Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: gdruebsamen@csupomona.edu (Gene Ruebsamen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Emplant Deluxe (with Mac Software v4.6) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.emulations Date: 16 Aug 1994 23:28:55 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 345 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <32ri3n$81h@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: gdruebsamen@csupomona.edu (Gene Ruebsamen) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, emulator, Macintosh, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Emplant Deluxe (with Mac Software v4.6) BRIEF DESCRIPTION The Emplant is a Zorro-II board that allows emulation of various different computers via your Amiga. Currently, the only emulation that is written for the Emplant is the Macintosh, which emulates a full-colour Macintosh on your Amiga. The type of Mac emulated by the Emplant is dependent upon your CPU speed. COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Utilities Unlimited International Address: 790 Lake Havasu Ave Suite #16 Lake Havasu City, AZ 86403 USA Telephone: (602) 680-9004 FAX: (602) 453-6407 LIST PRICE Unknown. I paid $399 (US) for the Deluxe board. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE 68020 CPU or greater. Mac 256K ROMS (v1.1-v1.3) Minimum of 2 megs of FAST memory. Hard drive required. SOFTWARE AmigaOS 2.04 or higher. A Macintosh System (boot) disk. COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000/25, 8 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM. 1 internal 880k floppy drive. Maxtor 213 MB SCSI Hard Drive. Quantum 105 MB SCSI Hard Drive. AmigaDOS 2.1 KingCon 1.4 replacing the Amiga Shell. INSTALLATION The Macintosh emulation software installs from an 880K floppy disk. Version 4.5 was the latest 'full' version on disk, therefore I had to install v4.5 then install the v4.6 patches on top of it. It was quite easy as both versions used the standard Commodore Installer. REVIEW I will be reviewing only the Macintosh emulation software in this review. The IBM 486DX emulation is suppose to be near completion, but there has been no release date set, and no one I know has it as of yet. The Emplant comes on a Zorro-II board that is easily placed inside any Zorro-II equipped Amiga (A2000/3000/4000). There are four different versions of the board: a basic one with no ports, one with two Mac serial ports, one with a SCSI port, and one with both serial ports and the SCSI port (this one is called the deluxe model). I have the deluxe model, so I will be be reviewing it. The first thing you notice when you plug in the board is that there are two Macintosh serial ports, and one SCSI port on the backplate of the board (the side sticking out the back of your Amiga). These serial ports are capable (according to the manual... I have never tested them at any faster than 14.4k) of transfer speeds up to 230.4k baud normally, yet with the special Emplant hardware, the speed can be quadrupled (between two Emplant boards ONLY) to 921.6k baud for AppleTalk (the standard Macintosh networking) or 460.8k if connected to a DoubleTalk board. The serial ports are not the standard Amiga RS-232 style, they are the Mini-DIN type. The second thing you will notice is the large SCSI port. The SCSI interface uses the 53C80 SCSI chip. It is NOT SCSI-II. It is a standard SCSI-I controller. Before you can use your hardware, you must have the 256k ROM from an Apple Macintosh computer, OR you can copy the ROMS off of a Macintosh that uses the 256k type. (Note: You MUST own the Macintosh that you copy the ROMS from, otherwise you could be in violation of copyright law.) A program included with the Emplant distribution software, called ROMINFO, will dump the ROMs when run on a Macintosh. In order to get this program to a Mac, you have to copy it to an IBM formatted disk via CrossDOS and then load it into a Mac that is able to read IBM disks, or you could use a modem. The ROMINFO program will dump the MAC ROMs to the same Diskette, and you can now use that ROM Image with your Emplant. If you opt for the first method (using the actual ROMs with the board) you must use a program called ROMDUMP to dump the ROMS onto your hard drive, then you must remove the actual ROMS from the board. From now on, your Emplant will use the ROM Image that is on your hard drive. Either way, you will end up with the same image. Once you have the ROM image, you can start the Emplant and get things up and running. There are three versions of the software that come with the Emplant: a version for EC processors (680EC20, etc.), a version for Amigas with the actual kickstart ROM chips (A2000/4000 and some 3000), and another version for Amiga 3000's with the softkicked kickstart ROMs. When you first start the emulation software, you will be presented with a preferences screen, where a plethora of options are presented to you. You are able to select the amount of memory that the emulation will use, the screenmode, 24 or 32-bit emulation (more on this later), mouse and keyboard emulation, sound, etc.... When the emulation first starts, your computer will beep (a la Macintosh), and should you have a Mac hard disk hooked to the SCSI port or a boot disk in the drive, the macintosh will proceed to boot. Once you are on the Mac side, everything runs well.. pretty much like a Macintosh. The only major difference will be the ejection of the disks. A little symbol will appear at the top of the screen which means to eject the disk (much like that of A-Max II+ for those of you who owned it). Aside from this, everything runs exactly like a Macintosh. One note: Some software is not "32-bit clean" and will require you to select 24-bit mode in the preferences screen. 24-bit mode will limit the amount of memory that you have available for the emulation. I highly recommend you install Apple System 7.1 or greater, otherwise you will be forced to use the inefficient 24-bit mode. The graphics speed with my EGS Spectrum is about 50% faster than that of a standard Mac II when run in 256 color mode. However, in 24-bit mode the graphics speed is extremely slow (much like 16 color mode on the Workbench of an ECS Machine). On my Amiga 3000/25, Emplant emulates a Mac IIci, and on an A4000/40 it is supposed to emulate a Quadra 650(?). Unless you have a high-density disk drive, do not expect to be able to read Macintosh disks in your Amiga disk drives (unless you happen to have an A-Max cartridge and a Mac Drive, or AMIA). Having a high-density disk drive will allow you to read Macintosh High Density diskettes, but not the low density variety. To read the low-density (which are fairly rare) you will need either AMIA or an A-Max Cartridge & Mac drive. (Note: if you have an A-Max cartridge & Mac drive you will not be able to use then inside the Mac emulation, instead you have to use an included "converter" program to convert the disks to EMPLANT format so that they can be used in the emulation. AMIA is able to read Macintosh low-density disks inside the Mac emulation). Multitasking on the Emplant is very good. You can switch to and from the Macintosh and Amiga Workbench screen. Though if you only have four megs of Fast RAM you probably will want to disable Workbench to get the most memory out of Emplant. With my eight megs of Fast RAM, the most memory I am able to get out of the Emplant is about 5.7 megs of Macintosh memory. You are able to set the task priority of the Emplant software as high as 0. Any higher (according to J. Drew) and it would cause the emulation to actually run slower. According to Xoper, when there is little load on my Amiga side, the Macintosh Emulation can take up almost ALL of the available CPU time; however, when I am doing something processor intensive on the Amiga, the Macintosh side will lower its CPU usage to about 50% or possibly even lower. I have experienced some crashes while downloading on the Amiga side at high speed, and doing some other stuff on the Mac. Overall, the system seems slightly less stable when running the Emplant software, but it is not too bad. Another thing is the speed of the Emulation. I have to say that it is very impressive. I am only sorry that I cannot include a Speedometer report in this review (as my Macintosh system got corrupted yesterday), but maybe in a later post. Well, about the speed of the Mac emulation. According to Speedometer, my 25-mhz 030 runs at the same speed as a 25mhz 030 Macintosh would run.... But the surprise comes with Floating Point operations. My floating point speed was anywhere from 5%-25% faster than an equivalent Macintosh!! This is very good for people into raytracing and rendering. I am told that the faster the CPU, the larger the floating point difference will be. So I wouldn't be surprised to see approximately about a 40% speed increase on floating point operations on an 040. Unless you are doing heaving multitasking on the Amiga side, you will find that your emulation will run faster than the equivalent Macintosh. The only thing that would slow you down would be graphics speed, but a good graphics card such as my EGS Spectrum would easily fix that problem. The screen that the Emplant uses can be chosen by the user. Emplant supports multiple monitors like a real Macintosh if your graphics card supports it. Several graphics cards are supported, and by using a graphics card, you will not suffer from the slow ECS screens. On my EGS Spectrum, I am able to do 1024x768, 832x624, and 640x480. When using ECS or AGA you are able to select from the screenmode database. There is a QD mode that can be enabled for faster updates on 24-bit and ECS/AGA screens (not needed on 256 color screens as they are extremely fast already!) but it uses 128k more memory. The last issue I will cover is compatibility. I am sure many people are wondering how "compatible" is this emulation... Well, I have had only one problem so far. When installing OmniPage Pro v5.0, the Macintosh crashed, but I cannot be sure that it was the Emplant as I did not have the chance to reinstall it because it corrupted my Mac system, and now I am waiting for my high-density drive so I can reinstall it. Here is a list of a 'few' programs that I run without any problems: MicroSoft Word 5.1a Z-Term 0.93 Now Utilities Norton Tools 2.0 MacWrite Pro Cricket Graph III v1.5 Spirit of Excalibur Sim City 2000 MacSyndicate (slow on 030) Civilization Adobe Photoshop 2.5.1 Kai's Powertools Speedometer 3.0 MPEG Play Super ATM F-18 Flight Sim Deliverance DiskDoubler One thing to note.. Some Macintosh programs seem to run slower than their Amiga counterparts (even on Real Macs), so I take it either the custom chips (i.e. blitter, denise, etc) are helping out the Amiga program to make it more efficient, or the Mac programs are less efficient due to more colors, being larger, or some other reason. One good example is syndicate, on the Macintosh it is high-res @ 16 colors. But the play is excruciatingly slow even on an 030. OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES Some of the "special" features of the Emplant that make it really fun to use are: * Has support for virtual hard drives (hardfiles) so you can have your Macintosh boot from your Amiga Drive, though it is quite a bit slower that way. * Has support for MANY graphics cards: EGS Spectrum, Piccolo, Retina ZII, Retina ZIII, EGS 110, Picasso, Merlin, Visona, plus ECS (2 or 16 color emulation), AGA (2, 16 and 256 color), etc. * You can use the serial and SCSI ports from the Amiga side, though the empser.device has no hardware handshaking so is useless above 2400 baud on the Amiga side (though a new empser.device is suppose to be out now with this problem fixed). * The Emplant can redirect the Mac Serial & Parallel to the standard Amiga ports, so you can use your modem and printer (if you have the correct printer driver). * Share clipboards between the Macintosh and Amiga. * Easy file transfers between Macintosh and Amiga. DOCUMENTATION The Emplant board comes with two manuals. A hardware manual (15-pgs) which explains a lot of things about the Emplant hardware such as jumper settings and the such. Also included is a new Macintosh Emulation guide. It is in a small three ring binder, and though black & white only, it does appear to be a well thought out and prepared manual. There is a table of contents and a troubleshooting section; however, there is no index. The documentation tells you basically everything a beginner needs to know. Other advanced questions can be directed to tech support at (602) 680-9234. LIKES The thing I like most about the product is the peaceful coexistence of the Macintosh and the Amiga. Little things like being able to copy text from the Mac side and paste (via clipboard) on the Amiga side and vice versa make the Emplant a nice product. Some other things that I like are the quick and easy file transfers, which allows me to download a Macintosh program on my Amiga side and make a Mac binary transfer to the Mac side. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS The thing that I dislike is lack of hardware handshaking on the current empser.device, and myself not being able to use the MMU of my machine. Utilities Unlimited said that if I were to use the EC version of the software I could use my MMU, but as of yet I still have had no luck. This prevents me from using a few software programs on the Mac side such as virtual memory. Also the problem with the empser.device is annoying, yet doesn't affect the Macintosh side. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS The only other similar product would be A-Max IV, which is also a color Macintosh emulator. I have heard only good things about A-MAX IV, but because I don't have one, I am unable to do a comparison. I do, however, have the older A-MAX II. According to Speedometer, Emplant is faster in ALL tests (I am unable to provide the output of the speedometer test because my Mac system is down right now, I may put it in another post though). I am not surprised that Emplant is faster since the older A-Max II only emulated a Mac Plus. BUGS I notice that when I use my Workbench with my EGS Spectrum (at 256 colors), and the Mac side is doing something on its screen, I get garbage on my Workbench screen which I have to clear by selecting ResetWB in the pull-down menus. I asked Jim Drew about this, and he gave me a reason for this once (in a post on USENET), but I cannot remember the exact reason, but I would think that it could be solved??? (Note: There is no such problem if you are running in only AGA or ECS mode, or if the Macintosh is running on an EGS Spectrum screen and my Workbench is on a standard ECS Screen. There is only the garbage problem when BOTH the Mac and the Amiga use an EGS Screen). I believe this happens with the Piccolo as well. VENDOR SUPPORT Excellent! The first board I had happened to be defective and only worked on occasion. I called Utilities Unlimited and they told me to send it back. I did so and three days later I had a brand new board with updated manuals and the latest version of the software! WARRANTY There is a Lifetime warranty. Also I should also talk about the upgrade policy. To upgrade from a lower model Emplant to a higher model, you only send in the board and the difference in cost between the two models and you will get your new board. There is no other "hidden" upgrade costs. CONCLUSION This is an excellent product, and I give it five out of five stars! Aside from the minor quirks, it works flawlessly, and even runs faster than the equivalent Macintosh. NOTICE This review written by Gene Ruebsamen, and is Freely Distributable. Gene Ruebsamen + Computer Dept. Chair, ERA Champion Realty. + Email: gdruebsamen@vmsa.is.csupomona.edu --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews