eharmon
Well-known member
I haven't seen a lot of Mac-on-Amiga topics on here, which is a shame. I've been restoring a 500 and had to give it the ShapeShifter treatment. If you're not familiar, ShapeShifter is the predecessor of both SheepShaver and Basilisk II. Unlike the latter, it's a hardware emulator but not a CPU emulator -- the Amiga also runs on 68k and ShapeShifter can use the native CPU without much loss.
Theoretically, ShapeShifter is the fastest 68k Mac on earth if you've got an Amiga with an '060 accelerator. Sadly that'll cost you 2-3 Macs worth of money. If anyone has one I'd be fascinated to know how quick it is in benchmarking!
Since I didn't want to spend >$1000 on a 1200 and an '060, I took the poor man's option: emulating the only component ShapeShifter isn't, by sticking a PiStorm into my Amiga.
The PiStorm has cropped up here a few times, it basically functions as a bus transceiver for a Raspberry Pi running a 68k emulator. There's always been the option of running the CPU emulator for PiStorm on Linux, but in the past couple years a bare metal emulator has appeared, emu68. This emulator runs without an operating system on top, more directly translating 68k to ARM instructions.
So, more or less, at this point I'm emulating everything on the Mac but the '040 bus. Is that a real 68k anymore? No, not really. But it is fun! And it's fast, other than graphics performance:

Beats a PowerPC!
Impressively fun, that's with the disk image for Speedometer mounted from the Amiga side over SMB over wifi (disk benchmark is against a local disk though).
If anyone has an '060, give it a try, and we can see what it's like without cheating.
Theoretically, ShapeShifter is the fastest 68k Mac on earth if you've got an Amiga with an '060 accelerator. Sadly that'll cost you 2-3 Macs worth of money. If anyone has one I'd be fascinated to know how quick it is in benchmarking!
Since I didn't want to spend >$1000 on a 1200 and an '060, I took the poor man's option: emulating the only component ShapeShifter isn't, by sticking a PiStorm into my Amiga.
The PiStorm has cropped up here a few times, it basically functions as a bus transceiver for a Raspberry Pi running a 68k emulator. There's always been the option of running the CPU emulator for PiStorm on Linux, but in the past couple years a bare metal emulator has appeared, emu68. This emulator runs without an operating system on top, more directly translating 68k to ARM instructions.
So, more or less, at this point I'm emulating everything on the Mac but the '040 bus. Is that a real 68k anymore? No, not really. But it is fun! And it's fast, other than graphics performance:

Beats a PowerPC!
Impressively fun, that's with the disk image for Speedometer mounted from the Amiga side over SMB over wifi (disk benchmark is against a local disk though).
If anyone has an '060, give it a try, and we can see what it's like without cheating.