Mac In a Box, An Amiga Box That is} You've saved your money, read the advertisements, scoured the magazines hoping to find the discounts and at last you've done it. You've bought your EMPLANT board! The wonderful day arrives and the EMPLANT is here! You eagerly tear open the package and there it is, glimmering in the sun, somewhere music strikes up and your vision is softly blurred. No? Well, that's not what happened to me either. When I first purchased my EMPLANT, little did I realize the path that I was on. A path fraught with Mac DOS, ROM images and when exactly do I use 32 bit memory anyway? By the end of this article series, you will have some insight into the installation and setup for the EMPLANT. I must say that even with all the work to set up and get it running, the EMPLANT is one of my most prized Amiga addons. The very bragging rights alone are worth the aggravation that you encounter trying to get the board set up! There's nothing I like better than to tell my friends who are bragging about their Pentiums and Quadras, that I run all the major brands of software on one computer. Yes, Amiga, Macintosh and IBM. Ha! Just in case you are not aware of what the EMPLANT is, EMPLANT is a hardware (board) and software combination that installs in your Amiga that will allow you to run Macintosh software. EMPLANT is made by a company called Utilities Unlimited from Lake Havasu City, Arizona, USA. The emulation is so exact that Macintosh viruses have been known to infect it! EMPLANT comes in four flavors. They range from the basic board, a bare bones version, no serial or SCSI to versions with serial only, SCSI only, and the EMPLANT Deluxe with both SCSI and with serial ports. The version you choose depends on the use that you will make of the system. EMPLANT can share the SCSI and serial ports of your Amiga, but if you use the Amiga side while the EMPLANT is running, it is better to get one of the higher end versions. If you only occasionally want to use the EMPLANT to run a favorite word processor or game, the basic board may be more to your liking. Utilities Unlimited will upgrade your board for the difference in cost between models. EMPLANT costs less for the Deluxe version than many god SVGA and all current multisync monitors. EMPLANT is different than most software/hardware combinations because to use the EMPLANT board successfully in your Amiga you need several things beyond the basic board and software supplied with it. You will need: * An Amiga with ZII or ZIII bus, ADOS 2.04 or greater, at least 2 Megabytes of fast ram (depends on the Mac DOS), and at least a 68020 CPU. * A dedicated hardrive or partition on your existing hard drive. * A high density floppy or, A low density Mac floppy and some other special hardware for interfacing it to your Amiga. * A copy of Mac DOS or at least a system disk. * Mac software to format your hard drive. * A set of MAC ROMs. Whew, and we still haven't bought any applications programs to run on the Mac! The Required Computer EMPLANT is designed to run on an accelerated Amiga 2000 and above. This is because it must have the Zorro bys to operate. There are also special addons that operate a Zorro bus for the Amiga 500 and 1000 that are no longer in production to my knowledge. If you have one of them, the board should work with it as well. Also, the vanilla A1200 is left out (no Zorro bus) although Utilities Unlimited has at least discussed the possibility of an A1200 board. As far as memory goes, the minimum configuration varies with the version of Mac DOS that is to be used (called System X.X in Macese). A minimal system can theoretically be run with System 6.X as a 24 bit machine in only 2 Megabytes of FAST RAM. System 7.1 is much better and can be configured (depending on your Amiga situation) as a 32 bit machine, but requires at least 4 Megabytes of FAST RAM. To achieve either of these two memory configurations will require that you strip the startup configuration to as minimal an installation as possible. No cute Commodities, no User-Startup assigns beyond the minimum required for EMPLANT, no WBStartup, and if you can handle it, no Workbench. Mac DOS is such a memory hog that if you have this configuration, you will have a small memory available for running programs. Given this, the "REAL" minimum system is at least 8 Megabytes of FAST RAM; 12 is better and should give the ability to run most reasonable Mac software and usually two or more application programs at once. To give you an idea, on my 8 Megabyte A4000, with a full startup on the Amiga side (a few Commodities and Workbench), I have around 3.3 Megabytes left for System 7.1 and my applications. Your Amiga must also have at least a 68020 CPU as well. This rules out the older unaccelerated machines such as the 2000 or the 2500. Are we beginning to sound like an accelerator board which allows added 32 bit memory yet? Speaking of accelerators, Utilities Unlimited recommends the WARP board. GVP Boards work as well, but incompatibilities have been known to exist. Finally, the EMPLANT is required to run under at least System 2.04. If you don't already have it, don't worry, just tell your spouse that you need it, he or she will understand I'm sure. The Hard Drive My personal choice was to use a partition on my main hard drive. Depending on the type of EMPLANT you have purchased however, you can use: 1. A dedicated real Apple hard drive connected to the EMPLANT SCSI controller, 2. An Amiga Hard Drive connected to an Amiga SCSI controller, 3. A partition on an Amiga Hard Drive connected to either a SCSI controller or to an IDE controller. This partition can be either present as a Mac formatted partition or as a hard file. In any event, you will need a megabyte or two for the emulation software itself and at least 10 megabytes for the Mac System software (v. 7.1), assuming of course that you do not want to have any programs stored there other than the system configuration. A tip here, don't use the name "EMPLANT" for your partition. EMPLANT (the program that is) uses an assign with that name and you will receive an error on startup. The Floppy Drive If you own an A4000 like me, you more than likely have a high density floppy drive. If you're not sure, test it by formatting a high density diskette and then look at the capacity. 