Hello everybody,
Thank you for your quick response and for the time you spent to help me find
the best way to keep old hardware productive.
Perhaps, it's best to describe my situation a bit more detailed to clarify the
situation:
Back in the 1980th / 1990th, our company bought several parameter test systems
(used for in-production testing of semiconductor devices). Those systems have a
build in computer-board (based on an 68040 microprocessor). All of those
testers are controlled by two Sun SPARCs running Solaris 8. User Interface,
program generation and everything else is done on the Sun. The vendor of the
test systems supplied us with some shared object libraries, we may use in our
programs to control the tester (make it force some voltages, measure some
current and so on). So, basically we develop programs on the Sun, and use the
vendor-supplied lib to convert and transfer our commands to the tester, wich
returns the results back. Please note: communication from Sun to tester is done
via ethernet, but they are using their own network protocol and not e.g.
tcp/ip. Unfortunately, I have only very little information about that network
protocol.
The tester-hardware is still in good condition (though out of support) and its
performance is still sufficient for most of our products. The longer, the
testers are usable, the more money we save.
On the other hand, the Sun SPARCs are out of support as well, and I am afraid
that some time one of them breaks down leaving us in a quite difficult
situation.
So I just want to check out, if it's possible to move the programs, which are currently
running on the Sun SPARC, to an x86/Linux PC using some kind of "SPARC
emulator".