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From: laba-4ad@web-1c.berkeley.edu (Joseph Teo)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Help: Softwr to Run DOS on MAC
Message-ID: <1990Jan10.014311.7148@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 90 01:43:11 GMT
References: <89360.113013REDELMAN@AUVM.BITNET>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: laba-4ad@web-1c (Joseph Teo)
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In article <89360.113013REDELMAN@AUVM.BITNET> REDELMAN@AUVM.BITNET (Richard B. Edelman) writes:
>Can anyone recommend software which will create a DOS environment on
>a Mac?   I want to run DOS progs on a Mac and transport disks back
>and forth between the Mac and an IBM PC.
>
>Thanks,
>Richard B. Edelman
>
>The American University
>Washington, D.C.
>
>BITNET: REDELMAN@AUVM
>FAX:    202-885-1946
>PHONE:  202-885-1948

The best and only program so far is SoftPC which provides an excellent
emulation on a 68020/30-based Mac complete with the disk cracking noise
on a PC. You can perform cut and paste operations between the PC application
and any Mac programs (excellent under MultiFinder). The Microsoft mouse
and PC parallel and comm ports are emulated too. I've tried to run
programs like PC-Tools, MS-Word, Wordstar, Tetris etc with it. I was told
it even works with Flight Simulator which is a stringent test of 
compatibility. With the SuperDrive, you can use the standard Mac floppy
as a PC 1.44MB floppy. You can have 2 PC hard disk volumes which are 
actually standard Mac HFS files. You can even assign a Mac directory as
a PC volume. The data forks of all the files can then be accessed as if
they were PC files!

The drawbacks are namely speed: on my SE/30, it produces only about 60%
the speed of a 4.77Mhz XT clone according to PC Tools and a pathetic 30%
according to Norton Speed Index. It only emulates the 8088 (actually the
NEC V20) and CGA so all EGA/VGA and 286/386 applications will not work.
Due to the different screen aspect ratio, the pixels cannot be mapped
directly and graphics will not look good on a 9" monochrome display. On the
Mac II, the display is much sharper than CGA and the effect on the mapping
is less pronounced.

Other alternatives include cards like the Mac86 for the SE and Mac286 for
the II which are costlier, somewhat less stable but a lot faster. Use them
if you have to access the MS-DOS environment frequently. You'll be put off
by the speed of SoftPC especially on highly interactive applications.