PCTask 3.1


When is an Amiga not an Amiga? When it's a PC obviously...
forget hard to find bridgeboards and turn your Amiga into
the enemy with a single program.


Price: £59.95 (?)
Developer: Chris Hames
Supplied: Emerald 0181 715 8866


It's true: you can run PC programmes on your Amiga, simply
by running a copy of PCTask. Install this program, and your
Amiga becomes a 80286 based PC. Once you have decided on the
configuration you want, click on "Start" and the worst
possible thing happens: you Amiga becomes a PC. The screen
clears to black, and the MSDOS thing starts to happen. Or at
least, it will start to happen if you have MSDOS installed.

PCTask cannot come with MSDOS bundled, so you will need to
purchase this separately (version 6.2 is the latest) and
Bill Gates will be more than happy to take your money in
exchange for a copy, and will probably through in a copy of
Windows as well. For technobods, a BIOS is included, which
means you don't have to go hunting.

After that, everything works just like a PC, from running
MSDOS to performing resets by pressing CTRL, ALT and DEL.
Support for floppy disks is transparent: run PCTask and your
floppy drives are miraculously renamed as A: and B: (if you
have a second drive) and they can immediately read and write
PC format disks. If you have an A4000 or rare A3000, HD
disks are supported as well as the old 720K standard.

Hard disks are almost as straightforward. The easiest option
IS to create a "diskfile" which to your Amiga appears as a
single large file of 20Mb or bigger (up to 255Mb is allowed).
This appears as drive C:, and if you want you can create
another D:. For a slight improvement in speed you can donate
an entire hard disk partition, and make it PC format from
the outset. This requires a little messing with HDToolBox or
a similar utility and is not for the faint hearted. If you
take your time and follow the manuals however you will
succeed though, and it is a much neater (and faster)
solution. 

The small but detailed manual also explains how CrossDOS
(the PC-disk reading utility supplied with Workbench 2.01
and up) can be used to provide an easy way for the Amiga to
access this PC partition. Similar experiments are detailed
which will allow PCTask and the Amiga to both access other
disk devices, such as Syquest cartridges. Useful if you need
to transfer a lot of data between machines.

But back to the experience which is MSDOS, and when you have
it installed -- preferably on a hard disk -- your new PC
will load it and happily present you with a C: prompt.
Congratulations! Your new systems downgrade is ready for
use.

What you do next is of course, entirely up to you. As far as
your Amiga is concerned, it's now a 80286 based PC which as
much memory and drive space as you have available. Being
able to share disks and partitions means copying data from
existing PCs won't be hard. You could even use a modem or
null modem cable and a Terminal package, as PCTask will
happily make use of your Amiga's serial port as a standard
PC port. 

Perhaps the smartest feature is being able to run multiple
versions of PCTask at once, either on individual screens or
on a public screen (the Workbench for example). At last the
PC can multitask.

Now in it's third incarnation, PCTask makes full use of the
AGA chipset present on the A1200 and A4000 machines to have
a good bash at displaying VGA and SVGA graphics modes.
PCTask will also work on most third party graphics cards,
and loves the Cybergraphics system. I tested it on a
PicassoII card, and some programs ran slightly faster,
others slightly slower than the native chipset. Finding
which was best was a matter of experimentation and the front
end program made this relatively straightforward.


Speed

The big question is undeniably, speed. "How fast does the
emulator run?" you may be asking. Sadly, "Not very" is the
answer, I'm afraid. As I have tried to explain it is simply
not fair to expect a speedy software emulation. You can
improve the performance by adding faster and faster Amiga
accelerators, but even a top of the range 68060 won't come
anywhere near a PC you can buy for less than £500. Running
DOS utilities on PCTask on a 68040 based Amiga and a 486SX25
based PC seemed to indicate that the rather dated PC was at least
five times faster. Running something which required graphics
put it an order or magnitude ahead.

However, the PC first became a popular as a business machine
based on the 80286 -- so there is still a lot of very
worthwhile software available if you can find it. Early
versions of the WordStar word processor were absolutely
terrific at doing their job, and if you need this facility
then PCTask will certainly run application programs of these
era perfectly acceptably. Likewise there are many, many
database and spreadsheet programs which may lack modern
graphical user interfaces, but still get the job done.

Of course, the /ultimate/ question is "Will it run Doom,
mister?" and the answer is "No."

Doom, along with most modern software, requires a 80386 or
better processor: the 80286 which PCTask emulates simply
won't hack it. On the other hand, the predecessor to Doom,
Wolfenstein 3D, will run happily on PCTask. Sadly, "happily"
does not necessarily mean "quickly". On an A4000 with an
68040 processor it runs almost fast enough to play: anything
less (an unexpanded A1200 for example) and it's really not
worth the effort. Running Wolfenstein on an AGA screen and a
PicassoII screen demonstrated little speed differences other
than the dreadfully slow fading of colours on an AGA set-up.

