etileniu@oracle.COM (Eric Tilenius) (01/01/91)
I have a Mac IIcx and am looking to emulate one of those inferior IBM type machines with all the extra power I have kicking around. Q: Which is better (I leave the word open for interpretation) - Soft PC with the EGA/AT option or one of those PC cards? Q: Is there a card that will give me 386 power in my Mac? 286? Q: Has anyone tried running Microsoft Windows on a Mac either with the hardware boards or with Soft PC? Is it workable? Any comments on running the Mac in PC mode would be appreciated. EMAIL if possible, please. Thanks in advance -- and HAPPY NEW YEAR! - ERIC - // // // Eric Tilenius, Associate Product Manager, Oracle Corporation \\ \\ \\ \\ \\ \\ Redwood Shores, CA, USA. 415-506-3175. etileniu@oracle.COM // // //
kyt@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu (Kok Yong Tan) (01/04/91)
In article <1990Dec31.204024.3358@oracle.com> etileniu@oracle.COM (Eric Tilenius) writes: >I have a Mac IIcx and am looking to emulate one of those inferior IBM type >machines with all the extra power I have kicking around. > >Q: Which is better (I leave the word open for interpretation) - Soft PC with > the EGA/AT option or one of those PC cards? I have the Mac286 card by Orange Micro. It is relatively speedy and works NEARLY like an 80286 with a CGA card. However, you can't view CGA graphics directly, only CGA text. There is some stupid glitch in Orange Micro's emulation that prevents this. However, you can view color CGA graphics in the monochrome mode. The advantage with Soft PC with the EGA/At option, I'm told, is that it actually emulates everything, color graphics and all. The only problem is that it's as slow as the hills. You need a IIfx to get any decent speed out of it. > >Q: Is there a card that will give me 386 power in my Mac? 286? > Yes, Orange Micro now markets a Mac386 card as well as a Mac286 card. The Mac386 card is supposed to have two slots on it: one full-size slot and one half-size slot which will fit any PC-compatible boards. Or so the blurb goes. Considering the failure of the so-called "full CGA emulation" on the Mac286 board, I'd check it out thoroughly before buying, if I were you. >Q: Has anyone tried running Microsoft Windows on a Mac either with the hardware > boards or with Soft PC? Is it workable? > I haven't tried this yet. All in all, the Mac286 is reasonably quick (at 8 MHz) and seems to run such applications as Paradox V3.5 and Turbo C++ V1.01 without any problems (as far as I can tell). It comes with Orange Micro's "port" of version 3.3 of MS DOS (which seems pretty complete, but then, I'm no nit-picker, so I didn't test everything thoroughly). And, if you're not buying the Mac286 card to use any PC-compatible programs which use the graphics screen, you should be fine. =============================================================================== Kok-Yong Tan can be reached at: | "Oscularis fundamentum!" InterNet: kyt@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu | - Annoyed Latin scholar CompuServe: 75046,256 | I speak for myself and disclaim all ties America Online: lallang | with regard to this message. ===============================================================================
unhd (Scott J Mccue) (01/05/91)
In article <1991Jan3.224414.22015@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> kyt@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu (Kok Yong Tan) writes: >In article <1990Dec31.204024.3358@oracle.com> etileniu@oracle.COM (Eric Tilenius) writes: >>Q: Which is better (I leave the word open for interpretation) - Soft PC with >> the EGA/AT option or one of those PC cards? > The advantage with Soft PC with the EGA/At option, I'm told, >is that it actually emulates everything, color graphics and all. The only ^^^^^^^^^^ I don't believe this is quite true. Because of the nature of the mac serial ports, SoftPC can't fully emulate a PC serial port. The exact limitations I've forgotten, and may even have been eliminated with the most recent version(I've got 1.4), but I think it probably was as solved as it was going to get. This has interfered with my use of a specific device, but I've also used SoftPC with a Hayes-compatible modem and a telecomm program and it worked fine. My macII was limited to 1200 baud, I believe. Another not-so-wonderful thing is printing with SoftPC. I will sometimes lose pages. This wasn't a problem with my Imagewriter II w/ Apple driver, but it is a problem with my Deskwriter with a third party driver. Otherwise, the emulation is marvelous. Even the local PC heads are impressed. >problem is that it's as slow as the hills. You need a IIfx to get any decent >speed out of it. I use SoftPC EGA/AT on a Mac II and would certainly like it to be faster. It's fine for almost everything except compiling, which I'm doing a lot of right now. For that, I will often move my books and butt to an AT elsewhere in order to avoid waiting several minutes to compile a few thousand lines. I just performed a Norton SI (system info) to get the performance of the EGA/AT module relative to an XT. Here are the numbers: Computing Index: 2.6 Disk Index: 15.8 Performance Index: 7.0 Again, on a Mac II. I guess another spot that is slow is graphics. I tried using a game called Attack Sub 688, but it was so slow that playing was basically out of the question. I also played the GNU version of Tetris. This was ok, but speed (lack thereof) was a factor in playing the game and I gave it up. I've taken some steps to improve speed. One was to install a screen device driver that will improve performance by around a factor of two. That works fine. Another was to order another 4 Mbytes of memory (at these wonderfully low prices) so that I could try installing a stripped SoftPC partition with compiler into a mac ramdisk. I haven't received the memory yet so I don't know how well this will work. >>Q: Has anyone tried running Microsoft Windows on a Mac either with the hdwr >> boards or with Soft PC? Is it workable? I haven't tried this for three reasons. The first is that I think SoftPC will be too slow to use Windows 3. The second is that I'm not impressed with the usefulness of Windows on a 286. The third is that it takes far too much room as compared to the space I have. The bottom line, for me, is price. I spent $350 on SoftPC and can do virtually any PC based chore. I have to do this often, so it was $350 well spent. I don't think I would feel the same if I'd spent the extra for the Orange Micro board. And when the speed is inadequate, I move to a machine that is adequate. I don't do this nearly so often as before I got SoftPC, however. I like that, and I like SoftPC. sjm@unhd.unh.edu (Scott McCue) sjm@msel.unh.edu
