Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Thomas_E_Zerucha
From: Thomas_E_Zerucha@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: About Atari's, Mac's, and IBM's
Message-ID: <4738@cup.portal.com>
Date: 23 Apr 88 17:57:02 GMT
References: <5419@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <226500010@trsvax> <213@bdt.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 16
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.3273


David Beckemeyer writes:
>The AT Clones ... 286 ... Have memory management...
Except if the point is to use MSDos Software, you can't use the protected mode,
since it does things which make many (most?) MSDos programs incompatible.
The 386 has a 'virtual real memory mode' (no, that is not a contradiction,
it emulates an 8086 address space in paged memory, so you can still play
segment overlap games (theoretically)), and there may be one or more products
out that take advantage of this, but I don't know how "protected" it would
be.  And there are PC Emulators (100% software) running on fast 68020 unix
systems.  PC Ditto is slow (for a PC), but if it can be ported to the '030
box and run under unix, it might be something.
   But to get back to the point of the MMU, if you change operating systems,
you probabaly can add one to the ST, since if the point is to run a different
OS, you almost need the extra hardware.  So it would probabaly be better to
buy a UNIX designed box in the first place (and with a 680x0 instead of a 286
unless you like segments).