--- Mark Gregory <mgregory_at_vantageresearch.com> wrote:
> One notable emulator/clone they missed was the Amax by ReadySoft for the
> Amiga. It was a slim grey box that contained sockets for the Mac 512K ROMs
And available later as an internal board with the same ROM sockets, a pair
of 34-pin connectors and external mini-DIN connectors. The 34-pin connectors
were there to place the A-Max-II+ board between the floppy drive and the
motherboard, allowing the Amiga's internal floppy to read/write 800K Mac
disks. The mini-DIN connectors were for LocalTalk.
I still use my A-3000 bought in 1990 to run M$ Word under A-Max and then
print via LocalTalk to my HP LJ/4ML. It works great as a turbo B&W Mac.
> I believe it was fairly successful - it went through at least 4 hardware
> versions that I'm aware of, ending with the Amax IV.
I only have the "A-Max II+". The IV had an upgraded PAL (security bit
blown, unfortunately; I checked) and new software.
> I was an early purchaser, and I always enjoyed showing off my Amiga with
> DeluxePaint II open in one window, WordPerfect for DOS in another window (I
> had an XT bridgeboard), and the Mac desktop in a third window.
> The best of all worlds, almost.
I had one way back, too. I used to use Mac System 3.5 with it.
There's another Amiga-based Mac implementation: Shapeshifter. It is software
only. I sent the author a Zilog data book so he could support the A-MaxII+
card (Z8530, just like the Mac and old Suns, a *great* serial chip if you
knew about its register access time limitations). My favorite demonstration
with Shapeshifter was to fire off System 7 on the Mac side, connect up to a
nearby Mac server and mount a share, switch back to the Amiga side, open up
AMosaic and browse the web while copying files on the Mac. For an added
touch, since there is no Netscape browser for AmigaDOS, shut down the TCP/IP
stack on the Amiga side, then launch Netscape for the Mac. Those who saw
the demo were usually stunned. This was all on a 25Mhz 68030 w/18Mb RAM
(16Mb "FAST", 2Mb "CHIP" (kinda like video RAM but more versatile))
Most recently, I took a CD of several hundred Apple QuickTake 150 pictures
that I shot over several months in Antarctica. My extensive research showed
that there was no way with UNIX or Windows to convert these files to any other
format. They are "Quicktime Compressed PICTs". The PBM utilities can parse
them, but they get to the meat of the picture and declare that there is an
unknown tag and skip the picture data. Anyway, I needed a Mac running the
QuickTake 150 extensions to interpret these 1200 pictures. My fastest real
Mac was a Mac SE/30. Running Picture Convert, it was 20-30 seconds to load
an image and save it as a compressed TIFF; fortunately, there's a batch mode.
Some of the pictures had developed bit rot, 10 in all. I couldn't just
fire it off and go to bed; I had to supervise the batch. I loaded the stuff
all up on to a 4Gb SCSI disk, hung it off my A4000 (25Mhz 68040) and ran
ShapeShifter. It was now more like 5 seconds per picture, thus, my fastest
Mac was really an Amiga.
Last month when I picked up the MacIIci for $5, I passed on a Quadra 605
for $25 because it had no Ethernet and was only a 25Mhz 68040. I figured I
already had that much and there was no reason to clutter up with one more
box. I think, eventually, when the University surpluses something faster,
I'll upgrade, but for now, the Amiga reigns supreme amongst my Mac collection.
For me, it wasn't just being able to run Mac programs that was great; it was
running them in a networked environment that was really awesome.
-ethan
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Received on Fri Mar 03 2000 - 08:23:01 GMT