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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: on February 20, 2003, 12:53:56 PM

Title: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: on February 20, 2003, 12:53:56 PM
Can any A1/Peg owners on here let me know if they have had any sucess in running Virtual PC under Mac-on-Linux? What is performance like, any installation problems?  I'll buy either board next month if it works.  (Might even buy both boards, due for a nice criminal injuries pay out in the next couple of weeks)

Cheers,
Nik

Nik
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: poweramiga2002 on February 20, 2003, 12:58:45 PM
that is a good question was thinking about this myself is it possible or not ?
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: Acill on February 20, 2003, 01:12:55 PM
Im sure it will work, but my question is why? If you want to run windows or PC applications why not just go buy a budget priced PC? The money you would spend on the A1, MacOS, and VPC with windows included is far more then a cheap PC,
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: J on February 20, 2003, 01:13:30 PM

MacOS certainly runs at very acceptable speeds on a G3. In fact, I'm only running at 450Mhz at the moment and it's still very good.

I haven't tried VPC yet but is on the to do list for me.

BTW, I have no benchmarks, just a 'feel'  :-)  

J
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: poweramiga2002 on February 20, 2003, 01:18:52 PM
Its not the point would love to rub it into peecee users that we can at least keep up with them but on our terms i have all the progs needed as i run vpc on my ibook and its not too bad on that
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: on February 20, 2003, 01:19:29 PM
I'm giving the PC to the missus when I buy the A1/Peg. Condition of buying it. You know how it is!
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: poweramiga2002 on February 20, 2003, 01:25:31 PM
Im gladly handing over the ibook to the misses wouldent want her using the A1 would spoil her too much
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: on February 22, 2003, 01:19:37 AM
Nobody tried it???????
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: nyteschayde on February 22, 2003, 01:52:46 AM
I think it would work. I have a beige G3 minitower macintosh that has been upgraded to a G4. It is running at 400MHz. VPC runs Windows XP okay but you must understand that VPC doesn't offer any graphically accelerated video modes. I suppose that doesn't matter because MOL doesn't either.

If you can settle for Windows98 I think you could perform a decent amount of work on it with only minor annoyance. Just understand that you cannot, even with a real Mac using VPC, ever run any games requiring Direct3D hardware. The VPC environment emulates only a S3 Trio32/64 chipset with 4MB of RAM.

If that is okay then I am pretty sure you will achieve what you want.
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: Bodie on February 22, 2003, 02:24:48 AM
I think those of us who want PC emulation are being realistic in the sense that we want to use programs such as Office (at least until good Amiga alternatives emerge).
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: yoodoo on February 22, 2003, 10:29:29 AM
Goodness knows why anyone would use MS Office unless it was bought for them by their company.

OpenOfficeOrg is file-compatible with MS Office, has all of the important features and most of the unimportant ones. It runs on Wintel, Mac, Linux (x86 and PPC) and is free.

The only real missing feature is a database with visual reports comparable to those in Access, but if you pay the nominal fee for SunOffice, you get the Adabas database.

It's certainly about time people stopped paying £100+ for the privelege of reading bloated MS-Doc files.
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: odin on February 22, 2003, 03:59:05 PM
Paying for M$ products? Huh? ;-)
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: Desler on February 22, 2003, 05:12:46 PM
There are many other reasons to run a win emu than just to use office. There are a lot of fx reasearch programs that are written for windows only  :-( not many of those needs an ultra faaast pc and are therefore perfect suited for an emulation.
I would consider buying a good x86 emulator even if it cost as much as a outdated pc. Why ?? space and time considerations. Who wants to connect a bunch of cables, power up a second computer, swap files between them one way or another, when you just as well could have a screen running win95 behind you WB screen?
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: yoodoo on February 24, 2003, 11:42:54 AM
I've just successfully installed Windows 98 on my A1G3 using the Bochs emulator.

No real problems, although it is very slow.  The installation worked first time, although it's only set up to use a hard drive image atm, so reading/writing to disk is slow.

I might try win95/DOS over the next few days to see if speed can get up to acceptable levels,but this might offer a slightly more reliable x86 emulation than running VPC on top of MOL.

Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: Desler on February 24, 2003, 01:04:57 PM
@Yoodoo
It was my understanding that Bochs was PAINFULLY slow. How is your take on this? Is it ok if you just want to run fx office?
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: yoodoo on February 24, 2003, 01:22:09 PM
It is slow.  I don't have DOS (on its own) to install, but will dload one of free alternatives later this week to try out.  The DOS part of win98 installation was fine and perfectly usuable as far as I could tell from the brief interaction.  Installing win98 took all night (6 hours) from start to finish.  had to leave it then to go to work :(

atm the installation is set up to emulate pentium class processor with 32 Mb memory.  It might be far faster aiming at 486 emu, which would cope fine with DOS and win95.

I was impressed with how easily and cleanly the sorce compiled for PPC - certainly worth an experiment.

Bochs is slow because it emulates the whole intel machine (vga/pci devices/storage drives), rather than just virtualising the OS calls like WINE or VMWare.

I don't anticipate attempting to install any really large software (cos I don't have any MS stuff available) but have a few older win95 educational apps that would be quite nice to see live again.

When run on a fast x86, Bochs is quick enough to run win95 at a usable speed, so hoping for my little G3-600 to go very far is perhaps a little ambitious.  Those dual G4s, however...

Perhaps bbrv could set up another showdown ;)
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: Desler on February 24, 2003, 01:27:03 PM
6 HOURS !!!! it sounds like something you would expect with pc-task and a 68030. Yeah I know that Bochs is super compatible and written in C and therefore is slow as hell. Does anyone know if its possible to scoup out the c code for the pentium and include a ppc assembler version instead. Would this give any noticable speed increases???
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: yoodoo on February 24, 2003, 07:52:08 PM
I've disabled PCI, SB16 and Ne2000 emulation.  I can get IPS (instructions per second) up to about 10,000,000 before it stops making a difference.

So how fast is it?

Equivalent to a 10Mhz Pentium ;)

When the kids are out of the way, I'll play with a few more settings and recompile to emulate a x486.

I don't think the emulator kernel is modular, so it would be difficult to swap bits without major rewrites.  There is (was?) a port to AmigaOS with MorphOS ectensions a while back.  Is it still going? Dunno.

If the speed could be upped to 50-60Mhz,  a lot of Win95 progs would be runnable.


Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: Desler on February 24, 2003, 08:20:08 PM
As far as I know Bochs IS modular, eventhough im no expert. I base this on a faq I read about Bochs I think they mentioned something about using the systems real x86 CPU. But of course I cannot find the link anywhere.
But then again 10 mhz on a g3 600mhz. That just poor. Now if only we could get the guy behind pctask to remove the dependencies for custom chip set. Even in 680x0 emulation mode this would make circles around Bochs :-)
Oh by the way the morphos/amiga version of Bochs is maintained by a guy called Nicholai Benalal. I have no idea who he is or how far he has gotten
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: yoodoo on February 24, 2003, 09:40:31 PM
Quote
then again 10 mhz on a g3 600mhz. That's just poor.


Perhaps.

The suggested speed in the docs for a 650Mhz Athlon is 2.5Mhz.  So we're doing better than that ;)

Don't forget that Bochs doesn't just emulate the cpu but the WHOLE machine. Bit like the difference between UAE without a JIT engine trying to do full AGA with Zorro. And it does it very cleanly; ie, no mean feat to compile first time on PPC with no changes/configuration at all.

Coincidentally, there's an article in this month's Linux Magazine here in the UK.  Just spotted it tonight on the way home from work.
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: asian1 on March 03, 2003, 05:07:52 PM
MS Buy Virtual PC (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-985149.html?tag=fd_top)

Apparently Connectix  / Virtual PC went down and MS buy the company. Perhaps MS will kill the product slowly.

Another possible idea is perhaps MS plan to conquer market for future motherboards based on high speed PowerPC CPUs (> 1 GHz).

>High speed PC on A1.
You can run high speed Windows XP or Linux X86 using REAL P.III / 700 Mhz Chip on Omnicluster SlotServer CPU card:

Omnicluster (http://www.omnicluster.com)
Title: Re: A1 + MOL + VPC
Post by: lempkee on March 03, 2003, 05:29:47 PM
what about MOL then? , also... is there any chance of IFUSION to appear/work on the A1 / pegasos?