shaker@lager.cisco.com (Christopher J. Shaker) (04/01/91)
I'm looking for facts and opinions on 68030 In Circuit Emulators. I'm interested in hearing about quality, expandable emulators that will handle 25 and 40 Mhz 68030s now, and will be upgradeable to handle 68040s in the future. The emulator should also be capable of supporting at least 2 MB of mapped RAM for ROM emulation, with expandability to support up to 4 MB in the future. We currently own a Cadre (Atron) Probe 68020 emulator which we've used for two development projects. I am quite frustrated with their inability to support more than 512 KB of mapped RAM and their glacially slow loading of program symbol information from a BSD 4,2 a.out file. I'm using a 12 Mhz Compaq Deskpro 286 as the PC host. This emulator is composed of two cards which plug into a PC, two long shielded ribbon cables that run to a small box with the mapped RAM and trace RAM, and another set of short ribbon cables running from the box to the 68020 pod. All in all, we've been fairly happy with the Emulator itself, and very happy with the support that we got from our local Cadre representative, Scott Lum, but need more mapped RAM for it to be useable on our current products. Another unfortunate thing about their product is that their network interface software uses Suntools for the windows interface. We have many Suns at our site, but do not choose to run Suntools on them. Instead, we run X11 Release 4, and are very happy with it. We have many engineers on other machines that run X11, NCD X terminals, HP 9000 workstations, and a lot of Macs running X11. In our environment, it makes no sense to buy software that requires Suntools. A Sun can *always* run X, so I don't understand why anyone would knowingly restrict their software to being useable only on Suntools windows? Chris Shaker shaker@cisco.com ***Disclaimer: These opionions are my own, do *not* represent the official view of cisco Systems. I'm just a software engineer ***