How about creating a virtual 908 machine by writing a PA-RISC instruction set
emulator that would run on Wintel hardware?  A high-end Wintel machine might
yield acceptable performance for low-end MPE development purposes.

The expense of HP hardware manufacturing and support becomes a non-issue.

Of course, the software support issue still remains.

Apple has already done this to be able to run the MacOS on Unix platforms via
the Macintosh Application Environment M68K emulator:

        http://www.mae.apple.com

I long time ago I installed the 1.0 demo on my HPUX machine.  It was really,
really spooky to be able to run native Mac object code on an HP machine.  ;-)
--
Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist.   Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
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"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)