Xy on Mac OS X -- a report

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

I'm working toward switching to the Mac, and taking Xy with me. Though I've
long defended Microsoft's political and economic rights on this list, I
have never been under any illusions about the frustrations with their
software.
I used to look down my nose at Apple products, but the fact that OS X is
built on Unix was the critical factor in my deciding to try out a Mac. I
bought an iMac notebook in January, and have been snail-like inching toward
doing real work on it. A few weeks ago, I gave it a real workout, making it
my main computer while on the road for 2 weeks.
I run Xy on the Mac under Win98 SE emulation courtesy of Virtual PC (VPC).
Here's the report, which someone on this list asked for and others may be
interested in.
1. Emulation of Win98. VPC is utterly fantastic. When you are "in" a
Windows window, you don't know you're not at a PC. That goes for its
ability to talk to all the peripherals--including a network. For example,
I'm writing this on my desktop PC, but I just shoved a music CD into my
Mac, and inside Win98 emulation, did Start/Run/CDPLAYER.EXE and it is now
playing. (Of course, the Mac first tried to automatically play the CD under
its own software, iTunes, which I quit before running CDPLAYER.EXE.)
2. Win Speed. The Windows emulation is pretty fast. Actually, I think the
slight dragginess is due to the fact that this iMac has only a 933 MHz
processor. Probably a faster Mac would run Win98 without being slower than
the Win98 on my 1.33 GHz desktop. The emulated Win98 actually boots faster
than my desktop Win98 boots.
3. Xy performance. In general, Xy performance is good--I'd give it a "B"
(on the A to F scale).
I've run a large (14K), complicated XPL program with what I regard as
decent speed results. However, you may consider it indecent: it's 6 times
slower on the Mac. Part of this is due to a slower processor. But I also
tried the same XPL program on my wife's 900 MHz Win98 machine with the
result that it ran 5 times faster than on the Mac.
The *only* limitation I've encountered with my XPL programs is my inability
to get Xy to shell to DOS. That is, I get an error message when I try to
the DOS command. Specifically, I get "cannot run command." I also see the
message "Type EXIT to return to XyWrite" flash by on the Command Line (a
message that should appear at the DOS prompt). I've tried a variety of
forms of the DOS command, including such things as

DOS/nv/x/z /c dir

and many other variants.
I don't know if going to Mac/Unix is the long-term solution to preserving
XyWrite. I am, however, very impressed with the Mac's to accept new
*hardware* such as peripherals being attached. I don't have to go through
such nonsense as Win's "insert the CD ROM with Win98." The Mac seems not to
need driver software! It is truly plug-n-play--without it even bothering to
flash dialogue boxes in front of you. Stuff just works with it, right out
of the box.

--Harry

Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx