🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991Feb22.015227.17611@portia.Stanford.EDU>, 
thewho@elaine22.stanford.edu (Derek Fong) writes...

>After visiting a store and fooling around with SoftPC, I couldn't seem to get
>a straight answer on how the "hard drives" work.  (yes, another clueless comp-
>uter salesman 

I wouldn't be so tough on the guy.  The section of my DOS 3.3 manual that 
describes how to set up a new hard disk is 19 pages long.  The relevant 
section of the SoftPC manual is 9 pages long, easier to follow, but 
still takes a few minutes to digest if you are a Mac person used to 
plug-and-play hardware and single-mouse-click software installations.

>Anyways, my question is this: how do you create larger partitions than the
>original one that comes with Soft PC.  I was able to create a 5 MB "Drive D:
>"But when I tried to access it, I got a "Non-DOS error."  I couldn't seem to
>format the drive using the normal DOS format command.  There must be some trick
>as to formatting the drive.  

The disk has to be prepared using the MS-DOS FDISK command.  FDISK
is a disk partitioning tool that is used to get around the DOS 
limitation of 32 megabytes per logical volume.  After running FDISK, 
each logical volume on the drive (usually one for SoftPC virtual disks)
can be initialized with the DOS FORMAT command.  The same thing would 
have to be done for a new PC drive.

>Also...another question: how is the performance of the AT/EGA add on.  I would
>be buying it only for the speed upgrade as I only have a black and white SE/30.
>IS the upgrade worth it?  How much faster?Q  Does it emulate a 287 also?  
>What kind of 286 performance does one see: 10 mhz, 12 mhz, 16 mhz?

I think that the AT/EGA extension adds considerable value to the package.
It IS faster, but more importantly it allows your Mac to emulate several
different PC hardware configurations.  You can do AT/CGA, AT/EGA, operate
with or without 80287 co-processor emulation, and use up to 4 meg of LIM 4.0
expanded memory.  This effectively gives you several different PC's in
a single package.  Switching between emulation modes is much easier than
reconfiguring a real PC.  The actual performance depends on the clock 
speed of the Mac, and whether background jobs are running at the
same time in another Mac MF partition (Multifinder compatibility is another
significant advantage of SoftPC over a real one or a NuBus PC board.).   
Switching to the PC is simple.  For example:

C:\> dir                               

 Volume in drive C is DOS_HD_C         
 Directory of  C:\                     

COMMAND  COM    25276   2-03-88   2:31p
DOS          <DIR>     10-18-90   9:37p
INSIGNIA     <DIR>     10-18-90   9:37p

Doesn't it make your skin crawl?  

-- Bill Johnston (johnston@oscar.ccm.udel.edu)
-- 38 Chambers St.; Newark, DE 19711; (302)368-1949