Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!quiche!tinyguy
From: tinyguy@cs.mcgill.ca (Yeo-Hoon BAE)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Macintosh emulation
Keywords: Amiga, Macintosh, Emulation
Message-ID: <1991Jan30.104543.4499@cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 30 Jan 91 10:45:43 GMT
References: <1991Jan29.225142.1732@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.mcgill.ca (Netnews Administrator)
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 56

In article <1991Jan29.225142.1732@Neon.Stanford.EDU> farrar@Neon.Stanford.EDU (David S. Farrar) writes:
>Just a bit of information for those interested in Macintosh emulation for
>the NeXT:  The Amiga has a Macintosh emulator called AMAX which is part
>hardware, part software.  Don't hold me to the following, but I think it

Correct, the hardware is a simple device which allows a Mac compatible
drives to be connected, and also provides a ROM socket.

>requires you to buy 64K or 128K Mac ROMs; it plugs into the Amiga's floppy

Also correct, but restricted to 64/128k ROMs does mean it's only capable
of emulating the B&W version of Macs.

>drive port, and gives you a Mac-floppy drive connector.  Supposedly you
>can use the Amiga's floppies (which use IBM-similar recording formats)
>to store Mac data, but you need a Mac drive to read/write disks originally

Yes, it provides its own 800k format that are not recognisable by either
Mac or Amiga under normal operating conditions. They do provide a
transfer software through...

>from a Mac (due to the Mac's multiple recording speeds).  There is a new
>version AMAX-II, which I think supports hardrives as well.  Although the

Not quite out yet. It's suppose to be an internal card for A2000 and above
series, and it claims to work with normal Mac disks on a non-variable 
speed Amiga drives.

>Amiga multitasks (even with IBM emulation), Mac emulation takes over the
>machine.  

Yes, and hopefully, ReadySoft will cure this 'problem' soon.

>
>To make this relevant to NeXT, as an observation note that the ROM chip in
>AMAX is not connected to the Amiga bus at all -- just to a drive port.  I
>suspect that it just copies the ROMs to RAM.  I would speculate that if this

Yes, it spends 30-40 seconds copying the ROM image from the hardware
into some area in memory. 

>is so, then Mac emulation could be done (in theory) entirely in software
>on any 68000 based machine -- including the NeXT.  I'll leave the legal

I think so too. Atari ST also has a version of Mac Emulator that works well,
I'm sure a Mac Emulator will be availble for NeXTs. 

>Scott Farrar...........................................farrar@neon.stanford.edu


+-----------------------------------------------------------+-------------+
| Yeo-Hoon Bae      tinyguy@homer.cs.mcgill.ca              | Amiga   /// |
| Dept. Computer Science, McGill University, Canada         |  2000  ///  |
|-----------------------------------------------------------|    \\\///   |
| Amiga2000 + 5MB + 104MB HD + KX-P1124 + Mit. DiamondScan  |     \XX/    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+-------------+