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Author Topic: Mac and 586 emulation on Emplant, how good is it?  (Read 11306 times)

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Offline mechy

Re: Mac and 586 emulation on Emplant, how good is it?
« on: June 23, 2012, 02:14:50 PM »
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
 

Offline mechy

Re: Mac and 586 emulation on Emplant, how good is it?
« Reply #1 on: June 25, 2012, 03:27:31 PM »
Quote from: EgillSkallagrimsson;697883
So, who's going to do the Fusion + Emplant versus Shapeshifter speed/compatibility comparison?:p

I don't have any benchmarks to give but i ran both emplant and fusion for many years and threw about everything i could find at them. I found fusion worked very well without a emplant and never noticed any of the problems Jim mentions could arise(thats not to say they were'nt there) i just didn't notice them so fusion was pretty rock solid with my picasso IV in a A4000 and looked pretty good with the 256+ colors using picasso IV fusion drivers.
I seem to recall in the end i had macos 8x updated to i think 8.2 running.
In the early days i used the emplant ports to hook to laser printers to tinker with using macprint(i think it was). It was also good for running early IE/netscape and later Icab sharing the amiga's ethernet connection- It was a way to have a somewhat modern browser in early times(although Ibrowse was great in the pre flash/java/bloated web stuff era). I do think fusion was as fast or faster than the emplant but again i don't have any hard data to back that up.



Mech
 

Offline mechy

Re: Mac and 586 emulation on Emplant, how good is it?
« Reply #2 on: June 27, 2012, 03:50:55 PM »
Quote from: JimDrew;697955
The FUSION software was a bit faster than the standard EMPLANT software because of a few changes we made to the multitasking code, MMU page swapping (in Mac OS), Mac OS patch code, and a few improvements to our already blazingly fast math.

Go compare Shapeshifter benchmarks to ours.  You will find, especially in math, that FUSION is faster.  In fact, until Speedometer 4.0 came out, we were breaking just about every Mac benchmark's math test.  We replaced Packs 4 and 5 (Apples math packages) with our own 68K/FPU hand optimized code.  The difference was so extreme that Hollywood production studios such as Amblin Entertainment were using our emulation in place of real Macs for rendering and running Avid video systems.

The speed was one of the reasons i preferred fusion i guess..It really did a great job.
Interesting stuff about Amblin.