What is SoftWindows 95?

SoftWindows is an x86 emulator for PowerPC classic Mac OS that comes packaged with a disk image containing an installation of Windows 95.

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We don’t advocate using Windows, but maybe you have FoxPro databases or graphics files in CorelDRAW format, or you need to see how your Web pages will look on PCs. Your options are: a hardware card, a whole other computer, or SoftWindows. In the past, the first two solutions were prohibitively expensive, and the last was glacially slow (running the first version of SoftWindows 95 on a Power Mac 7500, we saw about three seconds per frame performance in id’s game Quake).

With this version of SoftWindows 95, Insignia offers a workable alternative to hardware. What you run it on has a great deal to do with how tolerable the experience is. On a 200MHz machine, windows open without delay, and programs launch before you forget what you wanted to do. You wouldn’t want to make this your primary game machine (even though SoftWindows now does a good job of emulating sound cards and other hardware widgets), but it’ll do for checking email in a PC-based office or transferring data or even worldng with databases — just don’t expect anything to fly.

SoftWindows 95’s best feature may be the ease of accessing the Internet. If your Mac is hooked up to the Net, Microsoft Internet Explorer will go — though even on an ISDN line, the effective download speed was roughly that of a 9600 baud modem. Still, if you're a Web worker and need to know how fonts and colors will look on the Windows side, this will work.

All in all, we spent a lot of time messing with .dll files and cursing strange error messages. It’s Windows, all right.

Turner, D. D. (June 1997). SoftWindows 95 4.0. MacAddict. (pg. 57).

Download SoftWindows 95 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

Compatibility notes

It runs well on Mac OS 9.2.2 using the Power Mac G4.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver