Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!killer!tness7!bellcore!clyde!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: LIM simulators for PC ATs with no LIm h/w
Keywords: LIMSPEC,LOTUS,Intel,Microsoft
Message-ID: <1687@looking.UUCP>
Date: 28 May 88 03:51:22 GMT
References: <505@hrc63.co.uk>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 24

Do not waste your time (literally) with LIM EMS simulators that work out
of extended memory (or disk) to run Lotus 1-2-3.  There are two
very big reasons.

A) It's tremendously slow.  Your spreadsheet will slow down by an order
of magnitude, or more.  Minimal recalc might help a bit, but not a lot.
3-2-1 Blastoff won't do anything much for you either.

B) With actual bank switched boards, it is possible to have the same page
in two different banks.  1-2-3 will, Lotus says, sometimes do this.  If it
then writes to one bank, it expects the other bank to be updated.  That
doesn't happen with a simulator.  WRONG ANSWERS.

If you want EMS, kludge as it is, get a card that does both EMS and
extended memory, and can easily be switched.  There are many switchable
cards, not all are easy.

Or, if you have a 386, I think you can write an actual driver that uses
386 paging registers to do the job properly with real memory.

Or if you have ram at C000 or thereabouts, and you want to only simulate
64K of EMS, that's fine.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473