Info need about Apple Macs

[odin]

My brother is thinking of buying one of them funky IMacs with a 700MHz G4.

Ofcourse it will do the surfing/typing/spreadsheeting nicely.

Only my brother may need to run windoze software for his job (i.e. no mac versions at all, he's into GIS, Geo Information Systems or something).

The 100000$ questions are: How good is windoze emulation on the Mac? What's the compatibility? Any comparisons on what PeeCee hardware a 700MHz G4 IMac can emulate?

Also some more general info about emulating on the mac would be nice.

My personal experience with a mac is limited to an ancient 030 os7 era laptop and ShapeShifter.

[spihunter]

I've run virtual PC on my older 450 mhz G3  Imac.
Windows 98 was pretty quick. I could even play
PC games like Worms armageddon at a good speed.
It almost seemed like a pentium 2.

I would bet the latest virtual PC on a G4 would run
most of the later PC apps.

[elendil]

Heh,

On this 500mhz g3 ibook, virtual pc 5 is dead slow (probably due to osX, bvadr), but it appears to emulate everything flawlessly.

I have found that I do not need any windows applications, except for my net banking which requires a c: drive (yes, they are very smart at the bank).
You do not really need windows or its applications either - there are plenty of alternatives, if the specific program is not already made for the mac, and if you really, really, really need it, use virtual pc and it should work - just slow (here, at least).

Go tell him to buy an a1 and run macos on that instead :-)

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[spihunter]

I forgot to say that I was running virtual PC on OS9 not OSX! I'm not sure how it runs on that.

[McNorris]

I used to use VPC 2.0 on my iMac, under OS9. It is a great product! I've not felt the need to upgrade.

On the level, don't count on running kick-a$$ games with it, but for the rest of your needs I think you'll find it fast enough.

I with the guy that posted before in saying, "I don't need any windows apps."

VPC 4 has some great multi-os booting options. (although BeOS won't boot) And they sell it with only "DOS," in case you already own windows.

Maybe DirectX is slow, but it seems to run most productivity apps pretty quickly.

[odin]

And is any of that emu stuff included with OS9/X?

[strobe]

I have used VirtualPC 5 to run Win98, Win2K, Linux/x86, AROS, Darwin/x86, OPENSTEP, and some other stuff.

VirtualPC is a very accurate emulator and is easier to use than a typical PC since you only have to deal with one configuration and set of drivers. If you use VPC I suggest using Win2K since it works better with 32bit clean software.

Whether it's fast or slow depends on what you want to use it for. If you want to run 3D games, forget it. However for my uses it's fast enough. For $100 is also pretty cheap.