rechecking re connectix virtual pc relative performance?

[chelseayr]

if you were on a 200mhz pci powermac and didn't have too much background things (extra extensions especially) loaded, would the emulation performance perhaps be similar to a 120mhz pentium or close?

the guest os would had been windows 95, running simple desktop apps or 'slower' games (I mean - for a quick example from my head now lets say yes to railroad tycoon 2 but no to quake 2) just for notes

 

[obsolete]

It's been a while, but I would guess closer to 75MHz equivalent than 120MHz. Hopefully someone can step in with some benchmarks.

 

[Cory5412]

I, too, would guess much slower than 120 for VPC on a 200MHz 604.

If you have everything on hand though I would say why not give it a try? Worst that can happen is the games you're looking at run poorly enough that they're unplayable-adjacent due to interface lag, but it probably really depends on the specific game, too.

VPC 4 if I remember right officially recommends a G3 at like 333 or higher for Windows 95 and newer which actually got me and my parents to return the copy they bought me when I had the 7300/200 the first time around. We swapped it for a copy of AppleWorks 5 at which point it occurred to me I still had to write my papers on the family computer because I didn't have a Mac printer and didn't want to deal with file conversions. (haha whoops.)

But I do expect a light 95 install would itself run fine on VPC a 604@200, even if 95-era games won't.

(Reminded yet again I eventually want to pop the dos/166 and a sata card in my 8500/601@100.)

 

[Phipli]

Reminded yet again I eventually want to pop the dos/166 and a sata card in my 8500/601@100.

Reminder : You want to put your 601@100MHz, SATA card and a Voodoo 1 in your 8500.

 

[Snial]

if you were on a 200mhz pci powermac and didn't have too much background things (extra extensions especially) loaded, would the emulation performance perhaps be similar to a 120mhz pentium or close?

the guest os would had been windows 95, running simple desktop apps or 'slower' games (I mean - for a quick example from my head now lets say yes to railroad tycoon 2 but no to quake 2) just for notes

I have SoftWindows 3.0 on my PB 1400c/166 running Windows 3.1 (or 3.11 I forget which) in 386 mode. It feels like a 33MHz 386DX to 33MHz 486DX, but I haven't bench tested it as such. I mostly ran Borland Turbo C++, ClarisWorks 1.0 (for Windows) and the IAR H8 compiler. It was... usable to OK. It was faster than the 100MHz 486DX4 I originally had been given at DAC, but it was chronically slow because it only had 4MB of RAM. It's certainly slower than the 66MHz 486DX2 I got them to swap it with.

So, as a rough estimate, an interpretive emulator would run about 100x slower than the host. That's because the host would need to emulate the MMU and a whole host of environmental factors.

A JIT (or DRE) emulator is faster, maybe merely 10x to 20x slower than a host. This is because there's a trade-off between the compilation effort and emulator performance; and the JIT cache, but also because again, mismatches between the host and target architecture add up, particularly with flags. e.g. a PCI PowerMac is big-endian, emulating a little-endian computer.

The Gary Davidian 68K emulator achieved much better than a 100x slowdown, roughly 12x slower, because it didn't really have to emulate the system architecture (only the CPU); Apple allowed some apps to fail ("Fix your 68K app guys!") and critical system components were native (QuickDraw, Memory Manager and a few other things).

So, a 200MHz 604e would be like a 50MHz to 100MHz Pentium (maybe) with a DRE emulator and a 20MHz Pentium (40MHz 486DX) with an interpretive emulator. So, @obsolete 's estimate of a 75MHz Pentium sounds more credible.

 

[chelseayr]

I had thought software emulating would indeed be taking a hit but perhaps it look like could be more than what I had initially guessed at. but hmm yeah software is just software I won't mind eventually giving it a try and see what happens, as if it doesn't work out then theres always the trash can in lower-right corner for this! heh