Fusion Mac Emulator

[torsti76]

Originally Posted by JimDrew

Can you explain what you mean by this? Does FUSION give you an error message or something? FUSION just does a standard device driver Open() with the unit passed in. If the device driver fails to open then it would report an error (fail to start the emulation).

No, Fusion doesn't give me an error message. The problem only manifests itself "inside" the emulation:

When I set up Fusion with the enc624j6net.device unit 0, it successfully starts and boots into my generic MacOS 8.1 installation. But in MacOS, it fails to recognize the card as an 'Ethernet' device. Any previous TCP/IP settings are ignored and if I dare to open the TCP/IP control panel in MacOS, it tells me that the previously chosen 'Ethernet' is no longer available and that it's falling back to 'MacIP'. This isn't particularly useful if the main goal is to get the virtual Mac to connect to the internet.

The described behaviour can be seen with other network devices I tried as well, e.g. x-surf100.device (for the X-Surf 100 card by Individual Computers) or mediatornet.device (for Realtek 8029 10 Mbit cards in a Mediator).

BUT, there are also devices that behave as I would have expected. With those devices, the MacOS TCP/IP control panel shows 'Ethernet' as a choice in the top toggle field where one can select between 'PPP', 'MacIP' and so on. If I chose 'Ethernet' there, I can set up IP address, netmask, gateway, etc. and the emulated Mac is able to connect to the internet as well as to my local Linux boxes, etc.
Examples for such working drivers are fastethernet.device (for Realtek 8039 cards in a Mediator) or nullsana.device (a kind of virtual bridge device that can be found on aminet).

What puzzles me is the question what the difference between those device drivers might be that for some drivers 'Ethernet' in MacOS is possible and for some it isn't. I hope, you can shed some light on this...

[JimDrew]

Whatever device is used MUST be fully SanaII compliant. It sounds like these devices (their device drivers) are missing some of the functionality that is required for the Mac to see them as Ethernet devices.

[torsti76]

Originally Posted by JimDrew

Whatever device is used MUST be fully SanaII compliant. It sounds like these devices (their device drivers) are missing some of the functionality that is required for the Mac to see them as Ethernet devices.

I've got a debug version of the enc624j6net.device from its developer and will try to find out what's missing there.

I'm positive we'll figure it out.

[JimDrew]

Yeah, just log the device driver function calls that are attempted. The device driver is suppose to return -1 (not supported) when there is call that is not supported.

[OSH]

Well, this topic is quite old. But I read about iso.device which helps mount .toast image on Amiga side. So can I have more informatiuons please? Jim?

And you said:

That is not true. You do not need a MMU ever. None of the video drivers for FUSION that actually *requires* a MMU. There is a definite speed difference though when you don't have a MMU! The MMU can be used to determine when the Mac video memory has been changed and trigger an update in the Amiga screen.

But in the Fusion guide I read:

"This driver opens screens the MAC can draw into
directly on any Picasso96 compatible card. If you do not have an MMU,
only 256 colors are supported. The PicassoIV and PiccoloSD64 both support
direct thousands mode with an MMU. The CyberVision supports direct thous-
ands and millions modes with an MMU. There is no CyberVision3D driver for
Picasso96 at this time. All other cards only support 256 colors. Cards
with blitters can be used to accelerate the MAC video".

So do I need MMU for p96DirectXL and thousands/millions colors mode or not?

[JimDrew]

The iso.device driver that I created lets you use that to emulate the low-level functions of a CD-ROM drive, using just the .iso image file. This is not for the Amiga, but I guess you could make a DOSDriver or mountlist image with a filesystem handler to allow the Amiga side to read the data.

The P96DirectXL is 256 color only for the Picasso II and other boards without the MMU. You have to use the P96Refreshed driver in order to have thousands/millions support without the MMU.

Incidentally, I just saw you question (a month later). Questions about my products should be addressed to me via the support forum on my website: www.cbmstuff.com

[reflex]

hello Jim,
i use Fusion on my heavy expanded Amiga 4000 and I successfully managed to install MacOS 8.1 with a quadra 950 rom but everytime I launch the program i get the message "unable to inizialize audio device" or something like this, i have to disable audio to start the emulator.
What could cause this strange behavior?

