Congrats to Lisa and some thoughts - was Re: Xy on Mac

[Russ Urquhart russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx]

I've been following this thread for a while, and had some comments to
add.


First to Lisa, i too want to congratulate you on not only getting Xy
to work under Parallels, but for initially taking the advice of those
here, who only had theory about Parallels to offer. You took the
chances! Congrats!


Also, after reading your post about having problems about getting
Parallels to access your hard drive, i downloaded the documentation
and was trying to find out more information. According to the
documentation, Shared Folders is only an option for Windows based
operating systems. (This is a surprise to those of us using VPC as it
readily had the ability, even for the DOS users to map a shared
folder to a drive letter. ) Fwiw, i sent an email to Parallels
Director of Communications blog asking about having Shared Folders
for the DOS users. From reading this guys' blog it seems that the
development effort for Parallels is pretty active.


Someone else on the list mentioned using Radnor with DOSBox. I'm glad
that he was able to get that to work. That might be a viable option
as well, but DOSBox can be a little hard to configure. I don't know
if the gui front-end Radnor would help in that area or not. If so,
that might be worth looking at, as the screenshots on the website
show mapping Shared Folders.


For the people looking to Linux for running Xy, DOSBox may be the
answer for them as well.


As for the others fears of Big Companyitis. I can understand that. My
initial distaste for M$ prompted me to first look at Linux as an
alternative. (OS X, G4 Cube, and VPC where what brought me over to
the Mac.) After all this time, using a Mac at home and all the
various incarnations of WIndows at work, i'm just about convinced
that, with the growing complexity of software available, myriad of
third party hardware peripherals, and desired functionality from the
growing user base (people other than my demographic) ANY OS has a
difficult time of completely supporting everything, interacting
together, well. The MS-DOS days were a really fun, simple (compared
to now) time for users and their computers. Pretty much any machine
could be put together and work pretty well with the software and
hardware out there. (Of course things got more difficult as more
software and hardware were added.) Windows came along at this time
and offered a unifying umbrella for software and hardware... for
awhile.)
I think we are at the point once again where, regardless of the OS,
there are going to be issues. Which ones, and how big, depends on the
OS, IMO.


I've been happy with OS X, but there have been issues, certainly.

For Linux users, there are some pretty good distros out there now.
Ubuntu has been getting really good press from an average user stand
point, but there are issues here as well. A pretty good and balanced
critique was done but this guy who took his average computing
environment and went 30 days using Linux, trying to do everything he
always did with Windows, but on the LInux side. It's a good read and
you can find it here: http://consumer.hardocp.com/article.html?
art=MTI5OCwxLCxoY29uc3VtZXI=


Vista of course has it's own issues.

Just my two cents...


Russ




On Mar 12, 2007, at 2:51 PM, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:

> Lisa Kleinholz wrote:
> > The sharing, etc. is only available under most recent versions of
> > Windows. If I set up to access CD, nothing. My external floppy
> > shows up
> > in the menu, but I can't write to it or read it under Parallels,
> > though
> >
> > there is no problem when I switch to Mac.
>
> The more I think about this, the more I suspect that DOS, in and of
> itself, can in NO WAY "see" a mac drive; DOS cannot even see NTFS.
> (Possibly the CD with MSCDEX, but I doubt it.) Seeing the other Mac
> drives must be a function of the Virtualization engine. So the
> question is, can Parallels do that? I should think it must, because
> people running DOS or Windows games will want to copy them to a
> hard drive or play them from a CD. So I should think your first job
> is to find out how to do that. Once you can see a hard drive or CD
> you can copy your DOS and Xy files to one or the other under Mac,
> then copy them to the DOS virtual drive under DOS. (At that point,
> you want to copy xopy.exe first, then use that to copy the rest.)
>
>
> If--which I doubt--it turn out Parallels cannot see Mac drives, you
> might want to try using an older Windows for your virtual opsys. I
> have a spare CD and install key for Win 95, should it come to that.
>
> --
> Patricia M. Godfrey
> PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx