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From: johnston@oscar.ccm.udel.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc,comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Soft PC vs. PC boards?
Message-ID: <40763@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 5 Jan 91 04:57:13 GMT
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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)