Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!ncar!tank!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!urbsdc!aglew
From: aglew@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: object <-> object translation (
Message-ID: <28200239@urbsdc>
Date: 20 Nov 88 05:01:00 GMT
References: <2934@ima.ima.isc.com>
Lines: 16
Nf-ID: #R:ima.ima.isc.com:2934:urbsdc:28200239:000:940
Nf-From: urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM!aglew    Nov 19 23:01:00 1988


>The Hunter XDOS system attempts to tranlate DOS programs to their Unix
>equivalents statically, which is hopeless without manual intervention or a lot
>of a priori hints. There are, however, three other systems that do it
>dynamically, packages from Insignia (a startup that seems to be partly in
>California and partly in England), from Phoenix (the BIOS people), and from
>IBM. Each of these dynamically translate and run 8086 code on Unix hosts such
>as 680X0, SPARC and ROMP (the RT PC's processor.) They get very credible
>performance, I saw an early version of Phoenix's running a copy-protected
>version of spacewar in close to real time on a Sun-3, limited by paging. It
>emulated the PC's disk controller well enough to satisfy the copy protection
>code, which I found quite impressive.
>-- 
>John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 492 3869

How does "dynamic translation" differ from interpretation?