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[News] Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership.ANN.lu
Posted on 30-May-2001 04:57 GMT by Christian Kemp23 comments
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Merlancia Industries wrote: Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries announce partnership for iFusion development and distribution. Click here for the press release.
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 1 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Christophe Decanini on 29-May-2001 22:00 GMT
I hope this will provide required features like:
- Network support
- Sound
- A Mac partition handler
And next:
- Direct access to PCI cards (USB, firewire, GFX, ...).
And also improve these:
- CDROM support
- faster IO (Gfx, disk)
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 2 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Ryan E. A. Czerwinski on 29-May-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 1 (Christophe Decanini):
Support for Networks, and Internet, etc; via Serial (AppleTalk included) and Ethernet are currently under way.
A patch for Sound support has been released this week, and a Mac partition handler, HFS and HFS+ is planned. (e.g. Mount HFS/+ partitions on the Workbench and manage files from both the Amiga and Mac sides at the same time.)
CD-ROM support is possible under iFusion currently from what i recall, and better I/O access is under way. The newest patch adds Sound support and better video drivers (faster video).
other features are also planned, as well as a 'real' interface. All of this will be covered in an upcoming press release.
Hope this answers a few of your questions.
Cheers,
Ryan E. A. Czerwinski
Merlancia Industries
>I hope this will provide required features like:
> - Network support
> - Sound
> - A Mac partition handler
>
> And next:
> - Direct access to PCI cards (USB, firewire, GFX, ...).
>
> And also improve these:
> - CDROM support
> - faster IO (Gfx, disk)
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 3 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Christophe Decanini on 29-May-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
These are great news. I will see what the update will bring.
The CDROM support is very poor. For example audio CDROM are not recognized.
And what about adressing directly PCI cards (when a PCI bus board is available)?
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 4 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by ehaines on 29-May-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
> Support for Networks, and Internet, etc; via Serial (AppleTalk
> included) and Ethernet are currently under way. A patch for Sound
> support has been released this week, and a Mac partition handler,
> HFS and HFS+ is planned. (e.g. Mount HFS/+ partitions on the
> Workbench and manage files from both the Amiga and Mac sides at the
> same time.)
Hey, this is what I wanted to hear...I knew there was a reason I
bought iFusion. :)
> CD-ROM support is possible under iFusion currently
> from what i recall,
No, not really. CD-ROMs are treated like read-only hard drives,
which only partially works. For example, there's no CD audio support,
and some games need a real CD-ROM drive to work. Also I found that if
I use a CD that's a certain size, say 640MB, and then I try to use a
700MB CD (or vice versa), it doesn't work and I only get read errors,
so I have to restart. SCSI emulation like Fusion has would fix this.
> and better I/O access is under way. The newest
> patch adds Sound support and better video drivers (faster video).
> other features are also planned, as well as a 'real' interface. All
> of this will be covered in an upcoming press release. Hope this
> answers a few of your questions.
> Cheers, Ryan E. A. Czerwinski
> Merlancia Industries
Yep, sounding good!
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 5 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Sinan Gurkan on 30-May-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
Hi
I hope that BlizzardPPC support is also made possible
some day..Does your company plan to assist Sam Jordan
for BPPC support ?
Thanks
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 6 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by John on 01-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 2 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
I have just been to Blittersoft's page, and there has been NO upgrade
released this week for sound support.
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 7 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by StormLord on 04-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
MAKE IT RUN ON BLIZZARDPPCs !!!!!!
ASAP
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 8 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by ! on 04-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
SPECIAL NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT:
IFUSION LICKS NUT SACK!
END OF SPECIAL NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT
P.S. GET A FUCKING WINTEL BOX YOU LOOZERS
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 9 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Ryan E. A. Czerwinski on 04-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (Sinan Gurkan):
Support fro BlizzardPPC cards is on the top three list (Number One actually) of things to get going. H&P currently has not been able to fix the problem, and we are looking at ways to bypass the problem with WarpOS (if possible0> THis is a high priority, as there are many loyal customers with Blizzard cards waitinf to buy the product. We are working on other solutions in the mean while. Please watch for announcements and updates son.
-=RC=-
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 10 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Ryan E. A. Czerwinski on 04-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 6 (John):
OOps...yes, very sorry. I meant to say that it was *finished* this week. (The week of the original post). It should be there very soon, if it isn't already. Again, many apologies for the error.
Cheers -=RC=-
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 11 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Ryan E. A. Czerwinski on 04-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 8 (!):
Gee...how many idiots with Windows boxes do I get to insult this week? Well here's one...
Get a life. Get an Amiga. Either that, or get lost, Idiot.
;)
-=RC=-
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 12 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 05-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 11 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
Yes, very clever of you - replying to the troll thereby giving him the attention he is seeking and thus encouraging him to continue.
*sigh*
If EVERYONE ignores such trolls, they ALWAYS eventually get bored and go elsewhere.
Replying to them merely encourages them.
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 13 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by A3K on 05-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
I don't think that lamer was as much of a troll as a drive-by flamer.
It does make me stop and wonder though....
How many Ghz would it take to emulate an Imac on Wintel at usable speed? or would it require Thz?
