Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!dino!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!pawl!kudla From: kudla@pawl.rpi.edu (Robert J. Kudla) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: How Compatible with Mac is the Amax Macintosh Simulator? Message-ID: Date: 19 Dec 89 02:34:15 GMT References: <10612@cadnetix.COM> Distribution: na Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY Lines: 46 I've been told that the Amax simulator is 100% compatible with all software which concientiously follows the Mac software developer guidelines, and that most reputable Mac software does, in fact, follow these guidelines. This seems a far cry from "a long list of incompatibilities with Macintosh software". I haven't found any software thus far that runs on a Mac Plus but doesn't run on the Amiga running Amax. I haven't tried any games, but presumably one doesn't emulate the Mac to play games. Cricketdraw, Macdraw, and Versaterm seem to work well. Oh yes, and someone gave me MacPlayMate, which is amusing at best but works fine. All the utilities for transferring files like Stuffit, Packit, Binhex 5.0, and Ultraterm seem to work without a hitch. I haven't experimented with MIDI or printing. The audio is only partially emulated- there's one set beep that you can't replace, and it's not all that impressive. You also can't directly read Mac format disks (Amax uses a slightly different format; if you hook a Mac drive (or better yet, an Amigatosh drive which is Amiga and Mac drive all in one) up to the back of the cartridge you can read Mac disks to your heart's content. Annything that directly accesses any hardware will die horribly, however.... and I do take issue with the keyboard layout (no F-keys, ESC key disabled... Ctrl key disabled... only slightly better than the Mac Plus keyboard). Luckily, I have yet to clutter my disks with any hardware-specific programs, and the DA's etc that I've FTPed seem to be content with calling DOS functions. Oh, one minor other beef: I have a 500, and Fast RAM is installed at $c00000. Can you guess what happens when I try to configure a ramdisk that's too smart for its own good? You got it.... it assumes I have 12 megs of memory. Bad. You can turn that off by selecting "No $c00000" or "No fast mem" on the Amax menu, but that limits you to 512k. A friend of mine has found a ramdisk that doesn't have that flaw (I forget its name) and I'm running just fine now. In short, although I have only 896k to emulate the thing in and one drive, it seems to work well. I'd recommend it, though you better have a spare mac drive if you want to make sneakernetting things to work or other Macs and back easy. -- Robert Jude Kudla "Famous? I'm not famous. People come up to me after a show and say 'Hey, Steve!'" -Jon Anderson