navillus95472 wrote:

> I use a Mac PowerBook G4 and now run Guide 8 in VirtualPC (XP).
> I'm unhappy with this arrangement for several reasons, and I
> wonder if anyone has tried using Guide in DOS mode with DOSBox
> or some other DOS emulator for OSX.

First off... my apologies for the delay in getting this message
posted. Messages from new users are moderated (because when I left
moderation off, some years back, we got spam about "heavenly
bodies" of a very different kind). I'm afraid this one slipped past
me, until I got a reminder from Yahoogroups about it. You're now
marked as an "unmoderated user".

Anyway. Three things occur to me:

(1) Guide 8 ought to run Just Fine in VirtualPC, as far as I'm
aware. What problem(s) are you seeing? Maybe we can tweak things
a bit and get it to work with the current setup. (If it's a Guide
problem, rather than a VirtualPC one.)

(2) Getting DOS Guide to work might be possible. It works under
"real" DOS, or a DOS shell in Windows, or in FreeDOS. The down
side to this is that DOS Guide has had only minimal maintenance in
recent years, due to the fact that only a few people are still
using it. (Mostly folks with Mel Bartels' AltAz telescope system,
which in at least one form is a DOS-only solution.) Most of the new
features have been in the Windows version of Guide only. So I'd
not leap to DOS Guide unless you really had to.

(3) One other possibility might be the use of Wine:

http://www.winehq.org

This is definitely a good solution for getting Guide to run in
Linux; it works like a charm in that case. There is no noticeable
performance penalty (perhaps careful timing tests would reveal one,
but nothing I can see). I've not tried Wine on OS/X, but a version
apparently does exist for that platform.

-- Bill