From: gpotts@hebb.uoregon.edu (Geoff Potts)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.emulations
Subject: EMPLANT comments
Date: 7 Jan 93 23:14:55 GMT
Article-I.D.: eeg4.gpotts-070193151737
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.emulations
Distribution: world
Organization: University of Oregon Network Services
NNTP-Posting-Host: eeg4.uoregon.edu


Several people have been asking for EMPLANT reviews. The product,
in my opinion, is not stable enough to warrent a full review, but
I am willing to give my current impressions.

My system:

A3000-25/50; 6 megs RAM (2 chip/4 fast); 52 meg Quantum, 105 meg Quantum,
44 meg Syquest removeable; WB 2.04 softkick.

EMPLANT option A (serial ports, no SCSI option); software version 1.51
I do not have Sibyl as I do not use floppies -- all my portable files
are on Syquest carts.

My internal harddrives are partitioned with the supplied Workbench 1.3
and 2.0 and Work partitions on the supplied 52 meg drive. I have taken
10 megs from the Work partition and created an A-Max partition, AMAX1.
The 105 meg internal Quantum that I added to the system has an 80 meg
A-Max partition, AMAX2 and the remaining 25 megs is AmigaDOS.

The EMPLANT software is configured with Mac system and ROMs in Chip
ram (this is what the current version requires) and video and NuBus
in 32 bit ram. This limits the Mac emulation to a 1.2 meg system but
it is the only way that works, currently.

I had difficulty finding the ROM version that EMPLANT can use. The
Mac IIs that I have access to do not have Superdrives in them and
EMPLANT reports that the ROMs are 256K v.1.2 ROMS and that they are
unuseable. I finally found a Mac IIcx that had ROMs that EMPLANT can
use -- 256K v.1.3. As I have an MMU, I chose the AmigaVideo video
driver v 1.7, which is supposed to provide faster video.

I chose my two A-Max partitions as devices 1 and 2. I found that my
Mac system had to be on device 1 for the emulation to boot -- if the
System was on device 2, the emulation would not boot.

There are a couple of things that must be done before running EMPLANT:
first a program called rsrvmem must be run. There are two versions
of this program, one for kickstart 1.3 and one for kickstart 2. This
program must be run twice before running EMPLANT -- it reboots the
Amiga the first time it runs. Next one must run either ImageMMU,
HardkickMMU, or SoftKickMMU. I use SoftkickMMU as I have a softkicked
A3000. A3000s with 2.0 ROM chips installed use HardkickMMU; others
use ImageMMU.

After this preparation, the emulator is ready to run.

I had my A-Max partitions set up with System 7 but the EMPLANT does
not have enough system memory to run System 7 so I had to revert to
a very stripped down System 6 to get it up. Once I did that, I finally
had the EMPLANT emulation up and running. It came up and booted off
the A-Max partition and mounted the other A-Max partition. On the
screen behind the emulation was Workbench, still running. Multi-tasking
Macintosh emulation on the Amiga! The DF0: showed up as "busy" on the
Workbench -- I guess the emulation takes it over?

The Mac desktop came up in two-color mode and for some reason, the
desktop pattern does not appear -- the desktop is pure white. The
first thing I wanted to see, of course, was color, so I went under
the control panel and selected the monitors control. It came up
showing black & white, 4 color, and 16 color modes available. I
selected 16 color mode, the EMPLANT control screen showed briefly,
and the emulation reappeared in color mode -- color Mac emulation,
multitasking with AmigaDOS, as advertized.

Unfortunately, the color emulation is DOG slow -- so slow as to be
unuseable -- don't even try. I haven't timed anything but my impression
is that opening the general control panel took about a full minute,
maybe more, to get it drawn on the screen. Impossible to use. I went
right back to black and white mode.

The next thing I tried to do was launch an application. I tried Word 5.
Word 5 came up but when I tried to either close it or open a document,
there was a complete system crash -- not just the emulation but the
Amiga went down as well.

This is probably a good point to mention some of the side-effects on
the Amiga of running EMPLANT software. Running the SoftkickMMU program
disables the ability to soft reboot. After running SoftkickMMU, the
Amiga must be completely powered down to reboot or recover from a crash.
I don't know if this is also true for ImageMMU and HardkickMMU or not.

In addition, rsrvmem37 seems to interfere with serial port operation --
there seems to be degradation of the performance of the Amiga as
a terminal after running rsrvmem.

In general, I do not concider EMPLANT to be a usable product yet --
the speed of the color update, the memory limitation, and the
instability of the system render it not usable for my needs. In
comparison, A-Max v. 2.5, while it does not multi-task and is
monochrome only, performs admirably -- it is very stable and
runs all the applications that I need that do not require color.
These applications include ones that require '020 or '030 processors
and/or math coprocessor chips. These programs run fine under A-Max
even though it only supports the 128K ROMs. I am using System 7
and transfer files between Mac formatted Syquest carts and AmigaDOS
HD partitions using the A-Max file transfer utility with no
problem. EMPLANT makes a really nice, if expensive, demo. I am,
however, encouraged by the progress that has been made on EMPLANT --
it still does not have all the features that were advertised for
it but it is closer and promises to be a very fine product. If,
however, you need a Mac emulator that works today and you do not
absolutely require color or multi-tasking, then A-Max makes a
much better choice.

I do have some concerns about the whole design concept of EMPLANT.
Some of the Mac work that I do is computationally very intensive and
I wonder how efficient a multitasking emulator can be.

One other concern -- EMPLANT has begun to erratically report hardware
error with my EMPLANT card. When I try to run EMPLANT, I sometimes
get an alert stating that I don't have an EMPLANT card installed or
that the card I have doesn't support the emulation module I'm trying
to use. It says that I should run the EMPLANT diagnostic software,
but that software was not supplied. I have not yet called tech
support for this problem, as it is still a flakey and the whole
system is flakey but I plan to soon.

--geoff

gpotts@hebb.uoregon.edu