Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cwjcc!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!mcnc!xanth!manes
From: manes@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Mark Manes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Mac emulator!?
Keywords: mac attack
Message-ID: <6673@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 18 Nov 88 14:27:19 GMT
References: <5817@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Reply-To: manes@cs.odu.edu (Mark Manes)
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 60

In article <5817@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> nschultz@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Ned W. Schultz) writes:
>
> 
>I was a little surprised to hear from my father that he had seen a
>Mac emulator for the Amiga at the World of Commodore show held in
>Philadelphia.  Finally tracked down the company from the show program

I was amazed and greatly surprised, when I saw it and talked to the
folks at ReadySoft at the World of Commodore

>and discovered that it is ReadySoft, the folks who have a 64 Emulator
>(and the folks marketing Dragon's Lair).  I called them yesterday to
>confirm this and the girl on the phone said, yes, we have an emulator
>and it will ship the first week of February (1989, I am guessing).  She
>is sending a flyer or brochure.
> 
>So, anybody back East see this beast in action?  I am curious that it
>could appear so suddenly with no mention of it here.  Has anyone seen
>or heard performance specs?  They told my dad that you would have to
>supply your own Apple ROMs.

They demo'd throughout the show.  They ran Mac Paint, Mac Draw and
they said it would run Excel.  It uses the interlace mode of the Amiga,
or the 640x200 mode (they scroll the screen).  The mac floppy disks are
not readable by the emulator, however they created a work around, where
you can move 227k from a mac disk to a amiga disk.  They wrote a special
program that with a mac and a amiga you can transfer a disk in 3 passes.
 
The ROM chips are contained on a board that is connected to the end of 
your drive daisy chain.  If you have one of the older externals it must
be one that provides power (some did not).
 
The emulator seemed fast, and pretty darn good.  It will use 64k ROMS
or 128k ROMS.  
 
How did they get around the memory problem?  Well, they said that the 
first thing they do in a Amiga 1000 is kick-out kickstart.  This provides
an additional 256k, and this memory is contiquous.  You would therefore
have a 512k Mac.  On the Amiga 500/2000 they are looking for the new
custom chips to solve the problem.  It appears on a Amiga 500/2000 you
can only have a 256k Mac.  There theory is a 256k mac is better than no
mac at all :-) 
 
> 
>I'll post more when and if the flyer arrives.  Meanwhile if anyone else
>was at that show and learned something, I'd like to hear about it.
>Also...did anyone there see Gold Disk's demo of Professional Draw?
> 

I will post more as I learn more...

>
>Ned Schultz          {csun, sdsu}!polyslo!nschultz

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark D. Manes                                          "In Amiga We Trust"  
Programmer of Fortune, have compiler will travel

"Only Amiga makes it Possible, but with 1 meg its hell!"
===========================================================================