Emplant

[UNIXcoffee928]

The Emplant was a multi-system hardware-based generic-system emulator card for the Amiga. It supported Mac Quadra & 586DX configurations, both on the same card!

 

I knew this. Today, however, I ran across an advertisement for the card, and in the fine print, it turns out that they were going to release updates for the Atari 8-bit line, and the Mega ST. This I didn't know. You probably didn't, either, ha.

 

On the 586DX, It could run NT, in the Amiga environment, and I would presume that you could get Linux running on it, nowadays, too.

 

Too bad they went out of business, before the Ataris were implemented. Anyone know more about this?

 

[tschak909]

Ahh yes. Utilities Unlimited...

 

also known as "Yet another one of Jim Drew's con-games"

 

Emplant was essentially 3 VIAs on a card, with ROM sockets, and an optional NCR 5380 SCSI controller. A Zilog SCC was also provided for AppleTalk or Apple serial port emulation.

 

It DID emulate a Mac II, very well. An Amiga 3000 was literally twice as fast as the equivalent Mac IIcx at the same clock speed. (But then again, so was the ShapeShifter card! It was a side effect of more efficient use of the same processor cycles at a given clock speed.)

 

Does this mean that it will emulate a 586DX efficiently? FUCK NO. The "586" emulation required a major hardware change that wasn't available to the early adopters (despite the advertising to the fact), and was a complete fucking dog. Complete and utter rip-off, compared to actually having an actual BridgeBoard.

 

Jim Drew burned many bridges with this card, and ultimately just made himself quite the pariah with the remaining Amiga community, because the card never lived up to the hype. And knowing that he used all of his resources just to produce these two emulations, I know that any of the other "planned" emulations were nothing more than him just spouting hot air. Sorry, I was there. I was one of the idiots who got burned by this guy.

 

Please don't spread mis-information.

 

-Thom

[UNIXcoffee928]

...Please don't spread mis-information.

 

-Thom

I am in no way spreading misinformation; you obviously didn't even look at the attached ad, since it says zero downloads.

 

I saw one of these Emplant 586 cards in an Amiga 4000 on ebay today, & thought, wow, I haven't thought about the Emplant card for over 20 years, so I looked it up, and found the ad. I was just surprised that they had advertised the future plans for Atari support in the ad.

 

Never used one, I just remember seeing ads and reading some positive reviews for the Mac emulation... Sounds like you had a really bad experience with it, though. Personally, I was surprised to see that it was a DX. I remember the other 486 product available was an SX, in the Golden Gate 486, but I never used them.

 

I would be interested in hearing more about the design, though.

[tschak909]

Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to smack such a heavy hand.

 

Emplant was just an example of an overpriced design that failed to live up to the advertising (especially considering that there were cheaper options for mac emulation that were just as fast and feature packed.)

 

-Thom

[JimDrew]

Just saw this... It's funny how misinformed people are.

 

The e586dx emulation didn't require any "major" upgrade... when you purchased the e586dx module it came with a new custom logic chip that unlocked two of the chips on the board that were used by the PC emulation (but not used by the Mac emulation) - the chips were specifically for the PC emulation. It was our "copy protection", but the hardware was needed for the emulation.

 

We did provide a free Atari 400/800 emulation (Wacke - yes, that was us) along with a free Apple II emulator.

 

EMPLANT certainly lived up the hype and we sold tens of thousands of them, mostly all due to the Mac emulation which was replacing high-end Mac setups in places like Hollywood post-production houses because you could run circles around a real Mac with Vivid Studios software/hardware using EMPLANT. We even have a movie credit with EMPLANT and my name.. the movie was Cybertracker... check out the credits at the end of the movie. I had the very first full color Mac emulation in existence - out about a year before AMAX IV, and 2 years before Shapeshifter was created by ripping off code from both EMPLANT and AMAX IV.

 

The e586DX PC emulation was ok.. it did work, but it was slow unless you had an Amiga with fast RAM on the CPU board, and then it was great. After UU went out of business in late 1996 (due to the death of Commodore), I created FUSION and PCx, all new Mac and PC emulators that could use the EMPLANT hardware for enhanced compatibility, but didn't actually require the board to work.

 

So.... that is the correct information.

Edited May 23, 2016 by JimDrew

[tschak909]

Hi Jim. Maybe you can finally speak up with some actual data on this, since you were so tight lipped about it, when it was being sold.

 

What exactly did the 586 upgrade add to the board? There's nothing on that board but three 6522 VIAs, a handful of ROM sockets, a spot for an NCR 5380 SCSI chip, a 72 pin SIMM socket, a Zilog SCC for the mac compatible serial ports and some glue logic.

 

Doesn't seem like there's enough there to even do a proper PC emulation except in software.

 

-Thom

 

Also, doesn't even look like there's even a spot for the modules to go. So please, stop lying. You've been doing it for two decades at this point. This is what makes you a piece of garbage.

 

To everyone else on this forum, If you do _ANY_ amount of digging into this guy's past, you'll see he's a cheat, a liar, and a thief. He takes code and hardware made by others, reverse engineers it, slaps his own name on it, and sells it. You'll find a massive trail of bodies, the more you dig.

[JimDrew]

Not sure how I missed this post... so sorry for the late response.

 

As I stated previously, the e586DX upgrade chip replaced a custom logic chip (PEEL) on the EMPLANT board and unlocked two of the VIAs. These were used for the heart of the timing for the PC emulation (and it's odd ball IRQ rate), as well as the BIOS register storage and bus control. Without the chip, the emulation would not run. When PCx was released, it could use the Amiga's timers to emulate what the EMPLANT hardware was doing but that stole CPU time from the emulation to do it. You could optionally select to use the EMPLANT hardware with PCx to make it faster.

 

The "modules" we referred to were the various emulations themselves. The e586DX "module" was the PC emulation, and that came with software and a replacement chip for the EMPLANT hardware.

 

I think you are confused. People have stolen my hardware and software designs, and tried to pass them off as their own products. As a result I have successfully sued (or settled with) several people in the U.S. and overseas for copyright infringement over the last 30 years.

Edited April 27, 2017 by JimDrew

[_The Doctor__]

PCx with Emplant was indeed tolerable.... that's about all I have to say about it.. it would be too easy to see another pissing match develope. The Mac Emu was spot on. The price high and the 'protection' employed was like almost all protections... a hindrance to the product and was defeated as usual.. if that lead to lawsuits or not I couldn't say.. but I am sure someone can search for the briefs. The blurbs about fast ram, well of course fast ram helps, duh! All of the ins and outs being talked about would have helped back then as almost everybody felt like they were neglected, and to a large extent... were.

Edited April 28, 2017 by _The Doctor__