Jim:
I thought the Emplant was an amazing product when it was released. People could not believe the Mac emulation on my Amiga.
I always wondered:
1. How many Emplants were sold total?
2. How many revisions of the software did you make? I remember the first revisions were pretty rough and only ran in Chip Memory (I think). However, it didn't take long for the software to really mature and work amazingly well.
3. Did you ever get any flak from Apple on it?
4. How well did the e586 sell? I remember it being released but by that time I saw the Commodore ship sinking and jumped to another platform (Mac then Windows).
5. Did you ever consider selling Emplant without the board? Especially after ShapeShifter appeared?
I have found memories of Emplant, thanks for such a great product!!!
-P
1) More than 10,000 EMPLANT boards were sold.
2) A bunch!! v2.6 was the last official, but there was a v2.7 available through our BBS before UUI went out of business.
3) No, Apple was impressed. I demo'd it for Scully at their head quarters in Cupertino. They pretended to be interested to see if we were violating any laws, which we weren't.
4) I know we had over 1,000 back orders when it was first released, but I don't know the final sales total.
5) We did! After it was known that Shapeshifter was created from stolen Amax IV and EMPLANT code, I released several different versions. MacII was one, and the last was FUSION (later to be FUSION-PPC for the Amiga PPC version and FUSION-PC for the PC version). Both MacII and FUSION for the Amiga supported the EMPLANT board if you had one.
The P1-5095-P chip (sometimes colored RED) is the one required for the e586 support.
I have over 400 brand new EMPLANT boards sitting in storage that I will be putting up for sale on my new website that I am launching early next year. The website will be selling all kinds of Commodore stuff, so it is appropriately named:
www.cbmstuff.comIomega and several other Mac based companies used EMPLANT boards for setting up and duplicating hard drives.