? Don't think you can get anything non-x86 with ISA slots nowadays.
Jason Nelson
If I recall correctly, the firmware on those cards may only work with Macs. I don't own any Power Macs with PCI slots or any Mac expansion cards, so I wouldn't know.
As for the hardware onboard the cards, it appears to be a standard Socket 7 system- just running off a PCI slot. I think you could even upgrade the RAM and CPU with standard parts.
Zachary Jackson
Why are you so adamant about it being in a card form factor? It only made sense back in the Macintosh days due to hardware limitations that required the video port be on the card to switch seamlessly between OSes.
Look at this diagram for the Mustang-200 card, the PCIe 4x lane is wasted on it. It needs their custom OS to run on the card and software in order to turn the host into a 10GbE router to be used properly. It's a stupid idea.
If someone using a RISC-V or POWER9 based computer absolutely needed to run something on x86 hardware instead of emulation the obvious answer would be a cheap PC stick. If you want a more elegant solution get a USB 3.0 PCIe card that has an internal USB port and plug it in there.
Xavier Fisher
I want them to be able to run in tandem or separately. I realize this card isn't exactly what I want and I'd never shill for it. It seems like a dumb idea but it does have the hardware in the form factor that I'm seeking.
It doesn't have to be a PCI port but it does need to interface with the mainboard/CPU somehow. I am not saying you need to limit it to just x86 either, you could have similar cards with a variety of things: MIPS, RISC-V, a M68K, Z80s, FM chips. x86 seems like the killer application though because you gain so much software support along with it.
Your argument boils down to software you can't run natively is shit and you shouldn't use it anyway. That's great but you'll never see mass adoption of a new architecture without support for the old. Emulation simply isn't going to cover everything and when it doesn't a cheap add-on card starts to look like a good option. Normalfags aren't going to pick up another computer or have a server laying around.
If such a thing exists it's going into my next build simply because I need real x86 hardware for a variety of things I do. Some will eventually be workable on POWER9 but until that software is optimized it doesn't make sense not to run it on the real deal. Plus I can think of a lot of tasks I could use it for while it was idle. It basically becomes free processing power at that point and you could utilize for a bunch of stuff outside of this one use case.