#Fusion mac emulator amiga software

Mac emulation on the Amiga only became slower than the real thing when Macs started including 256-colour graphics. I'm not sure about the very early Mac emulators, but later ones also used the Amiga's blitter and hardware line drawing capability to speed up Mac display calls. Also helping was the Amiga's video hardware being designed to support up to 6 bitplanes (64 colours), so when running Mac emulation only 1 bitplane (2 colours) was used and whole lot of extra bandwidth was available to the CPU. The video chips were allocated precisely as much access to memory as they needed at any given time, freeing up the remaining bandwidth for the CPU. Given how basic the Mac's display hardware was, this system was grossly inefficient.īut the Amiga was a lot cleverer. So half the time the CPU was locked out and as the 68000 didn't have any cache it basically stopped dead. The original Mac split memory access 50/50 between the CPU and the video system. The main reason being the actual Mac hardware was very simplistic and sacrificed a lot of performance. software/games/FuryOfTheFurriesCD32 Fusion Macintosh emulator Vendor: Microcode Solutions Keywords: emulation, Macintosh, commercial Date: Sep 17.

#Fusion mac emulator amiga software

With their monochrome monitors, they were an outstanding, if semi-legal, way to run Mac software without paying the gigantic Apple margin.

The STs had a similar setup with different software. They called ROM routines, so fixing those let those programs run anywhere. If anything had been poking the hardware directly, it wouldn't have gone well, but hardly any programs did that. Combine that with its heavy dependence on ROM routines for all screen output, and providing a slightly altered ROM pretty much let the machine run happily on any 68K platform. It wouldn't have worked except that Macs were more or less a 'CPU on a stick', with kind of the minimum possible hardware to make a 68000 into a viable computer platform. The big advantage was that it natively used the same CPU, so you didn't need a translation layer there, you just needed patched Mac ROMs. The Amiga's native display wasn't done the same way as the Mac's, so the Toolbox routines had to be modified to draw differently, and the sound chips were different. I would still call this an emulator, it was just one with a very thin translation layer.