Fusion Mac Emulator

[vulture]

@DamienD

I'd say it has the edge in both processing and redraw speed over Shapeshifter. Not much, but it's visible, especially in games, ie Civ 2.

[SimonV]

Originally Posted by DamienD

I've never tried Fusion; how does it compare to say ShapeShifter, which is pretty cool indeed?

In my experience Fusion's RTG modes are quite a bit faster.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by SimonV

I just wonder ... can that new version be used for classic 68k machines or is it just targeted to the new fpga things ? Because in that case there still will be no legal way to get Fusion 3.2 for a lot of us.

It's targeted for Amiga machines. If you happen to have a FPGA based Amiga you can use that too.

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by SimonV

In my experience Fusion's RTG modes are quite a bit faster.

That's because I replace Apple's QuickDraw routines with accelerated versions. You can disable this feature if you want to in the video driver setup, but I really never found any case where it didn't work... it was one of those "just in case" things.

Also, I replace Apple's math packages with super fast optimized assembly versions that yield up to 2.5x the performance for floating point functions. MANY games for the Mac use the floating point library, and the Mac OS itself does for nearly everything.

[DamienD]

Jim, I'd be interested to know how Prince of Persia: The Shadow & The Flame plays like in Fusion?

Unfortunately in ShapeShifter the game freezes randomly, there in no music and the cutscenes get stuck...

[Misclegend]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Jim, I'd be interested to know how Prince of Persia: The Shadow & The Flame plays like in Fusion?

Unfortunately in ShapeShifter the game freezes randomly, there in no music and the cutscenes get stuck...

pop2 works OK in Fusion 3.2, music and cutscenes works very well
but in shapeshifter 3.11 the game works but music get corrupted

I'm trying in winuae and macOS 8.1 btw
I use idem hardfiles for both emulators so the problem is shapeshifter

[DamienD]

Thanks for the details Misclegend, so no problems with POP2 in Fusion regarding random freezes, music and cutscenes

Only issue for me with Fusion is that it's not free (I don't mind paying BTW) plus being unable to actually purchase at the moment, and also for these reasons I couldn't include in my collection even if I could somehow get a copy.

So I guess I'm stuck with ShapeShifter, which is pretty good anyway... but I wish it would get an update to fix POP2

[Misclegend]

Originally Posted by DamienD

So I guess I'm stuck with ShapeShifter,

perhaps you can try an old version of shapeshifter ej 3.9 or 3.10
I will try this tomorrow , I think those old releases were more compatible (if I remember correctly)

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Misclegend

perhaps you can try an old version of shapeshifter ej 3.9 or 3.10
I will try this tomorrow , I think those old releases were more compatible (if I remember correctly)

Been there, done that... see this thread: Mac titles for CD32 via Shapeshifter?

No difference with POP2 unfortunately

[JimDrew]

POP, POP2, etc. all work fine. There are only two programs that I know of that do not work with FUSION, and that is MacBugs from Apple (their developer environment handler, kind of like our Enforcer for the Amiga), and a Virtual Memory enhancement from a company in France. Both of these use the MMU in ways that are not compatible with the Amiga's multitasking. POP and POP2 both do use custom math functions. Funny how many Mac games require a FPU and you have to either use a Mac with a FPU (68882 or 040) or use SoftFPU to emulate the FPU.

[Gaula92]

Is Fusion supposed to work with the MiSTer Amiga FPGA implementation?
Its currently 68020 + AGA + lots of RAM + lots of HDD space.
But it does NOT have an MMU (to my knowledge) or FPU implementation.

[JimDrew]

Yes, it should except the CPU core itself is broken. It is missing several instructions and has problems with exception handling. If the core ever gets fixed, then FUSION will work. Same for the Replay 1 core. I already have a video driver ready for when these work.

[Gaula92]

@JimDrew: Have you tested latest Minimig MiSTer versions? Seems to have some previously missing instructions implemented.

[Misclegend]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Been there, done that... see this thread: Mac titles for CD32 via Shapeshifter?

No difference with POP2 unfortunately

I just tested POP2 in Basilisk emulator for windows and this game have music problems too,
well ,Basilisk was wrote by the same guy who wrote shapeshifter
(someone who Jim hates )

it seems the only way to play this MAC game today in PC is using Fusion under winuae

[JimDrew]

Originally Posted by Gaula92

@JimDrew: Have you tested latest Minimig MiSTer versions? Seems to have some previously missing instructions implemented.

Yes. I test every version of Minimig, hoping whatever is broken gets fixed. Since the new CPU core came from Till & Mikej, I already knew of the various fixes. I wrote test code that exposed many of the issues that were fixed. There is some type of address issue for sure because some instruction is stripping the upper 8 bits of a longword in an address register.

[SimonV]

Any chance you can make a requester in the sound tab to select the AHI unit number you want to use ? That would be great so I can use a different unit for Fusion instead the need to choose unit 0 for different programs.

[JimDrew]

The support for AHI back in the day was experimental and I don't think there was support for different units because AHI was so new. I can look at adding a UNITS field.

[Gaula92]

@JimDrew: Does FUSION require an MMU, or should it work on a plain 68020?

[JimDrew]

The minimum requirement is a 68020 (no MMU).

[AmigaHope]

It's cool to hear about the paravirtualization of the Quickdraw and math libraries. The room for improvements on graphics handling via paravirtualization are obvious, but I have a question though, how are the math libraries any faster vs. just having the FPU handle them?

Do the Apple math libraries just handle transcendentals badly on 040/060? Do they just rely on exception trapping? What about running on a system that also has Cyberpatcher/Oxypatcher that sticks a JIT cached version into the code after the first trap?