[JimDrew]

What are using for audio, PAULA directly or a device driver like AHI?

[Retro1234]

Have I missed something ??? looks like theres a new version of Fusion
Fusion 4

https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?r...&product_id=98

If I haven't missed this should probably go in the news thread.

[torsti76]

Yeah, and it's coming soon for more than a year now...

[JimDrew]

Yeah.. I have been waiting for over a year for the various FPGA Amiga emulation authors to finish the video driver hooks that are suppose to be added for supporting direct frame buffer access. These will allow for higher resolutions and accelerated graphics with several of the FPGA configurations. I don't want to go back and add this support later, and I have an all-new video driver core (every video driver is different from the previous FUSION versions).

I am not sure how much more I will wait though.

[jayminer]

Any chance of some kind of virtual floppy support in the updated fusion? Would be nice to be able to make an installation of MacOS on an Amiga with only a DD drive using disk images instead!

[JimDrew]

You have always had that option with FUSION (even EMPLANT's Mac emulation). Just use a disk image file as a hard drive image file (hardfile). FUSION automatically knows based on the size of the hardfile image and will display a floppy disk icon instead of a hard drive icon.

[torsti76]

Originally Posted by JimDrew

I am not sure how much more I will wait though.

Jim, just a thought:

With all the new accelerators available at the moment for classic Amiga machines there's an increasing stockpile of yet-to-be better Macs, which are just waiting for the proper software to be commercially available (again).

That said, how about just making a fait accompli and providing the FPGA guys with an API as YOU see fit?

[jayminer]

Originally Posted by JimDrew

You have always had that option with FUSION (even EMPLANT's Mac emulation). Just use a disk image file as a hard drive image file (hardfile). FUSION automatically knows based on the size of the hardfile image and will display a floppy disk icon instead of a hard drive icon.

That's nice, but then it's not possible to change disks while the emulation is running, right? Having some options for ejecting and inserting a new disk would open up many possabilities, especially now in the days of there being lots of floppy images on places like archive.org. And it would be nice to be able to install System 7 more easily on a computer with only a DD drive.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by torsti76

Jim, just a thought:

With all the new accelerators available at the moment for classic Amiga machines there's an increasing stockpile of yet-to-be better Macs, which are just waiting for the proper software to be commercially available (again).

That said, how about just making a fait accompli and providing the FPGA guys with an API as YOU see fit?

Well, that's been the problem really. I have been at the mercy of these guys and their indecisions. I already made a complete spec of the new emulation helper plug-in card I designed for the Amiga, which can also be made virtually (FPGA) and that has the video info in the spec.

At some point in the not-so-distant future I am just going to require adhering to what I designed with no chance of input. The changes I made allow the use of higher screen resolutions (along with their colors modes), than what existed on the Macs of the era. This required the entire video driver core to be re-written and it WAS an opportune time for FPGA emulator folks to chime in and setup a portal to the frame buffer info.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by jayminer

That's nice, but then it's not possible to change disks while the emulation is running, right? Having some options for ejecting and inserting a new disk would open up many possabilities, especially now in the days of there being lots of floppy images on places like archive.org. And it would be nice to be able to install System 7 more easily on a computer with only a DD drive.

The Mac lets you "eject" any type of removable media. Just select the icon and go to the pull-down menu and select the EJECT option. With FUSION you can flip screens and change the disk image.

You can of course just use a CD-ROM drive with the MacOS installer CD. The new version of FUSION has an ISO driver that lets you mount various forms of Mac CD ROM image files (.iso, .toast, .bin, etc.)

[Tomtom76]

Anybody running Fusion on TF1260? No luck for me using AmiRefresh. Other video drivers works but obviously slower.

[Marce]

Originally Posted by Tomtom76

Anybody running Fusion on TF1260? No luck for me using AmiRefresh. Other video drivers works but obviously slower.

perhaps your 060 is the eco version without MMU ?
otherwise if u have a full 060 disable super scalar cache, then run fusion
confirm

[Tomtom76]

Its LC version. Probably most popular with TerribleFire 1260. So MMU is present but no FPU. What interesting is Fusion says FPU is build in which is not true. BTW. How to disable super scalar cache? I`m new with that stuff and need to learn