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From: farrar@Neon.Stanford.EDU (David S. Farrar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Macintosh emulation
Keywords: Amiga, Macintosh, Emulation
Message-ID: <1991Jan29.225142.1732@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 29 Jan 91 22:51:42 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Lines: 20

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
requires you to buy 64K or 128K Mac ROMs; it plugs into the Amiga's floppy
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
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
Amiga multitasks (even with IBM emulation), Mac emulation takes over the
machine.  

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
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
implications of this speculation to the lawyers.

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