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I've always considered Mac people to be on the same side as us even if some of them don't see it that way. Therefore, emulating a Mac doesn't have the same sort of feeling of selling out your machine as doing the same thing with a PC.
People are bound to ask why you need a Mac. Well, in these tough times of not being able to get much in terms of new Amiga software to meet your needs, you want something that's not going to give you too much of a headache (both financial or otherwise). The Mac is the most logical choice given the common microprocessor. The way I look at it is that there are lots of people who use the excuse of "I need program XYZ to do this" to go out and buy a PC. Most of the major applications you can get for the PC, you can also get for the Mac, so why bother ? I didn't really buy Fusion for this reason, more for the fact that I exchange discs with Macs fairly frequently and the ability to manipulate Mac files from the comfort of my Amiga at home for such a great price couldn't be overlooked. Ordinarily, I wouldn't consider buying a real Mac primarily because despite them being not too bad in the architecture and usability department, they're still pretty underpowered thanks to the slow progress of MacOS. There can't be anyone who has objectively looked at both MacOS and Workbench 3.1 that believes that MacOS is more advanced.
A friend of mine who works at Mac Warehouse (the UK's largest Mac dealer) who used to work in PCs told me a while back that when he moved in to the Mac game, he found it stunning that people could phone up and say that they had a Mac that was a few years old and had no problems with running the latest software on it. On the PC, you'd be laughed at and told to upgrade. The fact that 68K Macs are still well-supported makes the Mac an ideal machine for gleaning some of the software that might be so elusive on the Amiga.
First things first, you'll need to have access to a real Mac of some description. For legal reasons, it helps to actually own a Mac (which rather defeats the object), but as long as you've at least got your hands on a ROM from a scrapped machine (like the Quadra I got mine from), then I guess you're safe. You can use a variety of ROMs with Fusion, but you get the best results (ie. it works) with one meg ROMS. The 256K ROMs from an old SE/30 didn't appear to work (I lost patience quite quickly, so I didn't explore this too thoroughly).
| On the graphics front, Fusion is extremely nippy. If you've got a graphics card, you get the choice of the more friendly "refresh" drivers for either CyberGraphX or Picasso96 (there are separate drivers for each), or the much faster, but slightly less useful in the multitasking sense due to the way they hit the graphics memory directly (usually causing elements of the Mac's display to appear on your Amiga), direct drivers. In practise, I found that the direct drivers were significantly faster, but on running some benchmarks with Norton Utilities, I found that the measured difference was somewhat smaller... but then again, who in their right mind ever trusts benchmark programs ? Oh, and it may also be of interest that Fusion has drivers for the CD32, the Graffiti RGB port graphics system as well as the normal Amiga Chipset drivers, and the pitifully slow one which runs in a Workbench window (more of a gimmick than something you'd want to run all the time, though). |
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| Fusion also maps the Mac's own serial ports (the modem and printer port) to the Amiga's equivalent devices (based upon whatever driver you choose to use -so those with additional parallel and serial ports should have no trouble using them with Fusion). I tried it with FreePPP and the modem I use with my Amiga as normal, and it got on-line with relatively few hiccups (Mac-related, not Fusion-related). It works very well. You can run Fetch, Netscape, and NCSA Telnet with no problems at all. So you can use Netscape to visit all those websites which require Javascript that you are normally forced to avoid. However, it's not all good news. Mac Internet software is a good deal clunkier than that on the Amiga, so I personally would go for Amiga software every time (except for the rare occasions when I'm absolutely desperate to see something with Javascript in it... which ain't often!). Netscape and NCSA Telnet are noticeably slower than their Amiga counterparts, and due to the nature of MacOS, lack Amiga software's asynchronous nature... and compactness. Just the same, this emulation is a valuable feature. What would be really excellent is if it would be possible to utilise the TCP stack on the Amiga side (something like Miami or AmiTCP) so that you can run both Amiga and Mac network software concurrently. Alas, I doubt this is particularly feasible. |
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The program does of course support CD-ROMs (which is rather essential for Mac software nowadays). It doesn't appear to like audio CDs when used in conjunction with the Apple CD Player, but generally it's worked flawlessly since I installed it. You can set it to recognise CDs specifically for the Mac (useful when you're curious to see what exactly is on those ubiquitous AOL CDs that you get through the door every couple of weeks), or any generic data CDs like the ones you usually use with the Amiga. You can even boot from them, but given that I don't have any bootable CDs, I couldn't test it.
Floppy support is there, although as you might expect, if you don't have something like a Catweasel (and I don't) then using floppies is a painfully slow experience. Booting from them takes an absolute age, but don't blame Fusion for this -it's purely a speed issue with Paula. Network support is also included, but in the absence of any SANA-II compliant networking device, I couldn't check this out either.
Fusion's SCSI support seems pretty complete. I tried chucking an EZ 135 and a Magneto Optical drive at it and had no problems at all. It only seemed to be a bit reluctant to play ball with an ancient, hand-cranked Microtek monochrome scanner. Then again, the Amiga side never managed to see it, so it's likely that the SCSI controller on my machine was to blame more than anything else. Nevertheless, I've exchanged many files between various Macs with no problems at all. This is very useful when you want to be able to take Postscript that you've either generated on your Amiga or with some software on the Mac and get it taken to a Bureau for printing. I've had to deal with 70 megabyte PostScript files before, and getting them over to a Mac was extremely painful before now.
Additionally, it appears possible to mount AmigaDOS volumes on the Mac side. I say "appears" because the interface certainly implies this, even though the documentation in all it's crapness gives you no clues whatsoever. Apart from that minor flaw, it defeated my best efforts to get it to do anything sensible other than creating discfiles. In fact, I'm still not totally sure how that particular section of Fusion actually works, and it's going to take a heck of a long time to figure it out! I believe that it also allows you to format partitions of Amiga drives for use with the Mac side, but I happened to have a spare hard drive to do the job, so I used that instead.
However, it's not all good news. Fusion does have some pretty blatant (and damn annoying) bugs, though. For example, if you put the SCSI mode to Direct (for significant speed increases if your SCSI controller is up to the job), the first time you start Fusion, it refuses to recognise that any SCSI devices exist. You have to physically shut the emulation and then re-start it. I don't like shutting down the emulation as it tends to encourage the instability of the program as a whole to surface, and it will eventually end in tears. This doesn't seem to happen with buffered SCSI accesses (which are marginally slower). Additionally, although it is possible to get Fusion to map all sorts of weird and wacky devices to Mac SCSI units, on using my A4000's default scsi.device and mapping unit 2 as unit 0 (Macs tend to boot faster the lower the SCSI ID you give them to boot from), it insisted on talking to the REAL unit 0 of my controller which happened to be an Amiga disc. Not particularly clever, however with some tweaking it did eventually get it right.
It has to be said that the documentation is crap. In fact, it goes beyond crap. There are very few programs I have on my machine that leave me in doubt over how something is used (even if it does take a few reads to figure it out). The lightweight AmigaGuide document included with Fusion gives you all the essentials if you've never used a Mac before, including a glossary telling you exactly what an application and a floppy disc is (in case you were in any doubt). There are still several aspects to Fusion that I don't quite understand, and this frustrates me given that I have nowhere else to refer.
| In terms of compatibility, I'd say that you'd have no worries with Fusion. Pretty much everything I chucked at it worked without a problem. The two notable exceptions are Netscape 4.05 and Micro$oft Word. With some tweaking of the settings, Netscape finally managed to play ball (Netscape 3 worked with no problems, by the way). However, Word wouldn't budge. It would certainly install and run, but whenever you tried to save anything, it would "unexpectedly quit" on you. This happened for versions 6.00 and 6.01. I never bothered with version 5. I'd still put this down to a problem with Word itself given that it is programmed contrary to all the MacOS programming guidelines that exist (in fact, it is based upon re-writes of certain MacOS routines (known as "the toolbox") so that the Windows code can be ported more easily). It's no great loss because Word for the Mac was always crap, and for as long as it is derived from a port of the Windows version, it always will be. Adobe Photoshop 2 and 3 worked without any problems, as did Xerox Textbridge (a very good OCR package), GraphicConverter (a shareware image converter), GIFBuilder (an animGIF package), Adobe Acrobat, and several others. |
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When it works, it has to be said that Fusion is great. It really does provide a convincing Mac emulation. However, I have to be honest and say that I simply don't trust it. Fusion makes my system unstable to the point where I'm scared to use another program for fear of upsetting the delicate state that Fusion puts my system in. In fact, Fusion has been responsible for more crashes on my machine than I could ever remember in the whole time I've had an Amiga. Normally, I could be running several applications all day long and my machine would be rock solid, but Fusion has changed that. Sad but true. I just can't trust it to run alongside other applications without it completely stamping all over them and causing the machine to crash. Basically, if you're going to run Fusion, run it on it's own. You don't need me to tell you this, you'll soon find out for yourself. Let's not get too negative here. Thirty quid is a good price for getting what is pretty much a fully-functioning Mac on your Amiga. If/when the PowerPC is supported, the range of software available to you will just explode. Here's hoping that the PC version of Fusion doesn't distract the programmers too much from the Amiga...
Andrew Elia