From: vangess1@pilot.msu.edu (Rick VanGessel) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Fusion Macintosh emulator Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.emulations Date: 17 Sep 1998 11:18:52 -0400 Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 171 Sender: barrett@belvedere.cs.umass.edu Message-ID: <6tr98s$25r@belvedere.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: vangess1@pilot.msu.edu (Rick VanGessel) Keywords: emulation, Macintosh, commercial X-Review-Number: Volume 1998 Number 11 NNTP-Posting-Host: belvedere.cs.umass.edu X-NNTP-Posting-Host: belvedere.cs.umass.edu Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!not-for-mail PRODUCT NAME Fusion 3.1 BRIEF DESCRIPTION A software based Macintosh emulator. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Microcode Solutions Address: 1799 Kiowa Ave. #107-670, Lake Havasu City, AZ 86403-2867 Telephone: unknown FAX: unknown E-mail: sales@microcode-solutions.com World Wide Web: http://www.microcode-solutions.com LIST PRICE $69.95 USD DEMO VERSION None SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Amiga computer with at least a 68020 CPU At least 8 MB of FAST Ram preferably directly accessable by the CPU At least 20 MB of Hard drive space. Roms from a real Macintosh either 256k, 512k, or 1MB in size. Utilitizes the Emplant or A-Max boards if present. SOFTWARE AmigaOS 2.04 or greater. MacOS 7.1 or newer software. COPY PROTECTION There is a .key file on the disk that contains Fusion which is installed on your hard disk. The authors are very paranoid about pirating. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING A4000 w/12 MB 60 ns Ram on motherboard CSPPC 604e+ 200mhz w/ 060 50 mhz 128 MB Ram on CSPPC card CV64 w/ Cybergfx 3 MFC III card Delfina Lite Video Magician card Jaz Drive USR sportster 56k modem INSTALLATION The program is installed by clicking on the install icon on the Fusion floppy disk. Then the user needs to configure the program based on his/her machine setup. Also, the path to the mac rom needs to be configured. After the software is installed on the Amiga side, the MacOS needs to be installed. REVIEW This program is great. So far I have been able to run almost all 680x0 based Mac software that I have tried. The emulation is solid, and the speed is quick. Other than a few minor quirks, I can not see a difference between the emulation and the Macs I have used in the past. I am currently running MacOS 8.1 on Fusion and even this verison of MacOS is quick. There are a couple of incompatibilities with certain software, but these appear to be caused by problems with the 060 library from Phase5. Fusion supports SCSI drives, on the fly screenmode changes, Virtual Memory, 32 bit addressing (as well as 24 bit addressing if needed, but not both at once), and pretty much everything else that the Mac can do. The graphics performance is great on the CV64 card due to the card using the same graphics format that Macs use (chunky planar rather than bit planes). The authors of Fusion have even been able to allow the owners of the 68030 to use MacOS 8.0 even though this version of MacOS does not directly support the 030. By using the built in SCSI support of Fusion, I can utilitize my Jaz drive and CD Rom drive just as though a real mac was controlling them. As long as a piece of Mac software does not attempt to access a piece of hardware directly, there should be no problem using it with Fusion. DOCUMENTATION The included documentation is fairly complete. It is strictly for the Amiga side of Fusion though. It does not attempt to teach the user how to use MacOS. LIKES A nearly complete and fast 680x0 macintosh emulator. Pretty good support by the authors since they also subscribe to the Fusion mailing list. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS This verison of Fusion is an update for me. I had purchased version 2.0 a month before this update was released and I had to pay for the update. The fact that I had to pay for the update is not a problem, my complaint is that this update (to 3.1) did not introduce much of anything new. It was mostly bug fixes. Also, using the AHI fuction of Fusion slows the emulation to an unacceptable crawl even though the Amiga side remains unchanged. The authors blame this on AHI, I am not so sure though. The authors like to blame other programs for possible Fusion bugs. Due to the rapidly decreasing support for 680x0 macs, this program really needs to be ported to Amiga PPC. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS This product is similar to Shapeshifter. It has features that shapeshifter does not, like VM and screenmode changes as well as MacOS 8.x support. BUGS Most of the bugs that I have encountered are not Fusion related, rather they are errors in the programming of support programs on the Amiga side (ie: 060 lib). I still think that the slow down in AHI suppport is a problem with Fusion though. The authors seem to be quick to blame other software for some problematic things that are clearly Fusion related. In verison 2.0, using the memory test feature of Fusion (on the Amiga side) causeed the machine to crash. The authors quickly told me that my CSPPC card was faulty, either that or my ram was. Later, they fixed the problem in verison 3.0 of Fusion since many others experienced the same thing. VENDOR SUPPORT Blittersoft is the company that Microcode solutions chose to handle the update. It took forever for my update to arrive. Other Fusion customers have had similar problems. WARRANTY Unknown. CONCLUSIONS This product is well worth the money. It is a great way to get a cheap macintosh. COPYRIGHT NOTICE May be freely distributed. Copyright 1998 Richard A. VanGessel, Jr. --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator 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 Web site: http://math.uh.edu/~barrett/reviews.html