iEmulator

[lowededwookie]

Has anyone used iEmulator? It's a PC emulator in the same vain as Virtual PC but it only costs $36(NZ).

They have video on their site and it looks like it runs smoothly and quickly but it doesn't tell you what hardware it's running on so the video could be using a Dual G5 Mac with tricked out RAM to get the performance and so is not a good indicator of the Real World.

VPC7 runs quite well on my iBook (04 model) and so if this program runs as fast as VPC7 then I'm seriously going to look at purchasing it. You can't even buy VPC without the OS so the cheapest option is $470(NZ) with XP Pro but I already have Pro.

[locust]

iEmulator is based on qemu (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/). I think it has some additional tweaks though, and comes in a nice bundled up installer that you don't need to hunt around for and/or patch+compile.

I don't know how much is in iEmulator performance improvement wise (it could be nothing for all I know), and I don't know how much qemu's improved in the past couple of months. But the last time I looked at qemu on the Mac, it was a lot slower than VPC. It ran TIE Fighter fine, but I wouldn't have used it for, say, Windows development work.

On the other hand, I already have (legal) access to VPC at no cost. If you're looking to not spend money, you may want to spend a couple of hours looking at qemu.

I'm pretty sure you can but VPC sans OS.