🚀 go-pugleaf

John Beardmore <wookie@wookie.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>In article <816692850snz@c4rv.demon.co.uk>
>           raj@c4rv.demon.co.uk "Rajesh Varia" writes:

>>>         The supplier I bought the PC from is sending me some softwear that
>>> will trick(?) the other softwear into seeing a co-processor and if just
>>> swopping CPU's to me seems the better option, then that is what I might do.
>>> 
>>Yes, there is software which can 'emulate' a co-processor but there are a
>>couple of points to remember:
>>- It possibly will not work with all software
>>- Being a emulation, you will not actually get any speed benefit of FPU.  As 
>>  you said that you are using maths intensive program, this is not desirable.
>>- Because it is running some emualtion software, its actually slower.

>And the emulation would probably only work on DOS / Windows !  No use if you
>move to NT, Warp, Linux or possibly even '95 !

Well Windows 3.xx and 95 use the win87em.dll library to emulate 80x87
functions, so you should be fine with general windows software - of
course it'll be slower. Some software that tests for (and won't run
unless it sees) an 80x87 may give an error message and quit, since it
may not use the API at all and write directly to the FPU.

HTH