What is SoftWindows 1.0?

Insignia has a tough challenge: to deliver Windows on a Mac completely via software. The Power Macs are here, and so is SoftWindows — with a strong endorsement by Apple. Does SoftWindows solve the speed problem? No, although performance is now acceptable for low-end business needs. More important, is SoftWindows a long-term solution to Windows compatibility? Perhaps, but there’s no guarantee that it can keep up with forthcoming releases of Windows or new Microsoft technology.

SoftWindows delivers its main promise: you can run Windows programs, on a Mac, in a Windows window. Insignia has a license from Microsoft to use the Windows 3.1 code, and sure enough, you get real Windows. But there are prices to pay for the ability to run Windows via emulation.

One price is the performance. While SoftWindows runs at four to six times the speed of Insignia’s SoftPC, that’s still at the level of bottom-end Windows machines, ranging from a fast (33MHz) 80386DX (approximately equivalent to the performance of a Mac II) to a slow (25MHz) 80486 (approximately equivalent to a Centris 610). SoftWindows’ performance varies by application. This performance is fine for standard programs used occasionally, such as accounting packages and databases.

A second price is compatibility. Yes, SoftWindows contains real Windows code, but it runs only in Standard mode. That means it acts like it’s working on an 80286-based PC (such as IBM’s long-discontinued AT). The 286 has been dead for several years, and even the 386 has been basically out of the business picture for more than a year. Now that Pentiums are starting to overtake the 486, Windows software developers are dropping support for the 286 and requiring a 386 or better CPU. By targetting users who have 386, 486, or Pentium PCs, software developers can take advantage of Windows’ Enhanced mode and its better memory-handling, multiple-program-intcraction, and protected-services features.

But Enhanced-mode programs won’t work under SoftWindows. System-level services like OLE 2.0 (the Windows equivalent of the forthcoming OpenDoc, or Apple’s publish and subscribe) require Enhanced mode — even if you don’t need to run OLE 2.0 within your SoftWindows session, you may well want to use OLE to connect a program running in SoftWindows with a program running on a real PC on tlie network.

Realizing this. Insignia is working on an Enhanced-mode-compatible upgrade to SoftWindows, but that won’t be available until the end of the year, at which time the next version of Windows — version 4.0, code-named Chicago — should be close to shipping. People need 486 mode right now, not the end of the year. Insignia says it will be several months after 4.0’s release before SoftWindow's will be upgraded to support it.

A third price is cost. The $499 list price translates to a street price of about $350. While that’s steep for an operating system (Windows 3.1, MS-DOS, and System 7 combined cost less), it’s not unreasonable. But SoftWindows requires 16MB of RAM — that’s another $350 or $400 for most Power Mac owners. (Why so much RAM? The Mac System takes about 3MB, while SoftWindows’ emulation takes about 7MB. That reserves about 5MB for Windows itself and about 1MB for other Mac programs.) And for reasonable performance, you need a cache card in the Power Mac 6100 or 7100 — that’s another $200 from third-party cache vendors. Quickly, SoftWindows ends up costing you about $900. For a few hundred dollars more, you can buy a PC coprocessor board from Orange Micro...

SoftWindows supports NetWare, so a Mac running it can be directly connected to a PC network. SoftWindows also runs on all models of the Power Macintosh. (The Orange Micro boards require a Mac or Power Mac with a 12-inch NuBus slot.) Users who won’t be performing demanding tasks can run it — at less- than -optimal performance — on a system without a cache, which drops the total cost to about $700.

If you run Windows software occasionally, or run undemanding Windows software a lot — and the Enhanced mode support is not an issue for you — SoftWindows is a viable solution, but no more than that. For more-demanding or longterm needs, however, a hardware solution is a better approach. As Power Macs get faster, so should SoftWindows, but nonetheless, I’m not sold on SoftWindows as a long-term solution to Windows compatibility.

Gruman, Galen. (August 1994). SoftWindows 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 63).

Download SoftWindows 1.0 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II