On Sun, 7 Jun 1998, Tony Duell wrote:
> > > Does anybody know anything about these "thrid-party Macintoshes?" I'm
> > > familiar with the Outbound computers, I have never even heard of any
> > > other early Mac clones. Any info?
> >
> > How about Atari STs and Amigas running Macintosh emulators? :) :) :)
>
> Wasn't there a thing called a 'Magic Sack' or something that was a cartridge
> for the ST which you put the ROMs from a Mac into. One version had a Mac
> disk controller (IWM) chip in it as well, I think.
A-Max on the Amiga had a similar arrangement. The disk controller was
necessary for using the multi-speed drives (which seems to be just about
the only format an Amiga can't read).
> Problem was, it needed genuine Apple Mac ROMs. The only way to get those,
> at least at first, was to strip them out of a Mac.
I think actual ROMs were used because of legal issues, not because they
were actually needed. At least on the Amiga, we could use a ROM image
from disk instead.
One funky thing about A-Max running on an Amiga 1000 was that it was able
(by use of a special bootblock on the A-Max disk) to overwrite the
Kickstart in the Writable Control Store. This meant that my 512K A1000
had as much memory available as a Mac 512K, even with the 128K ROM and
emulator loaded. And there was also a RAM disk available at the same
time, of about 128K.
The BAD thing about (at least that version of) A-Max was that it took
over the entire system. This is obviously necessary if Kickstart is going
to be removed, but even when this wasn't done, the machine essentially
became a Macintosh. AmigaOS was no longer running.
I think this may have been fixed in later versions. Other, more recent,
emulators allow both operating systems to coexist quite nicely.
Oh, BTW, the experience I had with A-Max was with a pirate version, so
it's possible the commercial version couldn't work without actual ROMs. I
hope I can be forgiven that transgression as I was still a teenager at the
time. :)
I think MagicSac on the Atari was on the market a year or two earlier than
A-Max on the Amiga.
> -tony
Doug Spence
ds_spenc_at_alcor.concordia.ca
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~ds_spenc/
Received on Tue Jun 09 1998 - 12:10:44 BST