Went to the Commodore Amiga 30th Anniversary event, came home with a new "Mac"

[Huxley]

Had a blast with my wife and son at the Commodore Amiga 30th Anniversary celebration (hosted at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA) - amazing exhibits, cool people, and a big table with neat stuff for sale. Among other nice items (a Commodore 1084 monitor, an external hard drive for my A500, etc.), I snagged this kit: an "A-Max Macintosh Emulator."

As best I can tell, this is a big(!) dongle that connects to the floppy port of an Amiga 500 (or A2000), and in addition to allowing an Apple external floppy drive to be connected, also has internal sockets for a pair of Mac ROM chips from a 128k, 512k or Plus. 

Should be a fun gadget to play with!

 

[360alaska]

Pretty cool! Could we see some pics of the board and adapter?

 

[uniserver]

 

[uniserver]

 

[uniserver]

this was kind cool too.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Such little logic needed to drive an Apple 800k drive on an Amiga floppy port. Wonder if the FloppyEmu works with it I think the Amiga floppy controller (in Paula) can read 800k GCR disks, but I might be wrong. Yep, looks like CrossMac needs an AMax to read/write 800k GCR disks.

 

[CelGen]

You paid how much for the Amiga hard drive sidecar???

Dammit, I've been wanting one of those for almost 11 years. The prices are nuts.

Anyways, I've used one of those MAC emulators before. I reverse engineered the board for someone so they could strip the ROMs out of a mac and use it themselves. It's an extremely simple design.

 

[Huxley]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! Snagging this gear for these prices (esp. the sidecar HDD / RAM pack) was easily the highlight of my year from a retro-computing perspective. 

Here are some pics of the Amiga booting into Mac OS 6.0.1:

The display flickers like crazy when in Mac-mode (not to mention the challenges of getting a decent picture of a CRT with a digital camera), but there are several display options in the A-Max config panel that I haven't tested yet. My Amiga RGB monitor cable has a loose wire (need to solder it back together) which is already causing some display headaches, and I've suspended my A500 tinkering until I get that resolved. In any case, I was genuinely impressed by the performance and 'feel' of Mac OS on the Amiga - other than the slow floppy access, it didn't feel any slower than running a standard Compact Mac natively. Pretty cool.

 

[Charlieman]

I am unsurprised that your Amiga flickers but I am happy that it works in Mac mode.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Its likely running 640x400 video, which is interlaced on the Amiga. For years the Amiga and Atari ST managed to be better Macs than the real thing simply because they could display higher resolution video out of the box.

 

[Huxley]

Its likely running 640x400 video, which is interlaced on the Amiga. For years the Amiga and Atari ST managed to be better Macs than the real thing simply because they could display higher resolution video out of the box.

Yep, correct. I borrowed a soldering iron last night and repaired my RGB cable, so at least I'm getting accurate colors (previously everything was either greyscale or various eye-searing shades of purple). The A-Max software has some options for switching display modes which I'll play around with tonight or this weekend - something's gotta reduce the flicker a bit, as it's hard to imagine anyone using this setup for real work without going into periodic seizures from the flicker.