[comp.sys.apple] II in a Mac - Review

halp@TCGOULD.TN.CORNELL.EDU ("Bruce P. Halpern") (01/25/89)

"II in a Mac" is Apple II simulation software for Macintosh. It simulates an
Apple II with a clock, joystick (but no mouse), and four 5.25 inch Disk II or
two 3.5 inch disk drives. An 80 column card in slot #3, a serial card in slot
#2 with adjustable baud rate, data length, parity, and stop bits, and a RAM
card with up to 3.6 Mb RAM (Applied Engineering RAMWords standard) in slot 0, 
are also simulated. The software is distributed on copyable 400K Macintosh
disks. It is published by Computer:applications, Inc., 12813 Lindley Drive, 
Raleigh, NC 27614. Telephone 919-846-1411. It is sold by the publisher and
by distributers such as Mac Warehouse.

"II in a Mac" is very slow. It operates at about half the normal speed of a
//e or //c. For anyone who is accoustomed to an accelerated //e or //c, the
speed is a significant factor. It is said by some that it will operate at
normal 1 MHz //e speed in a Mac II.

A very serious problem with "II in a Mac" is its inability to reliably 
produce open apple-X or closed apple-X commands, where X is some additional
key (such as  ?   or   P   or   ESC). One is supposed to produce open
apple by pressing OPTION and O  ;   closed apple by pressing OPTION and 
C.  For open apple-X, OPTION and O are to be pressed together, then released, 
the X is to be pressed. Occasionally this works. Generally, either nothing
happens or something unpredictable. I tried this with version 2.5 and 2.53, 
on two different Mac Plus. Same problems in all cases. Since AppleWorks is
very dependent upon open apple-X commands, "II in a Mac" is useless for
AppleWorks.

AppleWorks enhanced with Timeout utilities should not be used with "II in
a Mac" . A crash attributed to attempting to execute an undefined 6502
instruction is reported.

AppleWorks v2.1 will not work with "II in a Mac" v2.53.

Summary: Not recommended. Might be useable in situations where no
open or closed apple-X commands are used, and in which nothing that
might be considered an illegal opcode is used.

****DISCLAMER: My comments, etc., are my own shakey opinions ********




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