Fusion + Emplant Questions

[pan1k]

Hey guys I just picked up my Emplant board. Do I need ROMS on the Emplant board under fusion to make it run faster? What is the battery for on the emplant card?  

[pjhutch]

Yes, you do need ROMS on the board for Emulation to work.
The Battery is probably there for clock and PRAM parameters for Apple emulation.

More info here:
http://amigahardware.mariomisic.de/cgi-bin/showhardware_en.cgi?HARDID=345

[amigadave]

pjhutch wrote:
Yes, you do need ROMS on the board for Emulation to work.
The Battery is probably there for clock and PRAM parameters for Apple emulation.

More info here:
http://amigahardware.mariomisic.de/cgi-bin/showhardware_en.cgi?HARDID=345

No, you don't need ROM's on the Emplant board for the emulation to work, but you do need ROM files for the older MacOSes to work with the emulation software.  It was reported that the later MacOSes no longer needed ROM's to work and that everything needed to run the emulation was included on the MacOS CD.  I am sorry that I cannot confirm exactly which MacOS this started with, but would guess it to be 8.6 or 9.0 and later versions.  I don't have time today to search for the links to confirm this.

Now as for the Emplant board and the emulation running faster if actual Mac ROM's are installed on the board, that may, or may not be true.  I would doubt it though.  Let us know if you find out differently.

[Matt_H]

Strangely, the Emplant only took Mac ROMs in order to dump them to a file. They're not usable directly with the emulation.

There's a lot of neat imcomplete features on the Emplant. With RAM chips in those sockets and a working battery, it could function as an SRAM card to load in data very early in the boot process, much like today's Flash cards. It also has some provision for Audio mixing/recording (can't remember exactly what).

Of course, in typical Jim Drew fashion, software for these features never appeared.

[pan1k]

Thanks for all the replies. I've wanted one of these cards for about 12 years now Saw an ad in some Amiga magazine. It's pretty neat, I can safely say tho I don't notice much of a speed increase with the board installed vs. Fusion by itself. Maybe one day i'll get off my duff and install a speed test with the card and without.

[amigadave]

pan1k wrote:
Thanks for all the replies. I've wanted one of these cards for about 12 years now Saw an ad in some Amiga magazine. It's pretty neat, I can safely say tho I don't notice much of a speed increase with the board installed vs. Fusion by itself. Maybe one day i'll get off my duff and install a speed test with the card and without.

Which MacOS are you running?  Maybe if you connect a SCSI HD to the Emplant controller, the emulation will run faster accessing program files from it than from an Amiga HD???

Is it Fusion or iFusion you are running?  And lastly, what kind of Amiga are you using to run Fusion/iFusion on?

Give us all the details, inquiring minds want to know.

[pan1k]

I'm running regular Fusion V3.1. I couldn't find the iFusion, but a cover cd had Fusion on it, so i went for it. I'm running OS 8, it runs OK, i'm tempted to connect a scsi drive to it, but I think it won't get much faster, since i've got it running on a harddrive connected to my FastATA ZIV.

I'll try maybe next week to connect a scsi drive to it. It's all running in my Towered A1200 quite nicely. Anyone know how I can hide the partition for Fusion? It's HFS and is worthless on my desktop.

[Argus]

@pan1k

According to an old Amiga Format I read, you need to go into HDToolbox and change the memory setting for the partition to something the Amiga doesn't recognize, like 0x0 iirc.  Save the changes and presto, no more partition on Workbench appears (though still useable to Fusion).

[pan1k]

Thanks. I'll try that!