Jim:
I wanted to thank you for the information. Could I bug you a littler further?
1. How long did it take you to write the software?
2. You said spoke to Apple, did Commodore ever approach you? At one time, one of the rumors I heard was that Commodore was going to include Emplant with one of their systems.
3. Do you know what happened to Simon Douglas? I heard him speak and talked with him at one of the Amiga shows and always wondered what he did after A-MAX?
4. Was there anything you came to learn about the MacOS at the time you found pretty strange? If I remember right, you actually speed up the OS with certain changes in Emplant?
5. What is Joe Fenton doing now?
Thanks!!!
-P
1) We started the software in 1992 and continued to improve upon it all of the way through until it was turned into a PC version and sold to my competition in 2000. It was a LONG haul.
2) Yes, we were talking with Commodore about making an A4000 version, much like Newtek was buying A4000's and making Toaster Studio systems. But, Commodore actually wanted to sell the complete package. I was a little shocked that Commodore had this idea, as it was so anti-Commodore (as far as their business division went) to actually want to make money.
We couldn't make boards fast enough as it was though, and by the time that we could get production ramped up, Commodore was sinking.
3) I am not sure what happened with Simon. I believe I chatted with Simon (voice) once and ami.netted him a few times. I thought he was an outstanding programmer, and when Christian Bauer started stealing huge chunks of Amax IV (and then eventually my code), I let Simon know about it. When Simon released updates to Amax IV, Joe and I would spend days disassembling it and seeing if anything had been 'borrowed'. Even if Simon had looked at our code, the Amax IV code was nowhere near like ours so I was impressed and the emulation game was good clean fun at that point... until Shapeshifter.
4) Well, after disassembling every MacOS version from 4.0 through 8.1, you can see who programmed what. We could tell when the guy who wrote .Sony (the floppy driver) was no longer writing that part of the code. You could tell what code was written in assembly and what code was written in C. The Mac's multitasking code (for task switching) was about 60K in size, and written in C. We patched it to make it more efficient, and made it work with the Amiga's MMU support. I also spent a huge amount of time on the Mac's math packages, and to this day, there is no emulation with the same differential between the CPU and FPU emulation speeds. Joe and I got a kick out of actually breaking the first version of Speedometer when it went to do the math testing. The next version fixed that, but our math scores were still just about off the charts.
5) Joe ran into some legal issues, and ended up moving. I chatted with him a few times, but I have no idea what he has been doing. I heard he is living in England, but I can't confirm that.