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 14 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Ryan E. A. Czerwinski on 05-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 12 (Anonymous):
I defend my personal beliefs to all ends. I won't ignore anyone that attampts to soil them. Perhaps for some there is a viewpoint that it is best to ignore and let be, instead of defending and uprising. If I took on the later belief however, I wouldn't be doing this anymore- Rekindling the hearts in a world that grows cold.
-=RC=-
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 15 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Ryan E. A. Czerwinski on 05-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 13 (A3K):
Emulating a PowerPC processor on an iNtel requires a great deal of conversion, including endian conversion. The performance drop would be about 80% or so. THus, to properly emulate a 500Mhz PPC-7400, you would need appx 1500MHz of iNtel processor power, maybe more.
There are other solutions, however, such as a co-processor card. Such things are currently being investigated.
Hope this helps.
Cheers -=RC=-
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 16 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 06-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 14 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
You do seem to be getting yourself rather confused there.
There is a huge world of difference between defending your belief when they are under attack, and blindly replying to trolls - the former is most admirable, and the latter just bloody stupid and pointless. The former protects your belief, the latter just encourages the troll to continue, generally pissing everyone of.
Thanks for encouraging the troll :-(
Oh, and don't give me that crap about "If I took on the later belief however, I wouldn't be doing this anymore" - that is just plain bullcrap as you know perfectly well - there is a massive difference between promoting the Amiga and stupidly replying to trolls - hell, you've been around UseNet long enough, you ought to know the difference by now.
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 17 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by victor # on 07-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 15 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
"to properly emulate a 500Mhz PPC-7400, you would need appx 1500MHz of iNtel processor power, maybe more"
I don't think it's correct. Emulating 1 G3 instruction by 3 x86 instruction? I would count on several times of it.. Maybe not even with JIT.. Or maybe I'm wrong..
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 18 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Steffen Haeuser on 07-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 17 (victor #):
Hi!
I think MUCH more. Think about the registers for example... PPC uses 32 Integer
registers... on PC you have EAX,EBX,ECX,EDX,ESI,EDI as general purpose registers only...
then there is the problem with the FPU... PPC uses 32 FPU-registers, x86 a FPU-Stack.
I think this would bring a *very* serious performance-hit. Then there is the speed-penalty
you get for the Endian-fix... Read "you can forget
about such an Emulation". Emulation of x86 on PPC would be much easier (and look how
slow even this is).
Steffen
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 19 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Keith_Blakemore-Noble on 07-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 15 (Ryan E. A. Czerwinski):
Then that's absolutely no problem - that means current PCs (1.4GHz Athlon) should, according to your figures, be able to emulate most Power Macs (500MHz PPC)...
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 20 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Mart on 09-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
A PC emulating an Amiga at 50 Mhz 060 speed, ok thats about possible right now....
But I do not think a PC can emulate a 500 Mhz PPC at decent speeds.
Mart
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 21 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by victor # on 09-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 20 (Mart):
Of course, not! Just read Steffen's comment. Ryan obviously missed a '0'..
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 22 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Merlancia Industries on 11-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 19 (Keith_Blakemore-Noble):
The real concern is MIPS, not MHz in this problem, as PowerPC processors get more done per instruction cycle than X86 processor do. Thus, the rough translation in MHz is not enough to properly calculate the amount of speed you would get, but don't expect much just with SW translation of PPC on an X86 core processor. Unless you have the absolute top of the line PC you might wind up going for a flight from New York to Moscow while waiting for MacOS to boot. An option other than SW translation is possible however. I'll wait for any official announcement before I mention any more on that matter, however.
-=RC=-
Blittersoft and Merlancia Industries: iFusion partnership. : Comment 23 of 23ANN.lu
Posted by Ryan E. A. Czerwinskio on 11-Jun-2001 22:00 GMT
In reply to Comment 21 (victor #):
Yes, again...What was referring to was that 2/3 of the X86 processor's power are used just to translate the code. Considering that a PPC processor gets about 2.5 to 3x more done per instruction cycle than an x86 core would, it would yield about 100 to 200 MHz 'Mac' speed. Indeed, perhaps less. That estimate is without any backing save for my personal opinion, which has been known to be wrong. But I won't comment any more on the matter without work from JD...Our main conncern in the iFusion project is running MacOS on non-Apple PowerPC systems. (Hint, hint- http://www.gotboing.com). Any further complaints may be directed to my circular file...err..well.
Again...I'm just estimating within some means as to what it might be possible to squeeze out of an X86 processor...Windows is another matter alltogether...considering the amount of resources that just running th OS takes up, who knows what would be left over for an emulator?
I just wish that the people doing the MacUAE core would do some sort of update. The latest version (0.8.6) which is the included version on AF4 doesn't even support hardfiles. The Windows version even has AGA support, and really nice tools and icons, etc (also on AF4) to boot. Is there really no demand for a great mac version of UAE? Wouldn't anyone else want to run a Mac emulator on their Amiga, then An Amiga emulator ontop of that..and so on. ;) Well..perhaps we're not all that bad yet. (Though I've done it once apon a time when MacUAe ran on M68k...it worked...but I won't mention speed...)
At any rate...I hope this answers a few questions/concerns. And if not...too bad.
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