FUSION Macintosh Emulation Macintosh emulation. First impressions. Apart from Executor by there hasn't been a software-only commercial Macintosh emulator on the market (as far as I know). A product called requires the physical presence of a small board containing original Macintosh ROMs.

(Which means that notebook users as myself can't use such a solution). For the Commodore Amiga an emulator called FUSION by has been available for years. This product has now been released for the PC.

FUSION is a free, closed-source emulator of 680×0 based Macintosh machines. It's a DOS application and recommended for use on older DOS-based or Win 95/98 systems. It can be used on modern systems inside of an emulator like DOSBox.

The following reflects my first impressions. FUSION requires no Macintosh hardware; instead it relies on the user to make sure a copy of a legally obtained ROM exists as a file in the FUSION directory (i.e. You should own a Macintosh). The same technique is used by and the same provisions as to the legality of making that file remain; for instance the ROM does contain the string '(c) 1990-1992 Apple Computer, Inc.'

Click for more on US copyright law (especially sections and of US Code 17 seem applicable). I downloaded the FUSION demo and used the therein supplied utility ROMUTIL to dump the 1 Mb. ROM of my thrusty old to a Macintosh floppy. Since I don't run PC-Exchange on the Powerbook or a tool like MacDisk on my PC, I had to use Executor (sic!) for the actual transfer. Using the supplied SETUP program I created a harddisk image file and configured FUSION to use my CD-ROM. I also gave FUSION the maximum 8 Mb.

Of RAM (the non-demo version has no limitation). I inserted my System 7.5 Disk Tools diskette in my A: drive, started FUSION and it worked first time! First thing System 7.5 asked me was whether I wanted to format the HD I created. After that I copied the System Folder from my Disk Tools floppy to the freshly formatted HD. After a restart, FUSION booted fine from the harddisk.

I successfully installed some software from my CD-ROM and floppy. As a measure of speed I installed the Grolier Encyclopedia which worked well. In general FUSION is an impressive product! I ran TechTool to find out what hardware/software emulation is implemented, click for the results. A screendump of FUSION running System 7.5 (enhanced with Aaron). Shown are Speedometer 3.23 results.

Speed comparison Executor versus FUSION The graph on the right clearly shows that the CPU emulation of Executor is superior, caused by Executor's slightly more advanced dynamically compiling 68LC040 emulator. But the graph below shows that overall (weighted) performance of these two excellent products is in the same class. From my first impressions I conclude that FUSION is an excellent combination of the emulation speed of Executor and the full hardware emulation attempt of vMac. Having said that, a number of observations remain: • FUSION runs on MS-DOS alone. Executor and vMac are available on a much wider range of platforms.

• When FUSION becomes a commercial success, Apple might step in legally. The readme files of FUSION contain the phrase 'This emulation. Has not been approved by Apple Computer, Inc.' More on this issue is found. • The harddisk images used by FUSION are compatible with the Executor/vMac format. Jim Drew of Microcode Solutions has warned against booting FUSION from vMac system images because using any non-generic system software on those images (vMac emulates a Mac Plus) will cause problems for the emulator.

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