I don't know what date Jim Drew recognizes for Emplant's b-day but I know that the Emplant board got FCC approval 08/24/1992 so I thought that was close enough.  :-)

I loved my Emplant board at the time so I thought I would make this humble post.


Cheers!
-P

I don't know what date Jim Drew recognizes for Emplant's b-day but I know that the Emplant board got FCC approval 08/24/1992 so I thought that was close enough.  :-)

I loved my Emplant board at the time so I thought I would make this humble post.


Cheers!
-P

It's also the 20th anniversary of the introduction of Windows 95.  Truly a dark day.    At least you've given us some reason to celebrate today!  

If you had enough hardware in your Amiga you could have your cake and eat it too!!!
With an 68030 or 68040 and the Emplant, You could run MacOS System 7.  Additionally with a decked out Bridgeboard with the appropriate processor, memory and ISA video card you could run Windows 95.   And still run AmigaOS all at the same time..................

My Friends use to call my Amiga THE BORG.........    

It might have been near the end of commodore by the mid-90s but the Amiga was still a significant amount of fun at that time.

Happy Birthday Joe Fenton too.

So... the story goes like this...

On Friday, the 21st of August Joe and I went to the FCC testing facility in Chandler, AZ.  We brought an Amiga 2000 w/EMPLANT installed, Seikosha printer, a joystick, mouse, external floppy drive, and a 1084 monitor.  If anyone is not familiar with the FCC testing of a plug-in card, let me tell you it is not an easy task.  You have to have every "hole" in the computer plugged into something, and the monitor has to be displaying the letter "H" repeatedly.  Somebody decided that is what generates the most RF.  We actually had to write a BASIC program at the FCC testing place to display the letter "H" row after row.

We put the entire system outside on a rotary platform.  We went inside and as soon as it powered up we immediately failed in the 75MHz region... like severely failed it.  There was actually a bit of a panic.  75MHz is used for ILS, and we were basically a pretty high powered ILS ground station at that point, and the testing facility is about 10 miles from the airport!

We wanted to know which piece of hardware was failing, because Joe and I KNEW that the EMPLANT board was not responsible for the high frequency noise (it only had a 3.6864MHz crystal) .  So, we turned everything off except the Amiga, went back in and powered up the platform... crickets - no RF noise at all.  In fact, the tester was sure that we had not turned on the computer power.  We all double checked and the Amiga's power light was on.  So, we then turned on the 1084 and there was a bit of noise but nothing spectacular.  When we turned on the Seikosha printer, it pegged the meter!  The printer was the issue.  We didn't have another printer with us, so we were forced to drive home (about 200 miles) and return the following Monday with a HP Deskjet printer.  Everything tested well under the limit.  The tester told us that they had never had anyone fail on a Friday and come back on Monday and pass.  On the way home we stopped and celebrated Joe's birthday along with our success.

Incidentally, we got EMPLANT FCC verified, not certified.  Does anyone know why?  Both are legal for use, but if you get a verification you are not required to provide the schematics to the public.  Products that were FCC certified required that you include a complete schematic of the hardware in your instruction manual.  We didn't want to do that.  The FCC has since changed the classifications.  There are no more verifications, only certifications, and you can opt to keep the schematics confidential.

The EMPLANT board was laid out by hand.  I did it in ProBoard for the Amiga.  Joe and I drew the schematics and we went through the whole thing coloring in the connections on paper.  ProBoard would not auto-route the board.  It gave up at less than 50% no matter how I placed the components on 2 layers (4 layers was fine, but I knew we didn't need 4 layers).  Finally I just gave up on the auto-route and did it manually.  I still have the original ProBoard (and ProNet) files for EMPLANT, SYBIL, Boot Drive Selector, KickStart Board, AMIA, etc.

I guess you could call it the birthday for EMPLANT.  We actually used the prototype for FCC verification.  We made only a few changes to the board for production (to remove jumpers).

The Emplant board was just awesome.

Jim, I don't know if you'll remember this, but I called you from Purdue University and said that a bunch of broke college kids want to buy Emplants for their Amigas and you said if we got 10 orders (or something) you would give us a great deal.  I got the orders and you gave us a great deal.  Thank you so much for that!  That was just awesome!

Actually, when I called UU about our request a woman answered and just handed me over to you.  I never thought I would get to talk with you and got suddenly nervous at the time (I was 19 or 20) but you were incredibly gracious on the phone.

Great memories!  Great product!

-P