Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: jharris@cup.portal.com (John Harris) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Emplant (and comparison with AMax II) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.emulations Date: 25 Jun 1993 19:59:36 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 143 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <20flf8$k67@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: jharris@cup.portal.com (John Harris) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, emulator, Macintosh, commercial, followup This is an update to my EMPLANT review posted in c.s.a.reviews on April 4, 1993. I have been waiting for a particular enhancement to the product -- that of making it 32-bit clean -- and have wanted to hold off a formal update until that is available. Since it is taking longer than expected, and several other changes have taken place, I thought it best to write a quick update now. A more thorough update will be posted when EMPLANT achieves 32-bit clean status. This article covers EMPLANT version 2.91. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: John's original review is in the c.s.a.reviews archives on math.uh.edu in the file named Emplant_2. - Dan] OMISSIONS IN THE ORIGINAL REVIEW I should have mentioned the cost of updating EMPLANT. With almost 30 software revisions in the 8 month life of EMPLANT, it is important to note that all of these updates have been provided free of charge over the on-line services. Plus one disk, about version 1.5 or so, was mailed out for free as well. My apologies to those readers who wondered how much money it was going to cost to stay current with EMPLANT software updates! And thank you for bringing the omission to my attention. IMPROVEMENTS Many improvements have been made to the Mac II emulation software. Here are some of the highlights. EMPLANT screen modes are now available in overscan. There is a video driver for the Retina board that provides 256-color and full 24-bit support. I got to test this board very briefly and found the 24-bit mode very slow. However, the 256-color mode is nice and quick. It's much faster than 256-colors on an AGA machine, and even faster than the 16-color mode on my native ECS chipset. The driver is supposed to get several times faster in the near future. I was also able to run PhotoShop in both 256-color and 24-bit mode; and although I didn't run extensive tests, I found no problems. I will write more on this in a future update. Video drivers for other boards are also due shortly. Sybil now writes Mac format disks. There are also new routines in place that do not require the calibration step. Personally, I have had more trouble with the new routines than I had with the old ones. Once I had the old setup calibrated, everything worked fine. Now, if the software has a bit of trouble reading a weak spot on a Mac disk, it tries to auto-calibrate which throws it away from the correct setting, causing a permanent failure of the copy process. Before, it would retry the same place a bit, and could ultimately get past it. Most of the disks I have tried to read recently have given me problems, and I'm still waiting to get some questions answered by UU. They are supposed to make another software enhancement to get past hard-to-read sections on a disk, and this may fix the problems I'm having. The disk convert software can read disks from a real Mac drive connected with the AMax cartridge, Mac-2-Dos, or the public domain hack. This ability is still not available within the emulation, but it should be available soon. The error detection and reporting of problems related to an individual's EMPLANT setup have been greatly improved. There is also a hard drive installation program provided, so getting a working setup is much easier. BUG FIXES All of the 32-bit clean and MMU problems are still here. However, everything else listed in the 'PROBLEMS' section of my original review have been fixed, or at least are being addressed. The real time clock is fixed. The floppy drives are no longer locked out when running the emulation. They can be switched from Amiga mode to Mac mode while the emulation is running. The Sybil routines can be switched off when not in use, which eliminates problems with unwanted printing and paper ejection. The VBR (interrupt vector table that the CPU uses) is now separate between Mac and Amiga applications. It has also been moved out of its native location at address $0, and moved into Fast RAM. This has some plusses and minuses. On the plus side, everything in the emulation is faster, since the VBR is now in Fast RAM instead of Chip RAM. Also, there were some Mac programs, mostly games, that stuffed values directly into the VBR which crashed the Amiga system. Now with separated VBR's, things co-exist more peacefully. The only drawback is that some Amiga programs -- mostly games -- rely on having the VBR at location 0! U.U. has provided a program to move the VBR back to 0, but it's a bit of an annoyance to have to remember to run it. EMPLANT now traps out all of the processor exceptions. This has made any program crashes I have experienced exit in a graceful way. Where the machine used to just lock up or reset, it now presents a Mac 'bomb' dialog with an option to restart. The Amiga side is still active here, so it's a good idea to save anything that's in progress! Unfortunately, I can't run this new version, since the TickerWatcher program that I have to use everyday bombs with a 'Bus Error'. This is the same program that gave me problems in earlier EMPLANT versions, and now it's back to not working again. I guess this is a good time to restate that EMPLANT is still undergoing a lot of changes; and until things are in a more finished state, quirks like this are inevitable. FUTURE ANNOUNCEMENTS A new and very complete manual is reportedly being printed, and will be mailed free of charge to all registered users. U.U. has announced that emulation modules for Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers will be provided at *no charge* when they become available. U.U. has formally announced how they will provide IBM emulation capability. They are planning to do a complete cross compile of the entire program's worth of 80x86 code into 680x0 code at program load time. If this works, IBM programs would run very quickly compared to other software emulators, and theoretically, even faster than hardware emulators if you have a fast Amiga. The hardware emulators are only 16-bit machines. While I think this approach is possible in a broad sense, I have doubts about overall compatibility. Jim Drew claims to be able to handle self-modifying code, self-unpacking programs, and other tricks, but only time will tell if this will really be possible. The way I look at it, most programs are written in high-level languages these days and probably have few tricks that would cause the emulation problems. I also suspect that any non-working programs, if popular enough, could have support for them individually patched in. As usual, expect games to have the toughest time in this emulation environment. Thank you for all of the wonderful feedback, that I have received regarding my EMPLANT review. If you have any more questions, please feel free to contact me. John Harris jharris@cup.portal.com GEnie: J.HARRIS32 --- 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