Re: Linux / Kegs on a Mac

[Dain Neater <dneater@inebraska.com>]

> From: Phoenyx <quazar@dcnet2000.com>
> Organization: Insync Internet Services, Inc.
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2,comp.emulators.apple2
> Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 00:03:51 -0500
> Subject: Re: Linux / Kegs on a Mac
> 

> You have to consider that the Windows OS restricts many of the program
> methods best suited for this type of application. This is inherent in it's
> design. After all, it is designed to keep the programmer from having to
> resort to low level coding by allowing a program to call system routines.
> While this may work for a large variety of applications, it fails on an
> emulator which is cpu intensive and often requires timing critical code.

Well, I have Windows for work purposes, but I don't use it for my "Home
Computing", so I am not really that concerned, it just seems to be that
there are scads more Windows users out there than anyone else.
> 
> While I can't vouch for Bernie or Sweet 16, I know that Kegs has been
> supported by it's author for quite some time. Kent has put a lot of time
> and effort into expanding and debugging it as well as debugging faulty
> GS programs (usually games) so they will run on it. The Windows GS
> emulators have not had that kind of support.
Yeah, Kegs sounds like it gets updated very frequently, as does Bernie and
Sweet 16.  My personal feeling on the whole thing is that I do really like
having a user interface as opposed to editing text files and such, I guess I
could just be lazy.  Being able to download a *.bxy file and being able to
drag a file the Mac Desktop to the GS/OS desktop with little or no effort
really makes it awesome.   Bernie has low level disk support, but it is user
enabled if there are programs that won't function without it.  Another
interesting feature of Bernie is the ability to make an alias for a program,
say AppleworksGS on your Mac desktop.  Click on that alias, it launches both
Bernie, and Appleworks GS.  Sweet 16 is the best sounding GS emulator, all I
can say is Wow, good work was done there.

> 
> At first, XGS was ported to Dos and Win32 (NT) and for a little while it
> looked like PC users were going to get a chance to emulate the GS. At this
> point, all GS emulators were still in the early stages of development.
> Even Kegs, which at this point was largely restricted to the HP work
> station it was developed on. Then XGS development on the PC stalled out.
> Luckily, Steve decided to take over the development of XGS/32 and, well,
> the proof is in the programming. You just have to try it.

I never really tried XGS/32 because there were some readme files that
basically said that it will only work on NT and that Win 95 users were left
out.  I think that has been since remedied, but I have since then been using
Bernie on my Powerbook and Sweet 16 on BeOS so I don't need it.  I am glad
there is an option on both Windows and *nix.


The Apple ][gs world is living large with some truely great  GS emulators on
several platforms.  Thanks go out to the authors, you all know who you are.

Bravo.


Dain