johnston@oscar.ccm.udel.edu (01/05/91)
In article <1991Jan4.164932.18227@uunet!unhd>, sjm@uunet!unhd (Scott J Mccue) writes... >In article <1991Jan3.224414.22015@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> kyt@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu (Kok Yong Tan) writes: >>In article <1990Dec31.204024.3358@oracle.com> etileniu@oracle.COM (Eric Tilenius) writes: >>>Q: Which is better (I leave the word open for interpretation) - Soft PC with >>> the EGA/AT option or one of those PC cards? > >> The advantage with Soft PC with the EGA/At option, I'm told, >>is that it actually emulates everything, color graphics and all. The only > ^^^^^^^^^^ > I don't believe this is quite true. Because of the nature of the mac serial >ports, SoftPC can't fully emulate a PC serial port. >My macII was limited to 1200 baud, I believe. This is a function of the platform that you run SoftPC on, not a limitation of SoftPC. Higher baud rates work fine on faster Macs. Until recently, the Mac II was the slowest mac that would run SoftPC. Insignia recently a version for the Portable; this probably is also rather slow. For what it's worth, I have never felt that response time was the factor that made a machine "fast" to use. My first Mac was down-right SLOW at times, but the Switcher (bless Andy Herzfeld, where-ever he is) made the work go quicker. The nice thing about working with SoftPC is that you can Multifinder out to a Mac utility to do something on a PC file without quitting SoftPC. In fairness to the PC, sometimes I use it to perform file manipulations using wildcards, like C>delete /dir1/*.hqx, which can be a pain in the ass on the Mac. The speed problem results the "bag on a bag on a bag" effect. Throw one "bag" over the Mac to emulate a PC, then a second to emulate a terminal. By the time you add printer emulation to print from the terminal application you end up with the straw that broke the camels back. When you think about it, most of the problems with SoftPC end up having the solution "do it on the Mac". I certainly wouldn't swap White Knight for Procomm even if I tried it once to see if it would work -- I did, at 2400 baud running in a Multifinder partition with other applications open doing background printing. When you take into account things like Multifinder compatibility, and the way that you REALLY work on a Mac, it seems silly to pay more than the price of a PC clone to make the Mac emulate one. I have a PC clone (I use it to hold up Post-It notes) but find that I need to dip into SoftPC only when the customer absolutely, positively wants WordStar !! Find a few clients who are mystified by platform and file format conversions, and SoftPC pays for itself ... -- Bill (johnston@oscar.ccm.udel.edu)
jimb@silvlis.com (Jim Budler) (01/05/91)
In article <1991Jan3.224414.22015@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> kyt@cunixd.cc.columbia.edu (Kok Yong Tan) writes: >In article <1990Dec31.204024.3358@oracle.com> etileniu@oracle.COM (Eric Tilenius) writes: >>I have a Mac IIcx and am looking to emulate one of those inferior IBM type >>machines with all the extra power I have kicking around. >> >>Q: Which is better (I leave the word open for interpretation) - Soft PC with >> the EGA/AT option or one of those PC cards? > >I have the Mac286 card by Orange Micro. It is relatively speedy and works >NEARLY like an 80286 with a CGA card. However, you can't view CGA graphics >directly, only CGA text. There is some stupid glitch in Orange Micro's >emulation that prevents this. However, you can view color CGA graphics in the >monochrome mode. The advantage with Soft PC with the EGA/At option, I'm told, >is that it actually emulates everything, color graphics and all. The only >problem is that it's as slow as the hills. You need a IIfx to get any decent >speed out of it. Well, I may get booted out of the newsgroup, but when I went shopping because my wife uses Lotus 123 on a Windows DOS machine at work and wanted to be able to work at home, I found: Constraint: They only have 5.25" disks at her work. SoftPC: "Should be reasonably fast on your IIsi. 5.25 disks, well it only supports one floppy, you might be able to buy the Kennect and redirect it?" $1000 Emulator Cards: As above. Still $1000. I spent my $1000, I bought a 16MHz 286 clone vith color VGA, 1Meg RAM, 44 Meg Hard Disk and a printer. (Christmas special -- free printer and TurboTax). She's up and running. I don't like the machine, it's a bear to configure, and the graphics aren't as good as the Mac. Maybe you don't need the 5.25" disks, like I did. But on the other hand, the DOS stuff isn't wasting my hard disk space, and she wont be doing her work when I need to do my work. When or if we need to interchange data, I'll buy a $75 3.5" floppy for her machine. There's no doubt the DOS advocates are right, DOS hardware is cheaper, (a 3.5" floppy $75, a 5.25" floppy for the Mac $295), but so what, I'll take the Mac. My point is simply, if you need to do both DOS and Mac, it may be simpler and more economical to do exactly that: have both machines. jim -- __ __ / o / Jim Budler jimb@silvlis.com | Proud / / /\/\ /__ Silvar-Lisco, Inc. +1.408.991.6115 | MacIIsi /__/ / / / /__/ 703 E. Evelyn Ave. Sunnyvale, Ca. 94086 | owner