DOS Compatibility Card/Apple Houdini card support?

The Mariocrafter kayvonkamyar at gmail.com
Mon Apr 22 06:14:28 AEST 2024


Apple has released a few cards (The Houdini I, Houdini II, and DOS
Compatibility Card) that had entire computers on them minus the hard
drive, and were originally intended to only run DOS applications,
including Windows 3.x and 95, that had an x86 CPU, a sound card on the
Houdini II and higher, no FPU, none of the cards had any storage, and
a VGA port, and I think some models have some other serial port I'm
not too sure of. Certain Mac models came preinstalled with the DOS
Compatibility Card. When it comes to using this in Linux, the cards
come with lots of RAM (for it's time), with the most powerful card
supporting up to 80 megabytes of RAM. About the CPU, I'm not too
familiar with how the kernel supports CPUs internally, if the kernel
can support different architectures on different cores, or have
another CPU with a different architecture, but it could be supported
if the kernel can handle this without making the computer slow, like
reserving the x86 CPU for KVM exclusively. The VGA port on the unit
can act as another port for a display, which can display the Linux GUI
or terminal.

Information about this card can be found online quite easily, although
some links require the Wayback Machine as they are decades old. WIP
emulation for the Houdini II with a GPL v3 licence can be found:
https://github.com/dingusdev/dingusppc/commit/90f22d806677048813e0c89216a6430076b5b00f
with contact information for the reverse engineers that completed it.
If you own this card or a Mac preinstalled with the card, you can try
implementing this, and get extra RAM in return.


More information about the Linuxppc-dev mailing list