I'm interested in Emplant board, but there is not much information on the board and the software.
Are there any users here who have one and can share their experience with the Emplant board.
How is the Mac emulation compare with Shapeshifter?
How is the 586 emulation compare with PCTask?
Also, anyone made a Youtube video showing Emplant working? I have search and found nothing.
I have tried all the software you have mentioned one time or another, (Emplant, Emplant e586, Shapeshifter, and PCTask.)
Additionally I have used Fusion, GVP PC286 (basically an At-once plus for the GVP A500 HD+ and GVP A500-030), PCx, and an A2386sx with a 486BL3.
First let us speak to the Emplant: The Emplant board it self is interesting.
It primary is used recreate mac motherboard timing. This is suppose to make Mac emulation more accurate and is utilized by both the emplant software and is an option for Fusion (not suprisingly both written by Jim Drew).
The second thing that the Emplant board can do is allow to you plug MAC roms in and rip them into a file. Note, one cannot use the plug in roms during emulation, rather the emulation uses the ripped file. This is really a unnecessary thing as software exists with both Fusion and Shapeshifter that allow you to directly rip roms from a MAC.
Optionally the Emplant also came with either/or/both appletalk ports and scsi controller. the appletalk ports again can be used with emplant and Fusion (I don't know about shapeshifer) or even natively with amigaOS. This is kinda nice if you have a couple macs, a mac printer, and an appletalk network. The scsi controller is a basic non-booting 5380 based scsi controller. Any amiga or mac emulation software can use this like any other scsi controller.
I used to use Shape Shifter on my A1200, and it worked great. Fusion ( is that right?) was not bad. I have heard that Emplant was about the same, but not quite as compatible.
I have never seen the 586 module. Friends who had the Emplant never could get the 586 drivers - so I am not sure they were ever officially released.
The 586 module was definitely released. If you want to use the e586 emulation software, the emplant board needs to have a some of its chips updated, the e586 software came with something like 4 or 5 dip chips that needed to be switched out. So only some of the emplants out there can actually use the e586 software.
As for the Mac emulation software
The emplant came with the original Emplant software. Later, circa 95ish, a newer version called Emplant Pro came out for some extra $$$$$. Nearly the same time as the Emplant Pro software the e586 emulation software can out including the extra Rom chips.
The emplant emultion software actually worked very well in my a3000. The biggest limitation was the monitor modes, I remember only being able to use a limited number of resolution/bit planes but don't remember the specifics. There was also an issue with the version of the mac roms it could use and which ones were 32 bit clean etc, but I again don't remember the specifics. The Emplant Pro solved many of the problems including adding significately more monitor modes including opalvision and I "think" worked with more roms.
This emplant pro software again was very stable for me, however I remember having issues getting the emplant pro software working with my picasso II+. I subsequently "upgrade" my emplant pro software to fusion software. Picasso96 modes are fully supported with Fusion (as well as with shapeshifter) and could fully utilize the picasso II+.
If you already have a emplant and plan to keep it in your computer Fusion worked well for me, otherwise shapeshifter is free. There are several threads on amiga.org that explain how to make them "work"
As for the PC emulation.
I used PCTask orignallly with my a500 with an 030, and subsequently with my a3000. All I remember was it was so slow that one could only really run MSDos with it.
As mentioned earlier I used e586 with the emplant. All I really remember it it allowed VGA modes, but can't remember which ones. Also PC info software identified it emulated CPU as either a 486 or a 586 (depending on the software.)
Like emplant pro to fusion, I think of PCx as being a "upgrade" from e586 software (again another Jim Drew product) and does not require the emplant. It emulates a Pentium Processor and SVGA modes I only tried this out 5 or 6 times (I already had a BB at this point.) It worked with Dos, but I cannot tell you how well it worked with anything else.
I was really very fortunate to get an inexpensive a2386sx with a cardinal (SVGA,SCSI, Audio) card not long after I got the e586 software. If you want the most compatible amiga/pc "emulation" there is nothing like a commodore or vortex bridgeboard with a real x86 processor on it.
As for the PC286. This thing has a real 286 on it actually works well for any program not requiring heavy graphic usage. The graphics generation is very slow with this emulator.
