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From: rcfische@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Raymond C. Fischer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: How good is SoftPC emulation?
Message-ID: <1989Nov14.203226.16734@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Date: 14 Nov 89 20:32:26 GMT
References: <5768@lindy.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: rcfische@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Raymond C. Fischer)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Cal Poly State University -- San Luis Obispo
Lines: 21

In article <5768@lindy.Stanford.EDU> romeo@lindy.UUCP (Patrick Goebel) writes:
>Has anyone had experience with Insignia's SoftPC?  I imagine it must
>run fairly slowly; i.e., somewhere on the order of the original 8086
>PC.  Then again, presumably the speed would depend on the machine
>doing the emulation -- for example, it should run faster on an SE/30
>than on an SE.  Is this true?

Yes.  Especially considering that SoftPC doesn't run on an SE.  It requires
a Mac with a '020 or '030 processor and 2+Mb of RAM.
The speed is a about that of the original 8088 PC and although I haven't
used it a lot, the emulation seems to be very good.  You get a PC with up
to 640k of RAM, CGA display, and hard/floppy disks.  You can run PC
programs right off the 3 1/2 floppy drive.

As an aside, it is a real crack-up to see my Mac acting just like a PC.
SoftPC evens plays the sound of the PC floppy seeks and beep on startup.
I once ran MS Word 4.0 PC version in one window and MS Word 4.0 Mac version
in another window.  Guess which looked better and was easier to use?

Ray Fischer
rcfische@polyslo.calpoly.edu