FUSION revival

[24bit]

What about setting up Fusion, the "ancestor" of modern Mac emulators?

My reason for installing Fusion was my demand for a MacII emulation with at least 256 colours and a working sound system.
BasiliskII does a fine job running System7.1, but unfortunately some of my old games don't play sound. With Fusion they do, but Fusion can only be run from DOS or a DOS based Windows system.
If you own a fairly fast Intel or AMD machine with a dual core cpu and 2GHz clock speed or better, you may find that Fusion with DOSBOX is working at a reasonable speed.
DOSBox will only make use of one of your cpu cores, but as it occupies it up to 100%, it is a good idea to have some computing power left over for your host system.
DOSBox is available for several host systems, including OSX. My "newest" OS is WIN XP, so I set up Fusion with DOSBox and Windows XP.

If you should own some old hardware you might rather set up a FAT32 partition with WIN95, WIN98 or Millennium and start Fusion there, because it is much faster then.

What will be needed?
DOSBox 0.74
Fusion30 from Darek´s site
Mac ROM
Macintosh System CD

After downloading and expanding the needed files, copy the ROM file you are using with BasiliskII to your Fusion directory.
Locate the file “dosbox-0.74.conf”. At line 49 or so edit: memsize=31.
Telling DOSBox to allocate 31MB of RAM. It is not recommended to set this higher, anyway 63 will be the absolute maximum.
At the end of the file, paste something like these lines:

mount c d:\Fusion30
mount d j:\ -t cdrom
C:
setup


Line 1 mounts your directory Fusion30 on drive D as volume C in DOSBox.
Line 2 mounts your CD/DVD drive J as CD-ROM device D in DOSBox.
Line 3 tells DOSBox to go to the C volume, created in Line 1.
Line 4 calls Fusion´s setup screen.

The Fusion setup screen opens:
Click with your mouse into the screen. If you want your mouse back in Windows press CTRL and F10 at the same time. This switches the mouse between DOSBox and Windows.

Click ADVANCED and select your desired machine, lets say a Quadra700 with a Startup Sound 2

Click VIDEO and select VESA_R8M.FVD

Click FLOPPY and set it to OFF (unless you really got one and mounted it in dosbox0.74.conf)

Click DEVICES, then OPTIONS, then CREATE HARDFILE, type something reasonable, the files should be named something.hf0 to somewhat.hf9, press Return when finished. Use the arrows for setting the size to the desired one. Click CREATE, then EXIT.
The file you just created should be displayed in the “Available Hardfiles” box. If not press SELECT and do so.

Click ROM FILE and select the file you copied from BasiliskII. The file should be named anything.rom (any 8 characters.rom)

Click SOUND and set like this: Sound Hardware to BLASTER, Port to 220, IRQ to 7, DMA8 to 1 and DMA16 to 5

Click CD-ROM and set CD-ROM Support to D, Boot Priority to CD-ROM

ADB, SCSI and NETWORK can be left untouched right now.
The Apple Command Key is mapped to the right control key on the PC keyboard.

Click MEMORY and adjust it to 16MB or so.

Now its time to insert your Mac System Software CD.
Finally click LAUNCH EMULATOR

There you go!
Macintosh starts and asks, if you want to initialise the volume you created above.
Do that. Installation will proceed than.
If you are finished, shut down the Mac and close DOSBox by pressing CTRL+F9
If you would like to copy some files to your new volume, mount the .hfx file, you have created in Fusion setup, with BasiliskII or SheepShaver.

[ClockWise]

That is really wonderful. I'll copy and paste that into to the wiki. And this weekend I hope I can try out the instructions for myself!

[Ambassador]

Ah, I got momentarily confused by your post. There in fact was a "Fusion" emulator that was the predecessor to FusionPC 3.0. I think it was for Amiga if I remember correctly.

Here's another combo you can try as well 24bit: WinUAE and Shapeshifter.

[24bit]

Ambassador, you are quite right. The original version of Fusion was made for Commodore Amiga. I did not use Fusion in the Amiga days, I only had Amax for a while and could then afford to buy a used MacII.
Later I gave away my A2000, with a 68030 cpu upgrade, SCSI bus host adapter and a XT expansion card, to a friend.
That MacII with a Daystar 80030 cpu upgrade was my main computer system for many years and I would still be using it today, if it didn't die due to worn out ELKO's and a power supply problem.
With the MacII and his followers, a 7100/80 and an iMac bondi blue, I was not interested in Mac emulation until last year, when I looked through my old floppy disks and thought:
What a pity, I can't play ThinkAhead+ and Shanghai_II Dragons Eye no more.
Both are running again. ThinkAhead+ with MiniVac and System2
Shanghai_II Dragons Eye with Fusion. All the tiles will play their sound again, really great to have Emaculation!

What would be needed to run ShapeShifter and which were the special features of Christian Bauer's program?

[adespoton]

This is great... I now have Fusion running on my iPod :D

However, on all platforms, following the setup instructions, I get "Too much memory (or too many video drivers) selected." This happens no matter what video driver, ROM file, and memory setting I use.

Also, I can't seem to select or create hardfiles...?

[24bit]

Hey, thats a pity!
I am clueless about your iPod.
What kind of host systems did you try else?

[adespoton]

Hey, thats a pity!
I am clueless about your iPod.
What kind of host systems did you try else?

OS X and Win XP. I'm using v 0.84-0.87 I believe--maybe the environment variables in those have changed from your earlier version. I was hoping someone had had similar problems and found a solution....

[24bit]

You may have a point there.
Did you try 0.73 with WINXP? That combination should work at least.
Some other combos don't, e.g. VirtualPC with FusionPC.

Bye!

[ClockWise]

Hello, 24bit...

I've added your guide to the wiki:

http://emaculation.com/doku.php/fusion_setup_guide

Let me know if there is anything you would like to change. I will try to illustrate the guide with some screenshots later.

[adespoton]

Silly me... re-checked, and that 8 should be a 6. Updating to 0.74 and trying again....

...and it turns out when I check my memsize, it's still at 16. That's the only thing that was stopping me

Here goes System 7.0.1 on an iPod :D

[24bit]

@ adespoton: Glad to hear you made it!

@ ClockWise: Looks perfect to me, that guide, nice work.

[Ambassador]

What would be needed to run ShapeShifter and which were the special features of Christian Bauer's program?

You will need install an Amiga-compatible operating system in the WinUAE emulator and then install Shapeshifter in that.