Lake Havasu City, Arizona – where the old London Bridge luxuriates in unaccustomed splendour across an artificial lake is an unlikely location for a high technology company with a hot new product, but PC Week tracked down Utilities Unlimited International Inc, which claims to have an 80486 emulator for the PowerPC that will enable applications […]
Lake Havasu City, Arizona – where the old London Bridge luxuriates in unaccustomed splendour across an artificial lake is an unlikely location for a high technology company with a hot new product, but PC Week tracked down Utilities Unlimited International Inc, which claims to have an 80486 emulator for the PowerPC that will enable applications to run on a Power Macintosh 8100 at speeds exceeding current Pentium computers. The firm claims that the software, still unnamed, will offer full 80486 emulation, including the chip’s memory management unit, and will need 1Mb memory to run – nothing special on a RISC. It is claimed to run MS-DOS, Windows, OS/2, Windows NT and iAPX-86 Unix. The company says the emulator achieves its performance by applying technologies developed for its Amiga-based Emplant line of Macintosh and 80486 emulators, and includes many functions that would normally be called from the Mac, which improves performance considerably. It claims that its emulators are so clever that Insignia Solutions Ltd’s SoftPC 286 emulator runs faster within the Emplant Mac emulator than it does running native on a Mac. Utilities Unlimited has also gone back to (lower case) Basics and written all the code in assembly language, making it easier to fine-tune it for optimal performance. Planned for launch in the late summer, the emulator is expected to cost $150 or so, but it will include only Utilities Unlimited’s rewrite of MS-DOS, so users will also have to buy Windows or whatever other operating system they want to run under the new emulator.
