Phoenix Technologies Ltd, which announced last November that it was developing a Soft Co-Processor emulation of MS-DOS for 68000 family processors (CI No 568), is pulling the same trick for National Semiconductor’s NS32000 microprocessor line. The product is likely to be of particular interest to Siemens, which on the continent has sold large numbers of machines that use the NS32000 family and run Xenix. The Norwood, Massachusetts company says that the pure software emulation will provide AT-level compatibility, trapping and responding to all input-output functions with emulation software, plus code to re-map the 80286 instruction set to that of the NatSemi microprocessor. There are as yet no indications of how efficient or otherwise the Software Co-Processor approach is. No delivery date has been given for the new version of the software.
