This is version 1.1 of EMPLANT's e586DX emulation software. LOOK AT YOUR EMPLANT BOARD AND MAKE SURE THAT ALL OF THE CUSTOM LOGIC CHIPS (they have white labels) HAVE A DATE CODE OF 4693. IF NOT, CONTACT UTILITIES UNLIMITED FOR A COMPLETE UPGRADE SET. We have not been able to complete our licensing agreement for a suitable PC BIOS to use with the e586DX emulation. So, at this time, a BIOS is *not* included with this software. Due to complications in trying to obtain several different BIOS licenses, we have decided to write our own BIOS, which is currently being worked on. Until our BIOS is released, you will need to find a suitable BIOS. You can use any FLASH ROM upgrade (a BIOS image) with the e586DX emulation. We highly recommend AMI-BIOS (from American Megatrends). If you already *own* a PC that uses AMI-BIOS, you can either dump your BIOS from your machine, or call American Megatrend's BBS and download the latest FLASH ROM image for your machine, and use that with your emulation. The phone number for American Megatrend's BBS is included with the system manual for your machine. Virtually any BIOS for a standard AT ISA BUS machine will work. BIOS upgrades can be purcahsed from any PC clone dealer. There are some limitations currently with this software. If you try to use any PC application that attempts to use the MMU while DOS is mapped high, the emulation will freeze. This problem has forced us to completely re-write the emulation in order to maintain the current level of speed AND fix this problem. At the time of this writing, the new version is nearly completed. Depending on the values placed into the CRTC registers, MODE-X games may or may not work properly. There doesn't seem to be any real standard among game manufacturers with the values used for various monitor setups. If you run a game and it displays 6 to 8 'mini screens', please let us know what program it is so we can look at it. Perhaps we can create some sort of intelligent routine to handle all of the various combinations. We strongly suggest that you do not use virtual 86 mode as the emulation can be as much as 3 times slower, depending on how many inner-mixed protected mode/virtual86 mode/MMU operations are taking place. The CPU Transcription and CPU Prefetch gadgets are currently ghosted. A certain amount of reliable transcription is now *always* done (the original reason for the gadget in the first place). We will be adding more transcription to the emulation in which some things we know will not work properly with the transcription enabled (at which time, the option to not use transcription will be available). The Prefetch option is currently only selectable with the PowerPC version, and may not appear in the Amiga version. There are several PC utilities and drivers included with this software. You will need make a PC formatted 720K (or 1.44mb) disk using CrossDOS or something similar, and copy the file 'runme.exe' from the 'PC_UTILS' drawer included with this software. Once you have copied it to the PC formatted disk, start the emulation and copy the file to your PC's (emulation) hard drive partition. Now, type 'runme' and you will see that two files are created on your hard drive (one executable, and one data file). Run the executable by typing 'install'. This program will copy all of the driver software and utilities to the appropriate places, and walk you through setting up the options for the various drivers. A little history: The PC emulation was first started after the first version of EMPLANT's MAC emulation was released. Due to numerous machine incompatibilities with the MAC emulation, a large portion of our programming time was dedicated to iron out the problems. Several months later, we again resumed work with the PC emulation. Nearly a year later (and dozens of updates to the MAC emulation), the first actual test was done. Egads, was it slow. It worked, and it was faster than anything else available, but it was really not that usable... good experience. In late August of 1994, we started from scratch, now having a good understanding of how the PC architecture worked. Speed galore... beating a real 66Mhz DX2 in quite a few tests (with 40Mhz 68040 processors) made our day since we knew that there is always room for improvements. After playing with some 3rd party EMM386 clone programs, we noticed some interesting problems with the MMU setup. The problems turned out to be so severe that we were forced to start from scratch again. Now, a few days later, it is amazing to see how fast coding goes compared to the 'learning curve' we had to start with. Our first attempt took more than year; our second attempt took 6 months; and our third attempt has been 6 days so far, and it is nearly ready for testing. Our new code is about 1/4 the size and could be as much as twice as fast. A lot of this new code is due to the PowerPC version of this emulation. Since this product is being developed for both the Amiga and PowerMAC platforms, changes in one machine's code can often lead to optimizations in another machine's code... such as we have found when working with PowerPC assembly and 68K assembly. The executable code released on this disk is more than 1.75 megs The source code totals more than 10 megs and even with a 40Mhz 68040 processor, it takes several minutes to assemble. There are thousands of man hours in this project, and I am sure that we are nowhere near where we want to be. But, as with the MAC emulation, upgrades will be readily available, and we welcome your suggestions to make this emulation module as productive as possible. Sincerely, Jim, Joe, & Mark * PLEASE READ THE 'CHANGES.TXT' FILE BEFORE INSTALLING THIS SOFTWARE! * ******************************************************************* * * * * A T T E N T I O N * * * * If you obtained this software update as an LHA archive: In order to use the HardDisk_Installer script you have two choices: 1) Format a floppy disk with the name 'e586DX'. MAKE SURE you use FFS (FastFileSystem) when formatting the floppy. Decompress this archive to the floppy and double-click on the HardDisk-Installer icon. 2) Decompress the archive into RAD: and assign e586DX: to RAD: ------------------------------------------------------------------- If you obtained this software update as a .DMS file: Just decompress the file to a floppy and double-click on the HardDisk-Installer icon. ******************************************************************* The PC emulation ABSOLUTELY requires the installation of the MAC emulation software to run... no exceptions. RsrvMem *is* used for the PC emulation. EMPLANT's PC emulation was created using: ------------------------------------------ DEVPAC (The emulation core and device drivers were written with DevPac) WarpEngine (It is on rare occassion that we are shocked by a product... and this is one of them... 40Mhz, 30.12 MIPS, need we say more?) Some of the main systems used for development: (2) A4000's w/24 megs of FAST mem, video toaster, CalComp graphics tablet, (1) A3000 w/48 megs of FAST mem, (2) 2000's w/2630 and 2091a, (2) A500 w/VXL*30 and 8 megs of FAST mem, (2) A1200's w/1230XA's w/4 megs of FAST mem, (1) A1000 w/2 megs of FAST mem, trumpcard controller, A4091, XT bridgeboard, EGS-Spectrum, Piccolo, Picasso II, Rainbow II, Rainbow III, Merlin, Domino, Retina, Resovler, OpalVision, X-Caliber, ViewSonic 15, 1084, 1950, 1960, etc., etc... Trademark recognition: Mac, Apple, and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. AMI-BIOS is a trademark of American Megatrends, Inc. CrossDOS is a trademark of Consultron. EMPLANT, the EMPLANT logo, and e586DX are trademarks of Jim Drew and Utilities Unlimited International, Inc.