1.76 megabytes, you're in luck; 880K, sorry. To happen to have a high density floppy, you are in luck. Your drive will read Macintosh high density diskettes once you install and run EMPLANT. If you have a low density drive, you are left with one of two choices. Either upgrade to a high density floppy or get some additional hardware/software including a Mac low density drive. The additional hardware/software can be of several types. EMPLANT supports the following floppy devices/formats: 1. Its own propriatary EMPLANT format. 2. Amax (a competing Mac emulator) 3. Mac high density format 4. Mac low density (800 K) format 5. Sybil 6. AMIA Of these, I most highly recommend the high density format. Next the AMIA with a real Mac low density drive is probably best. I have no experience with the Sybil however, I understand that production was discontinued anyway. Users I have noted on Internet seem pleased with it. The AMIA (sold by Utilities Unlimited) device is a hardware connector that allows you to connect the Macintosh floppy directly to the Amiga drive port (or an external drive pass-through if you have an external drive). Mac DOS The type of DOS that you should get depends on the Amiga hardware that you have to run the Emulation. If you have either an A4000 or a memory expansion in a lesser machine that gives you 32 bit wide memory, go for at least System 7.0.1 (7.1 is better; 7.5 is the latest available, but is quite buggy so I hear). I run System 7.1 on my A4000 and it works without any flaws so far. If you don't have 32 bit memory, System 6.8.4 is the latest. It will only run in 24 bit mode. Make sure that you have a system diskette formatted in the style that you have floppy drives, AMIA, HD drive, etc. Normally, Mac DOS comes with several other diskettes as you would expect. My version 7.1 came with six diskettes. Now for the bad part. Usually, Mac DOS does not contain software to partition a SCSI hard drive. In line with the usual Mac mentality of "you don't need anything we don't give you", hard drives come preformatted, often with the system already installed. If you are using an Amiga drive space, you will need software to format and partition your drive. I recommend "Quicksilver", but any Mac software that supports drive manipulation will do. Mac ROMs You must use Apple 256K Mac series II ROMs for EMPLANT. The 512K and higher versions supplied with the newer, consumer-version Macs such as the LQ, etc. and the older 128K version such as is found in the Mac SE and Mac Plus will not work. The Mac models that support these 256K ROMs include II, IIx, and IIcx models. Next time, I will describe how to install the the SE-30, Mac ROMs on the EMPLANT and/or grab the ROM images. The ROM image can be grabbed while the ROMs are still in the Mac or with them installed on the EMPLANT board, we'll discuss both. The SE-30 ROMs come as a ROM-SIMM board. The others come as a set of four, 28 pin DIP packaged ROMs. Sources for these chips are another matter altogether. I was lucky enough to have a Mac that I could dump the ROMs from. If you are not so lucky, some vendors will sell the ROMs to you. Check Amiga magazines and the Comp.Sys.Amiga.Emulations newsgroup on Usenet for other sources. Purchasing the ROMs from individuals is also possible over the Internet. You can probably forget obtaining them directly from Apple or from an Apple dealer. Sometimes they will sell them to you, sometimes not. Many people will confuse the 128K ROMs that can be used with the Amax emulator as being the ones that work with EMPLANT. Remember only 256K ROMs will work. There are three versions or revisions of the 256k ROM that were created. Any version will work. Version 1.3 is the latest and most expensive. Versions 1.1 and 1.2 were missing certain desirable characteristics such as high density drive support. EMPLANT has the appropriate drivers, etc. built into the software so it really doesn't matter which version you use. Obtaining a copy of the ROMs (Dumping as it is called) carries certain responsibilities with it as well. To dump ROM files and then sell them is software piracy. The dumping process writes the "programs" built into the ROMs to a computer file. If multiple copies of this file is distributed, it is all the same as copying commercial software and distributing it. Purchasing the ROMs, dumping them and then selling them to the next EMPLANT owner while you keep the file is also piracy. Having a set of ROMs that you have dumped or owning a Mac and dumping the ROMs is not piracy. That's all the space I have in this issue. In future issues, we will examine the process of installing the EMPLANT, dumping the ROMs, partitioning the hard drive, setting up the EMPLANT, installing MAC DOS, and eventually running applications. ******************************** *William Jones has been a * *technical writer for over 14 * *years and has over 200 * *technical training manuals to * *his credit! He can be reached* *at: * *lakes!wjones@galois.ncsf.org * ******************************** converted with guide2html by Kochtopf [ Please note that the University of Edinburgh is not responsible for the content of these WWW pages. For queries please contact user@ph.ed.ac.uk where user appears after the ~ and before the / in the URL for this page ]