A.C.E. 2/ACE CD 2.iso/FILES/DOCS/EMPLANTD.LHA/Emplant.doc3

Text File | 1995-05-16 | 6KB | 112 lines

                     Direct from Jim Drew at Utils Unlimited
                     __________  ____________  ___     ___
                    / __   _  / / ____/ __  / Œ_/ \   /  |
                   / Œ_/ Œ_/ / / /   / Œ_/ / __/ – \_/ /| |
                  / ____/ / / / / __/ __ _/ / / / \___/ | |
                 / /   / / Œ_/ Œ_/ / / \ \_/ / /        | |
                Œ_/   Œ_Œ___Œ_____Œ_/   \___Œ_/Since 78!Ž_

                      e586DX IBM Module information.
            Readme File from the V1.1 e586DX emulation module.

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 FLASHROM 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 tothe 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
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