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nil :demisexual_flag:

@moira this is an edited screenshot since the program (SunPCi) depends on hardware that as far as i know isn't emulated yet. but from what i know, the program will refuse to run in this situation

1 January at 21:30 | Open on furry.engineer
12 comments
Julius Schwartzenberg

@nil @moira I have that hardware actually (SunPCi II). Not used in quite a while, but this kind of sucks if it really just doesn't work anymore at all now :(

1 January at 21:58 | Open on mas.to
nil :demisexual_flag:

@jschwart @moira i did some binary hacking to see how the date validation works. it's just one function, and takes a 4 byte change in sunpcbinary to replace the call with a nop. where that call is depends on what version of the software you have

1 January at 22:59 | Open on furry.engineer
Julius Schwartzenberg

@nil @moira many thanks for looking into this. I won't be able to try it soon, but when I do and run into this, I'll be sure to reach out!! You seem to be using the program for the SunPCi III whereas I have a SunPCi II. Possibly they are different. I still had the Ultra 5 on my desk in 2010-2011, so possibly the check isn't in that version or I indeed didn't boot up the card after 2009.

There is relatively little point in emulating that card btw. (A 2nd QEMU x86 instance will help more.)

1 January at 23:06 | Open on mas.to
nil :demisexual_flag:

@jschwart @moira for sure, i only emulated it since i wanted to get this error message and don't have a sun workstation of my own, let alone a SunPCi. if i wanted to run old x86 software i'd use 86Box or DOSBox. but it would be nice for the sake of preservation, if really impractical, if someone could implement an emulator for the SunPCi.

2 January at 15:21 | Open on furry.engineer
Julius Schwartzenberg

@nil @moira I see where you're coming from but basically you'd end up hooking up a second QEMU instance with some rather limited and peculiar hardware. The SunPCi II board for instance is just this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiS_630/ on a PCI card with some tricks that allow rerouting the display in a window and using disk images stored on the Solaris filesystem.

You'd be dealing with emulating the SiS 630/730 and even if you do that, you then already have a superior independent stand-alone emulator :)

@nil @moira I see where you're coming from but basically you'd end up hooking up a second QEMU instance with some rather limited and peculiar hardware. The SunPCi II board for instance is just this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiS_630/ on a PCI card with some tricks that allow rerouting the display in a window and using disk images stored on the Solaris filesystem.

2 January at 17:24 | Open on mas.to
nsfw :donor:

@jschwart @nil @moira I have the original SunPCi running on the 1.3 software and I don't remember it having the date problem.

Sun Ultra 10 installing Windows 98
Sun Ultra 10 playing Doom on Windows
1 January at 23:06 | Open on infosec.exchange
nil :demisexual_flag:

@timjclevenger @jschwart @moira maybe it's something they added later on, then... i can't think of why they would, if it works just fine without the date check

1 January at 23:09 | Open on furry.engineer
WooShell

@timjclevenger @jschwart @nil @moira This check seems to only have been present in the 3.x versions for the SunPCI 2 and 2+ cards. Apparently there was a patch published in Jan 2010 that removes that check, but the old SunSolve patch repos are long gone, thanks to Oracle.

2 January at 1:17 | Open on chaosfurs.social
cyanautik
Solarbird :flag_cascadia:
nil :demisexual_flag:

@moira it's exactly what the program would look like if you ran it, as i was able to hack the program to bypass other checks and jump right to the date check

furry.engineer/@nil/1137555461

1 January at 23:11 | Open on furry.engineer
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