Re: XY on a Mac

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Andy, et al,
I tried both DosBox and iEmulator in various versions and confirm Lisa's
experience of keyboard difficulties. The Mac keyboard has some keys not
defined for DosBox or iEmulator, and, as Lisa said, some DOS key
combinations overlap with Mac functions. There is a way to turn off
these Mac-specific functions in OSX and release the keys for DosBox or
iEmulator, but I'd have to poke around to find out where again--it was
complicated and not entirely satisfactory, as I recall.
Ultimately, I gave up on both DosBox and iEmulator because of other
problems: a) inability to navigate between the two OSs' partitions
(there was an awful procedure requiring one to "mount" a partition
manually each time DosBox started; whereas iEmulator stored everything
including the xy.exe and *.kbd and *prn files _and_ the text files all
in one whacking great file which was, of course, unintelligible to the
Mac--totally useless); b) instability (certain key-combinations sent
both emulators into a tizzy); c) illegibly small screens.
I am running OSX 10.3.9, for which Virtual PC running w2k (simulated
environment) was then available; Virtual PC has been superceded by
Parallels for OSX 10.4. and later. Virtual PC runs very stabily. The
screen and keyboard function as expected (with all the Xy3 functions
both out-of-the-box and user-defined in *.kbd and *.prn files executing
normally). Both windowed and full-screen mode work as expected. A shared
folder can be defined which both OSs 'see' and to/from which drag and
drop works seamlessly. Performance is acceptible, though not as fast as
on my w2k tower (less RAM is available in the simulated environment, but
certainly adequate for running Xy3).
I do not print from Xy, so cannot report on the functionality in this
respect. Xy4 also runs happily in the simulated Windows environment,
though I have not tested all of the U2 or UNDO functions.
I know, this doesn't really get you away from Windows, but I doubt
whether a DOS-only emulator running in OSX is ever going to be entirely
satisfactory. The DOS emulators appear to have been designed for gamers,
not word processors.


Hope this helps,