4 Oct
2007
4 Oct
'07
2:58 p.m.
On 4 Oct 2007 at 16:09, der Mouse wrote:
I'm not hardware-antipathic; I know which end of a
soldering iron to
hold [the cool one :)]
Well, you're a notch above me--in my brief (at least in geological
terms) life, I've picked up one of the old 100 watt "American Beauty"
irons by the wrong end a couple of times.
Since I've taken to soldering with an acetylene torch, I've become
more careful.
- Speed - emulators are usually slower than the real
thing. An
emulated setup capable of matching the real thing's speed will be
substantially more expensive.
It depends on the vintage of the original equipment and the emulator.
A lot of the hardware I'm interested in is quite old and I can watch
all of the YouTube videos I care to while running multiple emulators
at 10x-over 100x "real thing" speed.
And I don't have to fool with noisy equipment with klunky peripherals
(particularly printers) when emulation is used. Some may feel joy
when seeing an original IBM 1620 console typewriter work, but it
always struck me as something ready to fly apart at any moment
(particularly when returning the carriage).
- Hardware compat - I have some oddball SBus cards. I
daresay
PCI-to-SBus, ISA-to-SBus, etc, bridges exist, but they will be
expensive, probably difficult to find, and may not even play nice
with the emulator.
On the other hand, an emulator can allow you to emulate an exotic
peripheral that you might not even be able to find. It's a knife
that cuts both ways.
- Reliability - as I think I've mentioned before,
peecee-class machines
account for a rather disproportionate fraction of the hardware
failures I've experienced. "Modern" machines as reliable as the old
Suns are doubtless available, but, again, that will mean a
substantial additional cost.
Again, pick your "PeeCee" carefully and you can easily wind up with
something that not only is more reliable, but much quieter and less
power-hungry than your dinosaur. Heck, I'm typing this on an 800 MHz
P3 HP Vectra that's never had a bit of trouble, in spite of being
used every day. The odd thing is that it seems to actually be
*faster* for most things than my friend's Dell 2.4GHz Athlon-equipped
system that was recently here for repairs.
So, really, it's a total no-brainer for me whether
to run the real
thing or an emulation, quite aside from whether I'm prepared to do
low-level repair work.
Not clearly so for me--and I believe that I can easily go either way.
For many things, emulation is a great way to probe into the innards
without getting my hands burned or dirty. But then, my interest is
mostly along the lines of software and architecture and not iron.
Cheers,
Chuck