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[amiman99]

I'm interested in Emplant board, but there is not much information on the board and the software.
Are there any users here who have one and can share their experience with the Emplant board.
How is the Mac emulation compare with Shapeshifter?
How is the 586 emulation compare with PCTask?

Also, anyone made a Youtube video showing Emplant working? I have search and found nothing.

[Xanxi]

http://obligement.free.fr/articles/e..._macintosh.php

It can be translated from the links in the left upper corner.

Shapeshifter (current version) is the best by far.


As for the 586 chip for the Emplant, as far as i know it is ultra rare to find it and very buggy and unreliable.

[motrucker]

I used to use Shape Shifter on my A1200, and it worked great. Fusion ( is that right?) was not bad. I have heard that Emplant was about the same, but not quite as compatible.
I have never seen the 586 module. Friends who had the Emplant never could get the 586 drivers - so I am not sure they were ever officially released.

[RobertB]

Originally Posted by amiman99

I'm interested in Emplant board, but there is not much information on the board and the software.
Are there any users here who have one and can share their experience with the Emplant board.

Emplant developer Jim Drew is active on the forum at Lemon64 and on the forum at www.commodore.ca/forum . You can send him a message, and he will answer you.

Jim Drew attending CommVEx,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
July 28-29 Commodore Vegas Expo v8 -
http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

P.S. When Jim comes to CommVEx, I'll ask him to talk about Emplant development.

[amiman99]

I'm asking questions because I just acquired software for Emplant in a batch sale and I wondered if it's worth buying the actual card.
From the docs on the disks I read that 586 emulation it's software only, but it does require to install the Mac portion of the software. It also needs a PC bios file.
It would be nice if someone made a Youtube video showing how it works.

[spirantho]

Originally Posted by RobertB

Emplant developer Jim Drew is active on the forum at Lemon64 and on the forum at www.commodore.ca/forum . You can send him a message, and he will answer you.

I'd like to send him some choice messages about iFusion and why he never finished it, just took our money and gave us unfinished software. I'm sure I'm not alone in this either.

The least he could do would be to release the source.

[mongo]

Originally Posted by spirantho

I'd like to send him some choice messages about iFusion and why he never finished it, just took our money and gave us unfinished software. I'm sure I'm not alone in this either.

The least he could do would be to release the source.

He doesn't own the source. It was sold to Blittersoft.

[Motormouth]

Originally Posted by amiman99

I'm interested in Emplant board, but there is not much information on the board and the software.
Are there any users here who have one and can share their experience with the Emplant board.
How is the Mac emulation compare with Shapeshifter?
How is the 586 emulation compare with PCTask?

Also, anyone made a Youtube video showing Emplant working? I have search and found nothing.

I have tried all the software you have mentioned one time or another, (Emplant, Emplant e586, Shapeshifter, and PCTask.)

Additionally I have used Fusion, GVP PC286 (basically an At-once plus for the GVP A500 HD+ and GVP A500-030), PCx, and an A2386sx with a 486BL3.

First let us speak to the Emplant: The Emplant board it self is interesting.
It primary is used recreate mac motherboard timing. This is suppose to make Mac emulation more accurate and is utilized by both the emplant software and is an option for Fusion (not suprisingly both written by Jim Drew).

The second thing that the Emplant board can do is allow to you plug MAC roms in and rip them into a file. Note, one cannot use the plug in roms during emulation, rather the emulation uses the ripped file. This is really a unnecessary thing as software exists with both Fusion and Shapeshifter that allow you to directly rip roms from a MAC.

Optionally the Emplant also came with either/or/both appletalk ports and scsi controller. the appletalk ports again can be used with emplant and Fusion (I don't know about shapeshifer) or even natively with amigaOS. This is kinda nice if you have a couple macs, a mac printer, and an appletalk network. The scsi controller is a basic non-booting 5380 based scsi controller. Any amiga or mac emulation software can use this like any other scsi controller.

Originally Posted by motrucker

I used to use Shape Shifter on my A1200, and it worked great. Fusion ( is that right?) was not bad. I have heard that Emplant was about the same, but not quite as compatible.
I have never seen the 586 module. Friends who had the Emplant never could get the 586 drivers - so I am not sure they were ever officially released.

The 586 module was definitely released. If you want to use the e586 emulation software, the emplant board needs to have a some of its chips updated, the e586 software came with something like 4 or 5 dip chips that needed to be switched out. So only some of the emplants out there can actually use the e586 software.


As for the Mac emulation software

The emplant came with the original Emplant software. Later, circa 95ish, a newer version called Emplant Pro came out for some extra $$$$$. Nearly the same time as the Emplant Pro software the e586 emulation software can out including the extra Rom chips.

The emplant emultion software actually worked very well in my a3000. The biggest limitation was the monitor modes, I remember only being able to use a limited number of resolution/bit planes but don't remember the specifics. There was also an issue with the version of the mac roms it could use and which ones were 32 bit clean etc, but I again don't remember the specifics. The Emplant Pro solved many of the problems including adding significately more monitor modes including opalvision and I "think" worked with more roms.

This emplant pro software again was very stable for me, however I remember having issues getting the emplant pro software working with my picasso II+. I subsequently "upgrade" my emplant pro software to fusion software. Picasso96 modes are fully supported with Fusion (as well as with shapeshifter) and could fully utilize the picasso II+.

