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Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!unhd!sjm
From: sjm@uunet!unhd (Scott J Mccue)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Soft PC vs. PC boards?
Keywords: soft pc, pc boards, question
Message-ID: <1991Jan4.164932.18227@uunet!unhd>
Date: 4 Jan 91 16:49:32 GMT
References: <1990Dec31.204024.3358@oracle.com> <1991Jan3.224414.22015@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Reply-To: sjm@unhd.UUCP (Scott J Mccue)
Organization: Marine Systems Engineering Lab
Lines: 61

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