A special "Turbo" version of the emulator is supplied which
uses 4 times as much memory in an effort to improve
performance. Unfortunately it failed to make much in the way
of improvement.

Of course, anyone who buys a software based PC emulator for
playing PC games is a sick and sad individual who will be
sorely disappointed: unless text-only games are their
thing. Rather bizarrely though, to my surprise some PC
animations actually ran reasonably quickly on my setup. The
results you can expect therefore depend very much on your
own set-up and the software you want to run. Benchmark
programs give meaningless results: you'll need to try it for
yourself.

WINDOWS?

Perhaps more useful a question is "Will it run Windows?" and
amazingly the answer is "Yes, as long as it's not Windows
3.11 for Workgroups which also requires a 80386 processor."
Be warned: it won't run terribly quickly, and the
installation process will take a very, very long time, but
it will run. You will also need to use Video mode 7 drivers
rather than standard 256 colour SVGA drivers, but you can
display Windows in screen modes from 640 by 480 to 1024 by
768 depending on your hardware.

A particularly nice addition is the ability to access CDROM
drives. A software driver is supplied, and with the usual
MSDOS style editing of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, the
Toshiba drive connected to the WarpEngine's SCSI device
worked first time.

There is also support built-in for the Golden Gate 2 card, a
piece of hardware which allows PC style cards to be used in
Amiga Zorro slots. This means that serial cards and parallel
cards -- and conceivably network and modem cards -- can be
used with PC programs running under PCTask.



Conclusion

With the price of real PC's falling so low, any potential
purchaser needs a good reason for buying a software
emulator. After all, for ten times the price of PCTask you
can buy a very, very fast 486 PC complete with monitor, hard
disk and expansion slots.

The obvious advantage is that PCTask is cheap, however,
there are a few more potential advantages. For a start it
will run older PC software perfectly well. Perhaps more
importantly, it is also a good introduction to the joys of
MSDOS and Windows, something which we all have to admit is
frighteningly common out there in the Real World. Just don't
expect to run FX Fighter on it...




John Kennedy


system requirements: 512K Ram, WB 1.2+. At least 1Mb, AGA
chipset and hard drive recommended (1.5Mb Ram and processor
accelerator recommended for Windows).

ease of use: 90%
Of course, using a PC is something else.

performance: 60%
I know it's impossible for a software emulator, but it is
just not fast.

value for money: 80%
You can't buy a PC for this money. Not this year anyway.

overall: 77%
PCTask is a very impressive programming feat. The author is
obviously dedicated, talented and quite mad.




Box out: The Ins and Outs of Emulation

Emulating a PC on an Amiga is a world apart from emulating a
computer like an Apple Mac. The Mac shares the same central
processor as the Amiga, and so assuming input and output can
be re-directed, Mac programs runs at "full speed": this is
why a program like ShapeShifter works so well. Emulating a
PC is a totally different kettle of fish.

For starters, all PCs are based on an entirely different
processor: the 80x86 family (including the Pentium, a.k.a.
the 80585.99999). To run PC programs, the Amiga must create
a "virtual" processor based in software alone: every
instruction in the PC program must first be translated into
Amiga 680x0 code before it is executed. Then there is the
problem of memory: the PC has a weird segmented memory
scheme rather than a sensible "flat" model in which address
follow on one after the other. If that wasn't bad enough, PC
memory is "back to front" in that each 16 bit word needs to
be swapped around before use. And then there is the problem
of the dozens of video modes, INTs and IRQs.

In summary, emulating a PC in software is not an easy task
(pardon the pun) by any means, and you simply cannot expect
to get anywhere near the speed of a native PC.



captions:

pctask0.iff


Before PCTask starts being a PC, you can select the video
modes and memory requirements of your virtual hardware.

pctask1.iff
pctask2.iff
pctask3.iff


MSDOS programs in action. You can expect programs like these
to work reasonably quickly. All the PC hardware emulated by
the Amiga works fine. Notice the built-in Help utility of
MSDOS: something the Amiga could still do with. The hardest
part of getting used to MSDOS is remembering to use the
right "slash". Finding it on the Amiga keyboard is another
trick altogether.


pctask4.iff
pctask5.iff
pctask6.iff

You can't run Doom, but you can run it's Daddy. With a
decent Amiga system you can play it full screen, but with
slower hardware you might need to shrink the display just a
little...

pctask7.iff

Now here is something you don't see everyday. Not one, but
two virtual PC's running MSDOS on an Amiga Workbench screen.
True multitasking at last...