Triple emulation

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 17:27:00 +0100

I'm cleaning up old harddisks in my vintage PCs and found a DOS partition that I used solely to run the emulator S3AEMUL for the Psion Series 3a. This emulator was once available for free: a clever marketing trick! I got soon hooked and bought my first PDA, back in 1995.

Out of nostalgia I tried to get the emulator running again – but without leaving OS X, of course. Thanks to Parallels Desktop this should be easy, I thought. Just create a new virtual machine, install FreeDOS and copy the emulator on it.

AltGr and Parallels Desktop

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:24:19 +0100

I'm quite happy with my alien operating system running along my other applications on my Mac. The biggest gripe is the keyboard.

Parallels maps the Windows Alt key to the Mac alt/option key. Ok, Alt to alt seems quite logical, but my fingers don't care what is written on the key – they remember by position. And the Windows Alt key sits right to the left of the space key!
Though it's handy to be able to tab out of Windows with Cmd-Tab, I can't really tab back in. When I change the focus to Windows using Cmd-Tab, I have to press Cmd-I before my key presses are sent to Windows again (I know that I can use the mouse, but the keyboard is so much faster). I like when things are logical and symmetrical because that is what makes life easier.
The support for AltGr (I have a Swiss German keyboard and need AltGr for all the programmers best friends: []{}|\@#) is weak, almost nonexistent. A couple of weeks back Parallels mapped the Enter key of Apple Laptops (the one to the right of the right Cmd key) as AltGr – without telling anyone. I don't remember where I first found about this life saver, probably macosxhints, but surely not the Parallels help.
As of the newest build (1970), Enter as AltGr has silently vanished again. And only hidden in the forum pages are instructions how to get back the AltGr behaviour involving the Terminal. This is not the Mac way to configure things! (Basically you have to create the file /Library/Parallels/.keyboard_config containing one word: numenterisaltgr and no LF following it).
I dream of having the same keyboard layout inside and outside Parallels Desktop (e.g. using the option key to compose all these special characters in Windows), and perhaps even having a combined list of OS X and Windows applications when switching with Cmd-Tab.

Parallels on Pesches Schlauch

Triple emulation

AltGr and Parallels Desktop