Well, this topic didn't get much answers on the Banter and Brawl borad, so I'm moving it here to a calmer, and most knowledgeable place...

A while back, I was wondering if I should buy a PC or a Mac to replace by old LC630.

Though I am waiting for the show in NYC this week, I am going strongly towards PC at this time. I still believe that Mac is a better platform for ease of use and stability, but I would prefer a PC's versatility.

Now, my only worry is if I'll be able to play EV/O again. How good are Mac emulators for PC?

I intend to buy an AMD Duron, at about 600MHz. Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,

gorizo

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"Insult is an art."

I think it's a bad idea for two reasons... x86 chips don't emulate anything well at all (actually it's a pain in the @$$ to code anything in x86 assembler, but I won't rant). There are 8 visible integer registers, and floating point operands have to be pushed and pulled in order onto a stack. Compare that to a PPC chip where someone writting code has access to 32 integer and 32 floating point registers. Intel chips doing emulation end up moving a lot more memory around then they should. To top that off, there isn't any real demand for mac emulators for the PC. The market has a couple small competitors that can't afford to put the time or effort into fine tuning emulation like the harsh competition between VirtualPC and SoftWindows has caused on the mac side.

That said, most (all?) mac emulators require you to either install a mac rom on an expansion card, or require you to go out and find a suitable system to copy the rom from... They don't do PPC code, so the best you get is '040 emulation and hence system 8.0 is the top you can run off them. I think extensions don't work, so there's no QuickTime support.

Most likely it won't run EV3 for you, so you're probably going to have to choose one way or the other. In your case, if you've already been using a mac all this time, and all your previous software investments are mac, then it's probably a bit extreme to switch platforms now.

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I think tommorow's announcements will help to change your mind :D. Seriously though this
is a terrible time to jumpship. Apples coming back in a big way. Especially with OSX around
the corner.