Whatever happened to Microcode Solutions

[MarkTime]

I posted a 'web news story', I don't know if its in the pipeline or not good enough to make the news page, but anyway, for those interested, over at www.emaculation.com you can see that Jim Drew has been posting the latest on his Mac emulation project.

This project was to use a PPC pci card, and supposedly a company actually supplied it, though Jim says its memory architecture was such that it was invisible to him from the PC side, making the card useless for his development process.

Now he says the project is delayed again, but he
has not quit the project.

The code for this new project, was originally based on his iFusion Amiga code, but it wasn't up to snuff for Mac OS X.

He also explained how he would have preferred to develop this in the same way he developed Fusion PC, i.e. on an Amiga first, and then port that to PC...however, Amiga PPC cards are too slow.

So without a faster Amiga PPC card, and without the type of PCI PPC card he wants, he doesn't have good news to report.  :-)

thats my spin on it, I noticed the spin of some of the more rabid fans at emaculation was that Jim Drew is a big liar...which I found to be interesting, is that how rabid fans look to the outside?  LOL.

Anyway, I thought this crowd would find these goings on interesting, and I put a link in the news article, I don't have it now, but you can find it from the main page fairly easily.....just scroll down to a news story from May 16th at the emaculation main site.

[redrumloa]

Jim Drews popularity seemed to have nose dived hard in the last several years. I don't hear anything but venom towards Microcode Solutions.

[Ilwrath]

Jim Drews popularity seemed to have nose dived hard in the last several years. I don't hear anything but venom towards Microcode Solutions.

Very true.... Though I'd suspect it's because he's never put out anything more than a half-assed product before dropping the line and/or renaming it.  

iFusion is a perfect example...  A couple hundred bucks pre-order, and it from reports it STILL doesn't work on BlizzardPPC/1200's, and the only two computers it was AIMED at were BlizzPPC/1200's and CyberStormPPC/4000's.....

Fusion should have been an upgrade from Emplant, but since it had a new name, no upgrade pricing...  And, really, Emplant should have been discounted on the fact the only two modules for it that "worked" were the Mac (which ShapeShifter handily outran!) and the e586, which was superb, if you had a need for a 0.7mhz Pentium emulation from your 68040..  The 68060, of course, caused crashes on both the Mac and e586dx modules.  Oh, and don't try CyberGraphX 4, either...

Not that I'm bitter.  :-D

[MarkTime]

I agree many of the prepayment plans, from phase 5, amiga, inc., the imagine cup, and iFusion from microcode-solutions, turned out badly....

but Fusion's design is useful, it can do some things shapeshifter cannot.  on the other hand it makes sense that shapeshifters design would be faster.

who owns fusion now, h&p?  I'd be interested to know...I'm thinking about buying a copy, but what I really want is the source.

[uncharted]

Ilwrath wrote:

iFusion is a perfect example...  A couple hundred bucks pre-order, and it from reports it STILL doesn't work on BlizzardPPC/1200's, and the only two computers it was AIMED at were BlizzPPC/1200's and CyberStormPPC/4000's.....

I think that is partly to do with the fallout from the kernal wars, there was a problem with WarpOS on Blizzard Boards.  IIRC correctly he was waiting for a fix from H&P, but it never came.

Still pre-orders are always a bad idea in this small market :-(

[Warface]

What about sheepshaver? Now that BE is past, can't we convince the author to move on to MorphOS/OS4?

[amiga_boy]

I read somewhere that Virtual Programming (formerly Blittersoft?) bought the rights to iFusion but there website has no mention of the product anymore, just a few Mac games.

The last Amiga specific purchases I made were Amithlon and iFusion. Never again, never again.

[JimDrew]

Just saw this thread....

To clarify some things now that NDAs are expired.

PowerLogix, was the name of the company that came to us with a 604e PCI plug-in card for the PC.  They wanted to make our PPC Mac emulation for the PC.  Although I showed pictures of the prototype cards, it never materialized due to issues with their company.  The card did work, but did have some limiting factors - like the PCI bridge was our only access to the Mac emulation (which ran on the memory on the PCI card).  So, Nubus video, serial, timers, etc. all had to come from the PC side.  This made the emulation slower than a real Mac, even though it was a speedy card.  There was some talk of a redesign, but that never happened and the project died.

As for iFUSION, shortly after we released it we sold it to Blittersoft who carried on with the development.  People were angry at me about selling it, but that's business.  We had a much more lucrative deal with making FUSION-PC, so it worked out perfectly for me.