These boards are so old and expensive they are basically display pieces. At least this emulator lets people actually use them.

Hi there, I know of one of these cards coming up for auction sometime today on Ebay and it is fully loaded with all the gold ic’s
Beautiful board from an Engineers personal collection.

We live in such a strange era where we can effectively emulate them all, and much faster than the real thing.

It’s still very interested

Big Thanks for David Rand also, the original author of the DSI-32 software (you may know him by MRTG package). He has put together an old DSI-32 loader and NS32016 emulator.

It would be interesting to port early GCC 1.x to this board (using existing Green Hills compiler) to compare a performance.

P.S.
There was also Motorola 88000 ISA coprocessor board from Opus system:
https://books.google.ru/books?id=nDAEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40#v=onepage&q&f=false

I’ve read on vogons that the MIPS board over VL would drive Quake at around 5-6FPS, while a Pentium 60 with the asm optimization would yield 5-6FPS.

And this would be the long term problem with not only the MIPS, but PowerPC & DEC Alpha. While Pentium performance in the 486 era would be awesome, Intel was always driving on the tail end of the RISC wave.

Nobody was ever able to put together a system that basically was 3-5x the performance of a 486 in the time of 486’s or Pentium in the time of the Pentium at a comparable price to a Pentium. Big companies, will of course happily pay whatever it is, to run things faster where needed, but it kills any hope of real world adoption.

But as they say, this is all academic.

The Itanium, or it’s threat basically killed almost all the other RISC chips, such as the MIPS, HPPA, PowerPC in non IBM machines, and Oracle’s desire to win a lawsuit against Google, much how SUN sued Microsoft over Java lead to the death of the SPARC. And the x86_64 from AMD killed the Itanium before it even really got started.

Unfortunately no :-(.

Actually, like 6 years ago, I saw one being auctioned at eBay, when eBay didn’t sucked nuts like it does now.
No one has surfaced since then… But like happened with the mythic Desktation, i guess is just matter of time and patience to see one again, some good day :-).

Wow, I always wanted something like that, I didn’t know that one was a thing. Damn if I’d known MIPS on a stick would have been awesome, although considering software support for MIPS/NT … Maybe it was just as well. I only got the RISC version of Visual C++ some 7 or so years ago.

Did you have one? It sure sounds pretty damned awesome.

Don’t forget the venerable ShaBLAMM Nitro “upgrade” VLB card, which allowed to convert your “old” 486 into a full working RISC system, driven by a MIPS processor.