Utilities Unlimited International Inc chief executive Jim Drew claims his software emulation of the 80486 will be available by the end of this quarter. The e586DX emulator has been dubbed PowerClone. Drew said it is currently in beta test, but warns that the finishing touches will not happen until it is ‘brother’ is released on the Amiga platform. Users calling the company’s headquarters in Lake Havasu, Arizona are being told that the iAPX-86-on-Amiga version is completed and will be released as soon as the manuals have been finished. But sceptics on the Internet warn that Drew has made similar claims that the product is almost finished several times before (CI No 2,437). Utilities Unlimited’s claim to fame is Emplant – a software package that emulates a Macintosh on the Amiga (with the aid of genuine Apple ROMs). The company announced it would extend this work to emulate Intel Corp’s processors a couple of years ago, since when Amiga customers have been waiting impatiently. Then last year it emerged that the company was intending to convert this Intel emulator for the PowerPC. There were many extraordinary claims about the size and the speed of this emulation. The claims of great speed are still in place. In an electronic mail message this week, Jim Drew told our sister paper PowerPC News As far as performance expectations… they are beyond what we had expected, with many processor functions being as much as 250% faster than a 80486DX2/66 when running on a 40MHz 68040 machine. If you scale the performance level of a PowerPC 601 chip to the 68040, you can clearly see that performance will be the last of our worries. Previously Drew had said that he was in talks with IBM Corp, Apple Computer Inc and various unnamed companies, all of whom were looking at licensing the technology. Drew was unavailable for comment on the question of what happened to these negotiations. Neither did we get confirmation that PowerClone will be a Power Macintosh product, though that would seem the obvious market. If so, it will go head to head against Insignia Solutions’ SoftWindows.
