The Blandest PC Experience You Could Buy In 1998 For $7,000 ... // Exploring the SunPCI

Windows 2000 was wonderful, though. At least for those of us whose best alternative option was windows 98se. I still remember it as the first time ever when my PC was stable and reliable. That was a new thing back then.

I'v got my popcorn and I'm ready to see this sunny train wreck!

The company I worked for had a contract with a large hospital in the area to convert them from an old IBM server and terminals to SUN. This card required PC66 SDRAM to run stable, NT4 needed a script that was supplied by our SUN rep, and the monitors needed to be set to a specific refresh rate to not give us headaches. 3 months after the 2 year conversion, the hospital switched to just NT4 terminals.

NCommander! You had a lot of patience with that SUNpci!!! 😄 I would scream and shutdown everything in psychic attack after second failed attempt of installing XP

FWIW, these cards (at least 3 generations of those) were aimed also at servers - so a single Sun-branded box in a branch office could serve different Solaris services natively (NFS/CIFS homedirs, mail, etc.) as well as be an MS AD controller also natively.

Back in the day my group supported Sun and Windows. I was one of the Windows admins. We got a few of these cards to try out. I could see the potential but wasn't sure how well they would work. Most of our engineers had a Windows PC and a Sun workstation for their work, why not combine them into one machine. I was tasked to load Windows on them because our Unix admins couldn't figure out how to install and configure the OS. Unfortunately there was a big difference in performance, and probably price but I was never told the cost, as it was better to have 2 separate machines occupying an engineers desk space in the end.

I love how every project consists in you entering a valley of tears and then emerging victorious.

This Solaris graphical user interface looks so cool, there's something about that aesthetic that I love, I even find it ... nostalgic.

Amazing as always. That you got XP running in the end is above and beyond the call of duty! I think the production of this video might give more enjoyment that this card ever gave during its production lifetime.

Running XP on a K6/2 is a feat in itself, not to mention the fiddling with drivers and custom installers you had to do. Still, part of me wants to see this taken to the cursed, horrible end.

Kyoom? The determination to get XP running was amazing, hats off to you!

Is it possible sun intentionally broke windows disk manager cause they didn't trust it having access to the shared drives? Cause I know I'd do that if I were sun lol

You're way too rough on the machine. I bought an Ultra 5 in 1998 with a SunPCI for only $2,500. $2,000 for the machine and $500 for the SunPCI card. The correct software to run was Solaris 8 and Windows NT 4.0. With that combination, this system friggin' rocked! In 1998, that is. I could run Forte4Java (today known as Netbeans), Mozilla nightly, MP3 music in the background, various command line programs (including that nightly compile of Mozilla), a P2P program, and numerous other desktop utilities on the Solaris side. All simultaneously with little to no slowdown. On the NT4 side, I ran Office and occasionally IE5. I tried installing IE5 on Solaris, but Microsoft's installer f**ked up my Solaris desktop. That pissed me off so much that I trashed the thing and never looked back. Overall, I loved my Ultra 5/SunPCI back in the day. It was a beast for daily development tasks. I'm sorry you're having some challenges here, but you're hardly using an original shipment with MediaKit software. You have a cobbled-together solution that doesn't really represent the system of the time.

Just thought it worth posting that you can actually install another processor into the SunPCI Penguin card and get CMOV support. Such as the Cyrix MII/M2 like the MII-233GP or others. Granted it's not nearly as fast as the AMD K6-2 400. But it's an i686 level processor (Mostly a 486 that cheats) What's not to love XD

I just love that they called a card that goes into PCI slot "SunPCi". What a wonderful name. Jokes aside, your patience is just incredible, especially the fact that you've got XP working on the card that was never meant to run XP. I would've gave up as soon as I hitted BSoD :D

The fact this has so good of Sound Blaster support makes me think this was more meant to run Windows 9x instead of anything NT based

When I joined a computer science dept in 2000 everyone had an Ultra 5 on their desk with a sunpci card running NT4. It worked fine as all it was used for was working with MS office files. A couple of years in and we moved to PCs running Redhat or XP.

The moment you said it was the updated DR-DOS (i.e. the OS I grew up on), I got interested. When you mentioned that you downloaded the games from GOG, I knew you were toast. Those games are preinstalled, and configured for MS-DOS compatibility (because that's what DOSBox emulates). DR-DOS does not handle graphics or TSRs in the same way as MS-DOS, and unless you have access to the install media to set them up to run on DR-DOS, you're kinda toast.

Oh yeah! You got me there! I had this setup plus the Creator 3D Graphicscard and 1GB Ram. And yes, despite its weaknesses on the Windows side, I loved that machine more than anything else I previously had (with exception the AlphaAXP pci).

Hey Ncommander! Congratulations, your vídeos are Just amazing! I'm here for nearly 2 hours jumping from one to the next hahaha