f-leoe@IFI.UIO.NO (Lars-Erik 0sterud) (07/01/89)
There has been a lot of talk about the stunning PC-Ditto II lately, it fits inside am Atari and emulates a XT at 10 MHz with a Norton rating of 3.0.. BUT - yesterday I read in the german ST magazin about another hardware MS-DOS emulator. It mounts inside the ST (just like PC-Ditto II) and costs about the same, BUT it has a Norton rating of 4.0 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is this much faster than PC-Ditto II ??? Does anyone have more info ? I almost bought PC-Ditto II, but now I'm not sure !!!! What is Avant-Garde's comment on this ? Please help me decide which emulator to buy !!! Lars-Erik 0sterud / Summer & Christmas: / leoe@ifi.uio.no / f-leoe@ifi.uio.no / ____________________/ _______________________/
jca@pnet01.cts.com (John C. Archambeau) (07/02/89)
The SI rating is somewhat biased. What you should do is use the MIPS,
Landmark, or CPUSPD benchmarks. The SI can be altered with simple things such
as wait states, ram fresh cycle, bumping up your ram to the highest speed that
speed of RAM. Just by running SPEEDER (a ram refresh altering utility), I
bump my SI up by .3 from 15.6 to 15.9 on my 16 MHz/1 wait AT. SI is a general
performance benchmark, not a CPU specific bench. You can use SI for your hard
drive also, not very informative, but it's there. The moral of the story is
that you want a CPU only bench, not a system bench (which is what SI is). You
can bump your SI up by using a 16ms hard drive, but does that affect the
execution speed of programs? No. Similiar, on my system with an XT
controller, the total SI is 11.8. That's a performance reduction by 1/3
almost just by adding hard drive I/O to the bench. So interleaving, DMA
speed, and all of those other goodies can affect an SI. Don't let an SI fool
you. It's not that big of a deal, those tricks that are used to get that
extra 1.0 of SI you can probably do yourself by reinterleaving your hard
drive, altering ram refresh cycles, optimizing your hard drive regularly with
a disk optimizer, etc. But NEVER use an SI as a basis for how fast the CPU
is.
I can best summarize this message with a quote:
"Advertising is legalized lying." - H.G. Wells
/*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
* Flames: /dev/null (on my Minix partition)
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
* ARPA : crash!pnet01!jca@nosc.mil
* INET : jca@pnet01.cts.com
* UUCP : {nosc ucsd hplabs!hd-sdd}!crash!pnet01!jca
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*/dkhusema@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Dirk Husemann) (07/06/89)
f-leoe@IFI.UIO.NO (Lars-Erik 0sterud) writes: >There has been a lot of talk about the stunning PC-Ditto II lately, it fits >inside am Atari and emulates a XT at 10 MHz with a Norton rating of 3.0.. >BUT - yesterday I read in the german ST magazin about another hardware >MS-DOS emulator. It mounts inside the ST (just like PC-Ditto II) and costs >about the same, BUT it has a Norton rating of 4.0 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Actually, you pay DM 30.00 less for it - compared to the German price of PC-Ditto II. Also, the company who is the distributor for PC-Ditto II here in Germany is *reported* (I read here on the net - I don't have any proof for this) to have trouble getting the PC-Ditto II and is therefore selling the PC-Speed which *seems* to be available and working! >Is this much faster than PC-Ditto II ??? >Does anyone have more info ? >I almost bought PC-Ditto II, but now I'm not sure !!!! >What is Avant-Garde's comment on this ? >Please help me decide which emulator to buy !!! > Lars-Erik 0sterud / Summer & Christmas: / > leoe@ifi.uio.no / f-leoe@ifi.uio.no / >____________________/ _______________________/ ------------------ Smile, tomorrow will be worse! -------------- Email: dkhusema@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de Or: {pyramid,unido}!fauern!faui49!dkhusema Mail: Dirk Husemann, Aufsess-Str. 19, D-8520 Erlangen, (Home) West Germany (Busi- University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Computer Science Dep., ness) IMMD IV, Martensstr. 1, D-8520 Erlangen, West Germany Phone: (Home) +49 9131 302036, (Business) +49 9131 857908 -- Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life down here! -- --------------- My opinions are mine, mine, mine ---------------
hades@pbinfo.UUCP (Detlef Siewert) (07/07/89)
I have *seen* PC-Speed just two day's ago, presented by it's inventor, Hans Sack from Bad Lippspringe (only a few kilometers from here) and it convinced me. He had mounted it into a Mega ST 2 with a Vortex HD 30 harddisc connected. Almost every program he showed worked fine, but Flight Simulator III couldn't make use of the Mouse, because of an (yet) unimplemented special command. The emulator contains a V30 cpu running at 8 MHz, two PAL's and three TTL- chips. The board will have to be soldered directly on the MC68000 cpu. The speed was fantastic (compared to PC-Ditto I) and scrolling the screen using XtreePro was nearly as fast as Tempus. We tried to connect two other harddiscs, but one of them didn't worked. It was using an ICD host-adaptor, but every attempt to read from the disc resulted with an error message 'Teilerueberlauf'. The other one was an adaptor-board from GE-Soft (a german company) using an OMTI- controller and it worked fine. Users of an original ATARI- harddisc will have no problems. The price will be 498.- DM, that's about 250-300 US$. Hans D. Siewert