Picking an emulator

josebravo · #1 June 23rd, 2004, 11:38 PM

Everybody,
I have a IBook G3 Clamshell running at 300 MHz with 320MB RAM and MacOS 9.2. I wish to upgrade the system to OS X 10.1 and since I've heard of people that have done the switch with this particular problem, I know (or hope) that it's not going to be that big of a deal. My problem is that there is one SIMPLE application that runs on PC that I would like to port over to the MAC. The application is not graphics intensive, or a resource hog by itself; its just a simple dictionary program that I have to use. I don't care if I have to use Win 95 or 98 to run it, the application runs fine on both. I looked into Virtual PC 5 and 6.1, and they both advertise higher end operating systems and they both need at least the required 500MHz processor to run. What PC emulator options do I have? Can anybody recommend one? I heard about Bosch somewhere online, but I want to see if that is my only option. I just need an emulator that is going to be somewhat stable the occasional time that I use it and is going to let me run a simple Win32 program. Thanks!

Tetano · #2 June 24th, 2004, 03:06 AM

Hi, and first of all welcome to the forum!
try this link, i don't use pc emulators so i can't tell you how they are working!

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/se...acosx&x=13&y=8

Zammy-Sam · #3 June 24th, 2004, 03:29 AM

Buy an old pc for less than $100 and you will get happy. VirtualPC is the only reasonable x86 emulator for >Win95 and your G3 300 might be pretty much overloaded with it.
Welcome to the forum!

pds · #4 June 24th, 2004, 04:20 AM

Well, come into the forum...

Your Clamshell will be happier with Jaguar or even Panther. First hand I can tell you that it will run 10.2.8 very nicely, it is faster than anything previous. I have heard that Panther is even faster - even on a clamshell.

As for emulation - don't know, never used one as I'm not stuck on any windows-only programs. As Zammy says, you could easily run it on a cheapo pc, but why do you need that particular dictionary?

Nisus and others make dictionaries that are very capable, I imagine it must be the custom dictionary you're after. I think there must be a way to port the data from a dictionary into a custom dictionary that runs in OS X.

symphonix · #5 June 24th, 2004, 04:51 AM

Another good Mac OS X native dictionary program is Ultralingua. Plus, of course, MS-Office has a pretty decent integrated dictionary and thesaurus.
As for the operating system, 10.3 or 10.2 would be superior in performance and features to 10.1.
And the others are right in saying that most PC emulators will not run well on your Clamshell iBook.

Zammy-Sam · #6 June 24th, 2004, 05:21 AM

since we are discussing dictionary programs now: jaguars and panthers sherlock is quite fine as well. It's webbased but very good plus you can translate sentences. I would second pds post to get panther on your clamshell.

Cat · #7 June 24th, 2004, 06:08 AM

Well, it is true that there are many dictionary programs around, but, for instance, my uncle is a professional translator who uses TraDos as a translation program. This program runs partially as a toolbar/macro in Ms Word and partly as translation-database + dictionary. It resembles what the first poster described in this respect. It is not very resource intensive etc. The important feature is that it stores your past translations of sentences and has a semantic engine which permits it to analyse sentences for similarities in structure and automatically propose tranlations based on it. Hence it is much much more than all the programs you mentioned, but it only and exclusively runs on windows. If you want to do professional translations and you have to run this kind of program on a PC , you don't want an El Cheapo PC. You either want to run it directly on your Mac or you want a good PC. You neither want to have two machines on your desktop running continually and networked, nor having to save, copy to an USB stick, reopen, copy, paste several times every day.

Anyway, some emulators are Bochs and DosBox. Virtual PC, however, is indeed the best and easiest to use.

**mdnky** · #8 June 24th, 2004, 07:30 AM

I'm with what the others have said (having run 10.1.x on a G3 300 for quite a while now). Grab a copy of Panther if possible, or at least Jaguar. Jaguar is much more responsive on the beige machine than 10.1.5 was. Panther is more responsive than Jaguar. You can find unopened, unregistered versions of Jaguar on eBay for $30 to $60 US, just do a search.

Forget about trying to run VPC on the iBook, it won't handle it well. Win98 will be just as slow as Win2000 under VPC too. In fact, 98 was slower than 2000 Pro under VPC 6.1 and Panther on my 900mhz iBook. I'd hate to see how a 300mhz one would run it.