Darek's Emulation Tips and Secrets

Inspired by the recent release of 64-bit Windows XP Pro which I've now installed on my Athlon64 system at home, I tried running various release of Gemulator and SoftMac on it. To my surprise, it didn't work. Grrrrr.

I took the most recent beta build of SoftMac 9.0 (a.k.a. SoftMac Pro) out of mothballs and debugged the problem. Turns out to be a bug on my part, making some incorrect assumptions which break on the 64-bit platform. My bad. After fixing the problems and tweaking a few performance issues (remember, SoftMac was last tuned for the Pentium 4 processor, well before the release of any 64-bit AMD or Intel processors) I gave the newly fixed SoftMac build a whirl under 64-bit Windows.

Surprise! It runs faster than ever. This little $700 Athlon 64 box SCREAMS now running Mac OS. Attached is a screen shot, showing the performance pretty much beating all but the most top end systems from last year.

Now, this really was just an experiement and I have no intention of resuming work on SoftMac any time soon.  So for the time being I apologize that the SoftMac on our web site is broken on 64-bit machines. If enough people email me to tell me they're running Windows XP 64-bit and need SoftMac support, I might tear myself away from the movies.

Speaking of which, the annual Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) starts tomorrow, so after my early morning pilgrimage to see Star Wars Episode III, I've made it a goal to go see at least 50 movies this year at SIFF. Normally I cram in 25 to 30 movies during each three-week festival. This year I'm hoping to average 2 or 3 movies a years.

Check my Darek's Dungeon blog for weekly movie reviews!

Recently I've been getting a lot of email from people who stumble upon my web site http://www.emulators.com asking me if I know of a way to run old DOS and Windows 95 games on Windows XP.

However, emulators.com is devoted to the running of old Atari and Macintosh software in Windows XP, not old PC software. So, you've come to the wrong web site.

But as it turns out, I do have an answer for you. The very company that makes Windows also makes an emulator for running old DOS and old Windows software on Windows XP. That emulator is called Virtual PC 2004. A free trial version of Virtual PC 2004 can be downloaded from:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/

Enjoy, and please let me know how it works for you.

Ok, ok, enough with the whining about the lack of RSS feeds on the overly lengthy Darek's Secrets page. I'll leave it to MSN host and help me manage my posts.

This blog is dedicated to inner geek in all of us and will continue the tradition of the original Darek's Secrets page to focus on topics such as new hardware reviews, Windows and Mac OS tips, and my personal horror stories from the scariest places on earth - computer stores.

- Darek