b2@magic.UUCP (Bryan Bingham) (08/08/86)
Can I believe the Amiga ad that says all that's required to
run IBM-PC software is a small converter program? Can I believe
the people at SofTeam, who are selling such a program for
$69.95, that they have run the Flight Simulator with no problems?
They said I would either have to have a 5.25" floppy drive for
my Amiga, or somehow get the programs I want to run on
3.5"ers. Are the disk and directory formats for Amiga compatible
w/MS-DOS? How are 80xx programs run on a 68000? How are
graphics and such things handled?
b2
{backbone}!bellcore!b2
b2@bellcore.comdaveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) (08/08/86)
> > > Can I believe the Amiga ad that says all that's required to > run IBM-PC software is a small converter program? Somewhat. Commodore-Amiga sells a similar program, called the Transformer. This program takes over the Amiga, causing it to emulate a monochrome IBM PC. It does no graphics at all, and while it runs most of the more popular programs, there are quite a few things that won't run on it. It also runs several times slower than a real PC. > Can I believe > the people at SofTeam, who are selling such a program for > $69.95, that they have run the Flight Simulator with no problems? I've been hearing about the SofTeam program, PC-ET, for a long time. I haven't seen a demo of it yet. They claimed all along that it would also emulate the IBM graphics display, run in an AmigaDOS window instead of taking over the whole Amiga, and it would run fast. Now the video emulation is certainly possible -- that's the same thing that the Sidecar software will be doing. I would be surprised if it ran flight simulator at any reasonable speed, however. You'd be best off trying it out in a store before buying it. > Are the disk and directory formats for Amiga compatible w/MS-DOS? AmigaDOS disk and directory formats are very different from the MS-DOS versions of the same. Yet the disk drive hardware is compatible, so that the Amiga will have no problem at all interacting with MS-DOS format disks with the proper software on the Amiga side. > How are 80xx programs run on a 68000? How are graphics and such things > handled? Each of these programs emulates the 8088 instruction set with a 68000 program which is basically an 8088 interpreter. The 68000 is much more powerful than the 8088, but this still (at least with the Amiga Transformer) takes more time to run than the program running on a real 8088. The graphics are performed by another program which acts as an emulator for the IBM display card. The Amiga can do this at least as fast as the PC's hardware, so that's not a speed problem. The final section of such a program requires emulation of the rest IBM PC hardware components, like keyboard and interrupt chip. The problem here is that programs on the IBM PC often bypass the PC's operating system and manipulate the hardware directly. Thus, a good PC emulator has to exactly emulate the appearance of each chip in memory, not just the function of a series of OS calls. The result of all of this is that a PC emulator at best keeps the Amiga very busy. -- /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ Dave Haynie {caip,ihnp4,allegra,seismo}!cbmvax!daveh "I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment." -Gotama Buddha These opinions are my own, though for a small fee they be yours too. \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/