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Second, I foolishly said something nasty about how MIPS RISC chips weren’t used in the mainstream RISC boxes. Bryan Van Vliet and Frank Nagy both corrected me on this one, since both DEC and Silicon Graphics use the MIPS chips and together hold about 23% of the market. Oops. Admittedly, Sun alone has about 30% of the market and IBM is expected to do very well with its RS/6000 line of RISC machines, but DEC and Silicon Graphics aren’t to be ignored. I’m still not putting any money on the Advanced Computing Environment consortium.

Murph Sewall writes:

I’ve been using AccessPC since it first came out. It is capable of a few strange little things. The only outright conflict I’ve had came when I tried installing the color System icons and AccessPC’s ability to format disks went haywire. I’m not really sure what causes the conflict; it took me awhile to track it down, but I booted with no INITs or cdevs except General and the problem occurs with the color icon resource in System and not without. I have no problem with SunDesk. The System Icons patch (available from Sumex) has icons for the warning and stop sign that System can inject into any application (not just DeskTop stuff). They are meant to be installed directly into System (System 7 will have them built in and I don’t expect a problem then). AccessPC has to patch the System, of course in order to bring up its Mac or MS-DOS dialog when a new disk is inserted. That patch seems to get in the way of a color icon resource in System (or the icon resource gets in the way of the patch – at any rate, the color icons work fine and AccessPC doesn’t).

The other peculiarity occurs only with some software. Try McSink with it. If you add linefeeds to a text file and save directly to a DOS disk the end of the file will be corrupted. You can save the same file in a Mac folder and then drag it to the DOS disk under Finder and it’ll be fine. I’m having the same problem with Mac WordPerfect 2.0. If I export to PC WP 5.x straight to a DOS disk, WP gives me an EOF error and saves nothing. If I save the export file in a Mac folder and use Finder to drag it to the DOS disk the file is fine (PC WP 5.1 reads it with no problems). Since I have virtually the same problem with software from two vendors, I tend to think AccessPC has a little glitch in it. However, MacWrite II seems to export WP 5.x files straight to DOS with no problem (although some of the codes for margins and stuff get whacked a little, but I’ve always thought that was due to limitations in DataViz’s MacLink Plus Translator – maybe I’ve been wrong?).

DataViz is now shipping DOS Mounter 2.0 with the MacLink Plus Translators, so if you get the DataViz product you’ll be able to compare DOS Mounter with AccessPC.

Information from:
Paul Durrant — [email protected]
Frank J. Nagy — [email protected]
Bryan Van Vliet — [email protected]
Murph Sewall — [email protected]

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