Picking an emulator

J

josebravo

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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!
 
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!
 
Well, come into the forum... :D

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Again, it depends on what you need from the dictionary you have, but there may be ways to get the data running on Mac. Stardict may be a place to start. I don't use it, I just found it with a quick search on sourceforge. In fact I'm out of my league even installing it (would probably need fink) but it seems to be a flexible basis to use to import various dictionaries...

If you need what Cat is referring to it may be best just to have a machine dedicated to the work that needs the dictionary.
 
Just to clarify a point on Windows emulation: the speed you get with VirtualPC will be the fastest emulator you can get. Bochs and all the others will run extremely slow, so if VirtualPC doesn't run fast enough, then you're basically out of luck.

VirtualPC will run on your system, though. I would recommend VirtualPC 6 with Windows 95 installed. That would be the fastest combination of emulation on your particular setup, although I'd hardly call it "fast." It will work, though, just s-l-o-w-l-y.

Just FYI, I use VirtualPC 6 with Windows 2000 Professional on a 500MHz G4 machine, and it's slow as molasses. It works, though, and runs the programs I need.
 
Slow emulation is one definite drawback to using VPC or Bochs on a 300MHz system. Low memory is entirely another problem. With 320megs of RAM your MacOS will probably run pretty nicely, but you have to give the virtual PC memory as well, and it gets taken out of your 320megs. For Win95, 64megs of RAM may be sufficient, but that leaves your Mac with only 256megs of RAM for itself. You probably would be better off getting a real, year or two old PC. Windows would run faster on it and it wouldn't affect your Mac's performance at all. You should be able to share files over a network and even use remote desktop programs like VNC if you want to see Windows on your Mac display. I don't believe there is a VNC Viewer for native OSX but there is a Java VNC Viewer which runs inside a web browser, and there might be an X11 VNC Viewer available which would run under OSX 10.3.

Just don't expect to watch full motion video from the PC either way. The emulator (VPC) would run too slow and VNC doesn't refresh the display fast enough (networks are also pretty slow).
 
Well, for full motion videos of the network, there are wonderful audio/video streaming apps such as vlc/vls and Quicktime. Just in case this was desired somehow..
 
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