Windows emulators for UNIX on the Mac?

[Numbers1820]

I just ran a search using "emulat*" for the last six months on this site and didn't come up with anything new that was terribly relevant, so here goes:

As a grad student with no money, I'm always looking for free or nearly-free stuff. For the first time ever, I'm also running into some programs that are Windows-only that I really want. No, nothing graphics-intensive, just text files that relate to more academic specialty.

I balk at the $200-$250 retail price for Virtual PC.

A friend told me that there should be Windows emulators available for UNIX that should run on the Mac. They may even be open-source. A google search just turned up gibberish for me. Can you guys tell me anything?

My technical expertise falls under the description, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." I'm not afraid to muck around in Terminal, but I really don't know much about it or UNIX in general. So, if you're recommending some real DIY type of solutions, I'll need considerable hand-holding and/or pointing out of resources that will do that for me.

And if your first thought is, "Virtual PC, duh!" please see my nearly identical post under the more general Mac OS X System forum.

Thanks in advance!

[davidbrit2]

There's a free PC emulator called Bochs. I've only played around with it once or twice using a Linux disk image, so I have no idea how well it runs Windows, if at all. Configuring the thing isn't terribly user friendly, but I'm going to download the latest version right now and see what I can make it do...

[strobe]

Please don't cross post.

Bochs sucks BTW. It can hardly run DOS, nevermind Windows |-\

[davidbrit2]

Yeah, I noticed the video performance leaves a bit to be desired. I typed dir in the FreeDOS bin directory, and it took a couple of seconds to print the listing on screen. Yikes. And the program isn't very fond of exiting cleanly, for some reason.