From swithing@ic.sunysb.edu Tue Apr 20 21:18:22 1993 Received: from ic.sunysb.edu (engws1.ic.sunysb.edu) by toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu (4.1/UCD.CS.2.2) id AA21484; Tue, 20 Apr 93 21:18:18 PDT Message-Id: <9304210418.AA21484@toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu> Received: by engws1.ic.sunysb.edu; Wed, 21 Apr 93 00:18:24 -0400 From: Scott Withington Subject: Review of Utilities unlimited's Emplant To: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle) (Dan Zerkle) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 93 0:18:22 EDT Cc: SWEENY%MIDD.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu, bo24+@andrew.cmu.edu In-Reply-To: <9304052208.AA24168@toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu>; from "Dan Zerkle" at Apr 5, 93 3:08 pm Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.25] Status: RO Emplant by UTILITIES UNLIMITED One of the most talked about products on the net has been the Emplant board by Utilities Unlimited. In addition, the president of Utilities unlimited, Jim Drew, has been accused of being everything from an overconfident fool to a disreputible con-artist. While at the world of Commodore-Amiga, I had an opportunity to talk to Jim Drew and to see the Emplant board in operation. First, my impressions of the controversial Jim Drew: Jim Drew appeared to be a friendly, intelligent man in his late 20's. he answered all of the questions he was asked (including some of the really stupid ones and some of the ones that he had probably been asked a thousand times during the show) in a forthright manner. He did not appear to hold a grudge against anyone (except maybe the infamous Marc Barrett: He laughed, when I mentioned that Marc was about the only one who fell for my April fool's Day prank (about the new high-end chip to be shown to developers at WOCA-NYC)). He said that he recieved one apology from one of the many peo- ple who attacked him over the net. In other words, none of the accusations people made about him appear to have any truth. Now on to Emplant: By now I assume that most people have seen pictures of the product and descriptions of it's features, so I will skip over them. However if you don't know, then you can get one from the Usenet archives. The Emplant board was demoed on two amigas, an A4000 with a 1960 monitor, and an A3000 with a 1084s monitor (which was used to show the way it would look on an accellerated a2000 or 500. On both Amigas, they were running a variety of Mac programs multitasking with Amiga software. He demoed MS Word, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Quark Express, and several others. The 3000 version was running in 16 color interlaced 640 x 480 (overscan) mode and the 4000 in 640 x 480 productivity 256 color mode. All software was running and looked good (especially on the 4000). I asked him if he had had any reports of software incompatabilities. He responded that the only program incompatible with the current version of the emulation software was Apple's own disk copier (he said that it broke every rule for Mac software). He commented that he could produce a patch to fix it (Microsoft software, which also breaks Apple's rules, has been patched to work). I also asked him if and when he would have an emulation of the Mac 32k color mode. He looked over at his Mac programmer, who responded "about 6 hours after we get back." Plans for the next version: Addition of ability to access Amiga files from the Amiga partition on the Mac desktop, 32,000 color mode on AGA amigas, and possibly addition of a patch to allow the use of an ec030 accellerator (the Mac color system uses the MMU extensively). He says that the ability to use all of the other Mac ROMs should be completed by the end of September, and 386/486 emulation by the end of the year or the beginning of next year. All, in all I feel that the Emplant appears to be an excellent product and Jim Drew seems very dedicated to the enhancement and expansion of its capabilities and features. His policy of making upgrades in the emulation free and expansion (such as 386 emulation) cheap (~ $70), show him to be committed to customer satisfaction. I predict that Jim Drew will soon be a very successful businessman. -Scott, the amigavangelist