One of the amazing things that we could do with our Amigas back in the day was to emulate
a Macintosh. Now, in a previous episode I showed how you could emulate an IBM PC, but not very
well. Software emulation was terribly slow. And you could use hardware emulation with the sidecar,
but that was clunky and expensive. However, emulating a Macintosh was a very different story.
You see, the Amiga and the Macintosh both used the Motorola 68000 CPU. In fact, you could actually
pop the CPU out of your Amiga and put it in your Macintosh and it would work just fine,
or vice-versa. Thus, the Amiga didn’t need to emulate the CPU which made everything run much
faster. In fact, this would be more of what we’d call a virtual machine than an emulation.
However, there were two barriers making it difficult to run Mac software on your amiga.
One problem was that the floppy drive in the Amiga was not capable of reading the Macintosh format.
The second problem was that Apple owned the rights to the ROMs and weren’t about to license that.
Especially when you consider that a Mac Plus cost a whopping $2,599 in 1987,
and an Amiga 500 cost $699. Basically, the Mac cost 3.7 times as much money.
So, a couple of years later, one 3rd party product that came to market was called
A-Max. And they had a hardware solution to both problems. Let’s open the box and have a look.
Here’s the user’s guide. And here’s the product.
And I’ll show you what this peg does in a minute. And it comes with these two disks. On the inside
of the unit you’ll find two ROM chips. Notice these are actual Apple branded ROMs. These were
pulled from a real Macintosh at some point. So, the user had to supply their own ROM chips from a
Mac, or I suppose they could burn their own copy. Either way, it indemnified Amax from any copyright
problems. Oh, and on the inside of the case, you’ll find the signatures of the developers.
So the way this works is, it plugs into the Amiga’s floppy drive port,
and then you can connect an official Apple disk drive. This solves the problem of not
being able to read Macintosh disks. And, I promised to show you what this peg does. Well,
you can pull this little one out, and replace it with the longer one. And that
way, when you use it on the Amiga 1000, it sits at the right height.
OK, so let’s boot it up and see what we get. If we take a look at video preferences,
you’ll notice there are a number of options, such as hi res, or interlaced. And of course we
can pick the size of the Macintosh screen. For best compatibility with a Mac Plus,
you’d want the 512 by 384. However, this does present a small problem.
One of the issues you have to deal with is the difference of screen resolution.
A Mac Plus, for example, had a screen resolution of 512 by 384.
But the Amiga was usually 640 by 200. And a lot of that difference boils down to the fact
that the Macintosh had square pixels and the Amiga had rectangular shaped pixels.
So if you were to compare this with square pixels, the Amiga screen would look like this.
And if you tried to overlay the Mac screen, as you can see,
it won’t quite fit. One option is to use a virtual screen that you can scroll around on like this.
But this is not a very elegant way of doing things. So the better option is to
use interlaced mode, which doubles the Amiga’s vertical resolution.
However, this causes a problem I didn’t really anticipate trying to demonstrate this in a video.
So, while this may look like it is working fine, the camera is only picking up a single field. And
so every other line on the screen appears to be missing. For example, look at the menu bar of
the control panel. Normally it has a pattern of alternating lines. But, when I move it around it
will appear all black or all white depending on whether it lands on an even or odd pixel.
Now, it doesn’t look this way in person, it’s just on camera. Now you might say,
“well David, film it in 60 fps and that will solve that.”
Well, it does, sort of, but then I get this huge black bar on the screen.
So, I thought maybe I could capture video from the Amiga using HDMI. Well, this kind of looks okay,
but there are bizarre artifacts anywhere there is motion. So, then I thought “hey, we’re dealing
with black and white anyway, why not capture from my Amiga 500’s black and white composite
port?” So I tried that, and I have to tell my capture device how to handle the interlace.
This example was telling it to blur the fields, which doesn’t look so great. This
example is using weave, and it looks decent at times, but the capture device keeps losing sync.
So, then I had an idea. What if I used this old Apple III green screen monitor.
It uses a long-persistence phosphor which was meant to reduce flicker. And low and behold.
This works perfectly and makes my camera very happy. And of course, through the
magic of video editing, I could make this screen look black and white just like the Macintosh.
So, what I’m going to do now is is insert a MacOS 6.0.08 disk into both machines here
and see how long it takes each to boot. It turns out the Mac actually wins by a couple of seconds,
but it also has more RAM than my Amiga, so who knows. But there isn’t much difference.
Anyway, once booted, I can literally just stick in any Macintosh software, such as
MacDraw. Not to be confused with Mac Paint. This was a vector style drawing program. And
I don’t know how to use it, so I’ll just show some of the example drawings.
OK, let’s try some of the classic software like MacPaint. We used to have this on our Macs back
in high school. Seems to work just fine. And of course, we have to try Claris MacWrite.
I used to use this in the writing lab at our high school probably once a week.
And, well, it seems to work just fine.
So, how about something more interesting, like Tetris. And here we go.
Even the sound appears to be working correctly. Let’s try playing a game.
I mean, this works totally perfectly. It’s kind of a surreal feeling playing Macintosh Tetris
on my Amiga 500. Now to be fair, you might pose the question, “why would you bother to do this
being you could play the Amiga version of Tetris which is in color and is generally better?” Well,
you probably wouldn’t. This is more of a party trick, I think. I mean, nobody’s going to want
to run Mac Games on their Amiga. I’m sure the idea behind this was to run the various
business software like Excel, Pagemaker, and stuff like that. But I don’t have any of those
to show you. So I figure I’ll just show you more games just as examples of compatibility.
So, I wanted to talk about speed here for a moment. I ran a number of programs side
by side with the Mac Plus, and as you can see there is no discernible difference. I realize
this isn’t the same as a benchmarking program, but I didn’t really know for sure what to run.
But even if there is some difference, clearly it is minor and doesn’t affect the experience at all.
Let’s talk about disk formats for a moment. So I’ve been booting MacOS from my internal Amiga
drive. And yet, I said earlier that the Amiga drive couldn’t read Macintosh formats. However,
Amax has its own format that contains the Apple filesystem, but uses timing that is compatible
with the Amiga’s drive. And so what you can do is
copy files or entire disks from the Apple external drive over to the Amiga’s drive.
So, you could actually copy all of your Macintosh software over to A-Max
formatted floppy disks. You could also copy the ROM chips over to disk as well,
creating a completely software-only solution. In fact, that’s what I have running right here,
this is just a stock Amiga 500, regular Amiga floppy drive. There’s no A-Max cartridge
connected, no ROMs, no Apple floppy drive, unless of course you count the Apple monitor, but
clearly you could use the Amiga monitor if you wanted to. Point is, this is the setup that I had
back in the early 90s, and I had a pirated copy of A-Max along with several A-Max formatted
disks that contained various Macintosh software that I could play around with.
Oh.. And there is another option for copying files from a real Mac to your Amiga. If you
use the utilities disk on a real Mac, you have the option to create a special kind of transfer disk.
Now I’ll explain how I think this works. I think due to the way Mac and Amiga drives read data at
different speeds depending on what track they are on, I think there is a common area of a
disk that is readable by both systems. And so what they’ve done is divided the disk up into
a Mac format here, Amiga format over here, and some sort of weird hybrid format in the middle,
that is only readable by this software. And that section is 272K. So you can only copy
stuff a little bit at a time. The utility allows you to create 3 such disks to copy a full disk
image from one machine to another. Kind of a pain, but it does eliminate the need for a Macintosh drive.
Of course, A-Max also supports the use of hard drives so that you can create like a custom
Apple partition, and you could do considerably more complex tasks. I don’t have any of that
equipment to show you at the moment, but I’ve actually seen that kind of thing in operation,
especially like on Amiga 2000s and later model Amigas. Speaking of the 2000, there was also an
internal card you could get, that had the A-Max ROMs on it, and the floppy drive port, and
AppleTalk network connection, so you could actually network with other Macintosh
computers. So, that would have been pretty cool. I don’t have one of those to show,
but I also want to talk about something else. Now, I’m going to show you a little
bit of footage here. Now this is believe it or not, this is my actual high school
writing lab. Where we had a lot of Mac Pluses. And this was actually taken in 1995, so this was two
years after I graduated. But, it looks exactly the same. Other than the students occupying the seats,
the writing lab looked exactly like that, when I was in high school. So you know,
I had to go in and use one of these every day. And a lot of the other students in the class,
they’d never used a computer before. And so they really thought that these computers were cool.
And they would rave on and on about them, and of course, you know this irritated me a bit,
because I had one of these at home. And it could do amazing things. And I would explain to my
fellow classmates that, hey, you know, these are ok, but what you really want is an Amiga. Because,
you know, it’s not only a 3rd of the price, but it can do all of this great graphics and sound and
all of this kind of stuff. They weren’t really grasping it, and I didn’t really have any way
to show them most of the time unless I invited them over to my house.
And even then, they would always be like “Well, there must be some reason the Macintosh is so
much more expensive. There’s bound to be things that it can do that the Amiga can’t.” And so,
I liked the fact that A-Max existed, because I could honestly say to them.
“You know what, that’s not true. The Amiga quite literally can do anything a Macintosh can do,
and you know, so much more.” Now, whether I actually ever convinced anybody,
I don’t know. But it was at least a nice argument to have in your back pocket.
But that about wraps it up for this episode. I would like to remind everybody that
I do participate in the Geekbits podcast. We release a new episode like
once or twice a month. It’s worth checking out if you’re into geeky stuff. We talk about
Star Trek and science fiction and physics stuff and all kinds of stuff like that.
But anyway, that’s it for this episode. As always, thanks for watching!