--- Jeff Hellige <jhellige_at_earthlink.net> wrote:
> >And Dave Small did a version for the Amiga, too, I seem to
> >remember his exhibiting at an Amiga conference back when...
>
> The main Mac emulation boards for the Amiga were the Amax and
> the Emplant, though the Emplant didn't support the use of the
> 400k/800k Mac disks or floppy drive. It did have Mac serial and SCSI
> ports though.
I have both an A-Max and an A-Max-II for the Amiga...
The original A-Max is a long, thin cartridge that hangs off the floppy
poer of the Amiga and provides a pair of ROM sockets, pass-through for
the Amiga floppy, and a Mac floppy port.
Later, the A-Max-II came out for the A2000, etc., as a Zorro board
with a Z8530, twin Mac 8-pin mini-DINs, ROM sockets, and a couple of
34-pin floppy connectors. Instead of hanging an external Mac floppy
off a port in the back, you plug the internal Amiga floppy into the
A-Max-II board, and the A-Max-II board into the motherboard. I presume
it stuttered the motor or some such to get the rotation speeds to match;
that, or it synthesized its own bit clock (not sure if that would work
with Denise or not).
There was also an A-Max-IV, an A-Max-II board with a new PAL, more or
less, and different application software. I think it was released to
be able to run newer versions of the Mac OS than the A-Max-II could.
I used my A-Max cart/board for _years_ so I could a) transport files
to and from my mother's typesetting shop and b) directly drive my
HP LaserJet 4/ML (that I bought *new* for over $1000) from Mac apps.
Played a lot of Risk, also. :-)
Even when I had an A4000, the A3000 w/A-Max-II still got lots of use.
eventually, I started finding Macs for <$50 at the thrift stores and
I've moved on.
I did like Shapeshifter - a software-only Mac emulator for the Amiga. I
got a free license key for providing development assistance to the author.
It ran *concurrently* with AmigaDOS, and supported Ethernet. As a demo
at work (I had my A3000 on my desk when I was on the Ice), I showed my
Amiga booting System 7.something, then pull files off the Quadra 950
to its left, while at the same time, surfing the web with AMosaic. I
even showed it surfing with Netscape under MacOS, but I had to shut down
the TCP/IP stack on the AmigaDOS side because there was no way for the
stack to know which OS wanted to see IP packets. As long as I didn't
use the same packet type, I could have both OSes using the hardware
via the SANA-2 driver and it knew where to deliver the packets to. A
second ethernet card would have done the trick, too - one IP address
for the Mac, one for AmigaDOS.
I did not try running a DOS emulator under MacOS. :-)
-ethan
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Received on Mon Jun 17 2002 - 11:40:55 BST