If you already have a emplant and plan to keep it in your computer Fusion worked well for me, otherwise shapeshifter is free. There are several threads on amiga.org that explain how to make them "work"



As for the PC emulation.

I used PCTask orignallly with my a500 with an 030, and subsequently with my a3000. All I remember was it was so slow that one could only really run MSDos with it.

As mentioned earlier I used e586 with the emplant. All I really remember it it allowed VGA modes, but can't remember which ones. Also PC info software identified it emulated CPU as either a 486 or a 586 (depending on the software.)
Like emplant pro to fusion, I think of PCx as being a "upgrade" from e586 software (again another Jim Drew product) and does not require the emplant. It emulates a Pentium Processor and SVGA modes I only tried this out 5 or 6 times (I already had a BB at this point.) It worked with Dos, but I cannot tell you how well it worked with anything else.

I was really very fortunate to get an inexpensive a2386sx with a cardinal (SVGA,SCSI, Audio) card not long after I got the e586 software. If you want the most compatible amiga/pc "emulation" there is nothing like a commodore or vortex bridgeboard with a real x86 processor on it.

As for the PC286. This thing has a real 286 on it actually works well for any program not requiring heavy graphic usage. The graphics generation is very slow with this emulator.

[bbond007]

Originally Posted by spirantho

I'd like to send him some choice messages about iFusion and why he never finished it, just took our money and gave us unfinished software. I'm sure I'm not alone in this either.

The least he could do would be to release the source.

yeah. I had blizzardPPC for a while and the iFusion never was made to run on it...

I lost interest after i sold the BlizzPPC so i don't know if it ever was fixed...

[spirantho]

@motormouth

Thanks for such a detailed reply!

@bbond007

It was never fixed, no. If you had a BlizzardPPC you got ripped off completely. At least on a CSPPC we got a partially working emulator.

[mechy]

The people above did a good job on explaining these differences, i would only add there is no speedup using the E586 stuff on emplant since the emplant board mine as well be thought of as just a "ports" board really which is useful for the appletalk/printers etc. There is no cpu for mac or pc onboard.
i have used all the above back in the day and a real 2386 or goldengate 486 is faster for pc emulation.

Mech

[Motormouth]

Originally Posted by mechy

The people above did a good job on explaining these differences, i would only add there is no speedup using the E586 stuff on emplant since the emplant board mine as well be thought of as just a "ports" board really which is useful for the appletalk/printers etc. There is no cpu for mac or pc onboard.
i have used all the above back in the day and a real 2386 or goldengate 486 is faster for pc emulation.

Mech

Yes, this is good point and I was not explicit enough about this.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by spirantho

I'd like to send him some choice messages about iFusion and why he never finished it, just took our money and gave us unfinished software. I'm sure I'm not alone in this either.

The least he could do would be to release the source.

I did finish this project, and it was sold to Blittersoft. They continued to work on it, and I am not sure what happened there after. I went into the PC market with FUSION-PC.

[JimDrew]

The EMPLANT board was basically a Mac-II motherboard on a Zorro card. It contained the 5380 SCSI controller, 8530 serial chip, ROM sockets, AppleTalk ports, etc.

The timing was exact, which was something that proved rather difficult to accomplish with a software-only emulation. I was able to find quite a few programs that worked fine with EMPLANT's Mac emulation that would not work with our Fusion software when other Amiga tasks were running. Audio was the biggest problem, because OS7.5 and later used the Mac's VIAs for direct timing and so it was critical or you would get out of sync Quicktime movies.

The e586DX emulator required a change of one PEEL (custom logic chip). This enabled one of the extra VIAs on the board that was used for the PC timing (also critical for certain aspects). The emulation could run Windows (slow but sure), DOOM and other games that used the mystical "MODE X" for graphics, and pretty much everything. Speed was really based on how graphically intense things were. For DOS stuff, it was quite speedy because the BIOS was our own (after licensing a real BIOS for awhile), written in 68K assembly - just like everything else we did. So, anything that made BIOS calls worked exceptionally well. As things progressed more and more towards Windows, we started supporting the various video cards like we did for the Mac emulation. This really helped speed up things. I made one sample driver for the Retina board that mapped the Retina's registers as a PCI card and so there was no copying/converting the PC display to the Amiga display. Instead, the PC emulation wrote directly to the Retina. It was easily 25 times faster. Instead of watching the Windows logo be drawn, it instantly appeared. The mouse was smooth, you could play solitaire and basic games with real speed. DOOM also flew! The Retina was the only card we did this with because other card manufacturers would not give the info on how to access the hardware directly.

[bbond007]

Originally Posted by spirantho

@motormouth

Thanks for such a detailed reply!

@bbond007

It was never fixed, no. If you had a BlizzardPPC you got ripped off completely. At least on a CSPPC we got a partially working emulator.

I traded a pretty nice (at the time) notebook computer 240/060/50 Blizzard. I had it for 4 years or so and I got a fair price for it... more than I had paid for the notebook anyway... So, ripped off completely... no...

But you are right... The BlizzardPPC was never worth it, and that is why I have a Blizzard1260 now.