So I was hammering out something with SheepShaver (more on that later!) and I thought a quick test of just how fast SheepShaver is vs a real PowerMAC would be interesting. Â So I was playing with my old copy of SoftPC, which is 68000 based, but There were PowerPC versions, years ago when I bought a G4 to run OS X to only find out that it wasn’t supported (the dark days of OS X Server 1.0, before the 10.0 public beta) I used to run Windows NT 4.0 on SoftPC on MacOS 8.6. Â Ugh, dark times indeed!
So with some luck, I got SoftPC 3.0 up and running on MacOS 7.5.3 using SheepShaver for Windows. Then I noticed that unlike SoftPC for the 68000, SoftPC for the PowerPC emulates a 486! Â So how does DooM run? Â A little slow, it’s kind of dream like.
But since there is Windows and a 32bit processor, I thought this would be a great time to load up Win32s, Video for Windows, WinG, and WinDooM!
And much to my amazement it runs! Â And I was further impressed that there is a shim sound driver, and it works!
So I made a quick video to compare DooM for Windows vs DooM for MS-DOS on this setup.
Yes it’s pointless, but I kinda think it’s really cool.
As a bonus, here is E1M1 under MacOS 8.0. Â The MIDI support in 8.0 is MUCH more stronger than 7.5.3! Â And I should add, it actually feels faster on 8.0 than 7.5.3
I have SoftPC on an old Quadra 605, but of course it’s only 286 emulation. Still it’s surprisingly usable, especially considering the host is only 25Mhz! I did run later SoftPC versions on a G4 iMac with Windows 2000 under 10.3; slow dark times! It was certainly barely usable, at least on my hardware.
On topic though, the PPC emulation there must be quite quick to be able to emulate the 486, video and sound shim to that level! SheepShaver isn’t particularly slow (though I didn’t think it was that quick!); just really crashy, even more so than the same MacOS version on real hardware.
I look forward to seeing what you’ve been tinkering with!
Ps. great to see your Windows hosted Apple Talk share on the desktop!
Yeah it is very crash happy, but you did catch the major change!
I’ve run SoftPC on a SE/30 which… was ran and felt like an XT. But it was barely enough to play BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception in CGA mode so I was happy enough. I last ran it on my old A/UX box, a Quadra 950 (what a beast!), where it happily ran on that old 68040 @ 33Mhz.
But even on Basilisk II without any JIT it runs amazingly fast.
SheepShaver is a bunch more stabler with old world 9500v1 ROMs, and with the older more 68000 friendly OS’s. I did some QuickTime experiment which shows it works best in 7.5, 8.0, 8.1. Once 8.5 and beyond show up with their nanokernel it all goes down hill, and fast.
Seeing emulation inside emulation is always nice.
Yep the more pointless, the better!