A1 + MOL + VPC

[yoodoo]

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.

[yoodoo]

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.

[yoodoo]

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

[yoodoo]

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.

[yoodoo]

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.