Mac and 586 emulation on Emplant, how good is it?

[mechy]

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.

[Pentad]

That info seems correct to me.  Although those are PEELs, not GALs or PALs.

Jim:

I was always impressed with your work and Emplant was a great product!  A few questions:

1.  How long did Emplant take to create?  How many software revisions were there when you stopped?

2.  Did Commodore ever approach you for a deal with Emplant?

3.  I spoke to Simon Douglas a few times (AMAX author) and he said that you and him were friends.  Did you guys ever swap code or bounce problems off each other?  Do you know where he ended up?




Trivia:  Simon said (no pun intended) that he was reading an article about the folks that wrote the Mac emulator for the ST (Magic-sac) as they were porting it to the Amiga.  However, after some time they deemed the Amiga to 'weird' to write a Mac emulator on.  Something about Chip Memory...  Anyway, he jumped in and had a Mac emulator working to the boot screen in a weekend.  Of course, it took more time to go from the boot screen to a final product, but I thought it was a great story.

[JimDrew]

The EMPLANT board took about a week to work out and create.  The software seemed to take ages, but since were reverse engineering the Mac that was not much of a surprise.  Every time Apple released a new version of the OS, we had to go figure out what changed and how to patch it.

Commodore didn't want the headache of dealing with Apple for licensing ROMs.  They were very supportive of our efforts, giving us permission to take and alter the multitasking code.  We were the only company that actually had this permission.

I wasn't really friends with Simon Douglas in the sense where we hung out (he was in Canada as far as I recall).  However, we did chat a few times and I believe their was a mutual respect for our capabilities.  Simon was just on the wrong end of the stick with our mission to destroy Readysoft over their breach of contract.  Simon and I talked more about the a theif stealing a huge amount of his code for Shapeshifter.

[Motormouth]

@amiman99

Did you end up getting your emplant board working with the e586 module?

[amiman99]

@amiman99

Did you end up getting your emplant board working with the e586 module?

No not yet, and from the discussions it looks like there is no real benefits running the MAc/PC emulations vs Mac fusion/PCTask software.
I may keep an eye on it and get it, if is cheap, as a historical value.

[RobertB]

Jim Drew has listed all the items he intends to sell at CommVEx.  To see the list, go to

http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=commvex:vendor_info

Writing from The Beat Coffeehouse in Las Vegas,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group
http://videocam.net.au/fcug
July 28-29 Commodore Vegas Expo v8 -
http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex