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From: johnf@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu (John Flanagan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Mac Clones question at the end & (was Re: Dead mice)
Keywords: Mac clone amiga roms
Message-ID: <1989Oct27.205346.8871@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 27 Oct 89 20:53:46 GMT
References: <879@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <21104@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <2529@ucsfcca.ucsf.edu> <20404@mimsy.umd.edu> <584@milton.acs.washington.edu> <16002@netnews.upenn.edu>
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In article <16002@netnews.upenn.edu> meuchen@grad1.cis.upenn.edu (Paul Eric Menchen) writes:
>In article _ seymour@milton.acs.washington.edu (Richard Seymour) writes:
>>there is a MAc Clone: the Amiga (no, i don't have one)
>>They do it by using old Mac 128kROMs to provide the system calls.
...
>If you don't have an Amiga, how do you know it's a Mac clone?
>If you did have one, you would know it isn't.
...

  Just a note to clarify things.  The Mac emulator on the Amiga is just 
a little board which holds the Mac ROMs, and a program which loads the
Mac ROMs into memory and installs some fixes to work around some of
the hardware incompatibilities between the Mac and the Amiga.  It
turns the Amiga into a Mac Plus, more or less.  You have to buy the
ROMs and Mac System disks yourself (I bought the roms for $175 and the
System disks for about $24, I think).  Surprisingly, there does not
seem to be much of a shortage of 128k ROMs yet.  The emulator board
and software together cost about $125, so it costs ~$324 to add Mac Plus 
compatibility to an Amiga.  You can optionally add a Mac-compatible
external drive, so that you can read and write Mac-format disks.
This adds about $150-$200 to the cost of the system.  The Amiga's
native disk drives look to the emulator like Mac 800k disks, but the disk 
format is different from the Mac format.
  I have one of these emulators, and it is pretty nice.  There are
some ways in which it is better than the Mac Plus (faster, bigger 
standard screen [640x400]), and some ways in which it is inferior.  
The most notable missing feature is sound.  The emulator does not try to
emulate the Mac's sound chips with Amiga's sound chips, and hence can
only do the system beep.  Another problem is that there is no
provision yet for upgrading to the 256k ROMs, so you are emulating
an obsolete machine.
  This emulator is only of interest to people who already own Amigas
-- it is a cheap way to get leverage out of pre-existing hardware.  For
example, I can use the investment I've already  made in 20 MHz 68020 and 
32-bit-wide memory boards for my Amiga to also get a Mac with decent 
performance.  I quite like it, and plan to use it for developing some code 
which I wish to run on both the Amiga and the Mac.  I also use it for
word processing.  
  However, a buying the cheapest Amiga with the emulator would cost about 
as much as, or even more than, buying a Mac Plus.  So, if one were only 
interested in Macintosh functionality, it would make more sense just to get 
a Mac Plus.



John Flanagan				Space Sciences Laboratory
johnf@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu		University of California
(...!ucbvax!sag4.ssl!johnf)		Berkeley, CA 94720
Manners Maketh Man.			(415) 642-7635