Re: Demos

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article edhel@bigfoot.com (Edhel Iaur, Esq.) writes...

>On 31 Jul 1997 15:44 -0500, spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)
>wrote:
>
>>Demo (entertainment): Moire
>
>Isn't that one of the dinky BASIC programs from the little
>spiral-bound green and white Applesoft ][ manual (a copy shall soon be
>mine >:D )?

    Yep, though I recall this was "Moire GS", a GS-specific version that
used 640 mode SHR. I think it was included on a collection of animations
from BRCC years ago, nothing very exciting.

>>Demo (software preview): SoftPC (fake-port)
>
>*double take* HUH?

    It was a hoax. Some programmer(s) wrote what was supposed to be a
demostration copy of SoftPC for the IIgs. They had it setup so if you
typed some commands (i.e. 'dir', 'dir/w', 'type autoexec.bat', 'time',
'C:', 'cd dos', etc) it would respond back with a pre-prepared output
to make it _appear_ it was really emulating a PC. They even made the
floppy drive seek unnecessarily and the display update slower than
normal to further make the user believe the GS was emulating an IBM
through software.

    Of course it didn't take much poking around the files on the disk
to see it was a fake. Not too mention it is technically _impossible_
to emulate an IBM at anywhere near runnable speeds on a stock 2.6 MHz
IIgs (you could write SoftPC, but it'd probably take a day or two
before the emulated machine would bring up a DOS prompt ;). The only
real way to get the GS to run IBM software is with a PC-Transporter.
(on the topic of software emulation, I'm still curious how that
Nintendo Gameboy emulator will run, that might actually be semi-doable
on a 15 MHz IIgs. This emulator is real, but may be kind of pokey).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca