#A500 IBM emulator
For anyone that is interested…
I have received and installed the A500's new IBM emulator distributed by
Pulsar Technologies. So far the installation was a breeze. Essentially, I
have an IBM-xt dual floppy disk system hidden inside my A500. No, it
doesn't run as a subtask of Workbench (like the A2000's IBM cards). It
doesn't run access a harddisk (that is beside the fact that my A500 doesn't
even have a harddisk, if I had one, it wouldn't work know it was there).
It works like this, when I want my Amiga, I insert the Amiga workbench
diskette and I get an A500 with the 512k on the mother board, the 512k on
the pulsar board, and then an additional couple hundred k or ram on a
ramdisk that is generated from the extra ram on the pulsar board. The
clock on the board is accessible from workbench.
When I want an IBM (since I have it at work and need to do some of my
wordprocessing on an IBM for the laser printer), then I turn on the Amiga
and insert my Pulsar diskette and I get an IBM-xt (NEC-v30 running phoenix
bios) with 704k.
Since I have an Amiga external drive hooked up to my A500, when I boot
Amiga or IBM, I get two drives (you know, df0: df1: if Amiga and A: and B:
if IBM).
So far there appears to be no major problems. I have run 'Word' the
word processing IBM program without problems. I have run 'Welltris' the
game as well. There was a diskette included that had 3 shareware programs
(a word processor 'galaxy', a spreadsheet 'aseasyas', and a database
program 'file express') as well as pkARC to unpack them. It also came with
MS-dos 4.01. So far I am quite pleased.
To get stuff from IBM to Amiga or viceversa it comes with 'crossdos' the
Amiga program that reads IBM diskettes. However I have not tested that as
I had 'dos-2-dos' another Amiga program already that I was using at work
anyways. I know have an A501 expansion card w/ clock that is sitting in my
desk doing nothing. Any ideas? questions?
Jerry Yu
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