Indeed I had Amax running on my 2000 and the machine sported VGA output via the Commodore Flickr fixer. It really did look amazing on my crisp VGA monitor and I used it as needed while attending university for writing and stuff.
I love watching both your TH-cam channels, it would be fantastic to see a collaboration video. And the Amax would be a great topic as it’s the intersection of Amiga and Mac
I had an Amiga 3000 at one point with VGA monitor and flicker fixer. It was indeed amazing to see the crisp video and be able to run any Mac software or PC software, even if via a clunky hardware add-on. (I didn’t have the PC emulator though.) What I never understood was how much other kids were prejudiced against Amiga, even though they clearly never used one. I changed their minds when I invited them to my house to see mine work. (Though I don’t believe anyone actually ever bought an Amiga because of me.)
Around the same time, just after the bankruptcy of Commodore US, there were actually Power PC boards for the Amiga, too, though the lack of Commodore meant there wound up being a couple competing standards.
The engineers at Commodore had all sorts of great ideas, but the management was terrible and killed off most things. The A3000 was supposed to ship with 16-bit sound and a DSP but that was scrapped. The AGA machines were only stop-gap but the AAA and other replacements never got finished.
Even with good management, I think the Amiga was doomed to never really make it in business where the real market was. The system relied too heavily on hardware acceleration and programs hitting the hardware directly. And yeah, having to move to a new CPU architecture would be extremely disruptive. The personal computer was moving towards more robust operating systems that could hide the hardware behind layers of drivers and APIs which makes switching to new architectures that much easier. Look at MacOS and Linux. In both a new architecture is just a recompile away for most applications. Plus Amiga had typecast itself as a gaming platform. I like to imagine if they went anywhere in the 90's it would have been more gaming console to compete with Nintendo, Playstation, et al. BUt competition there was pretty stiff. So I dunno. Either way, it is always sad when the best technology doesn't prevail. Happens all too often. Like MSDOS was garbage that lasted WAY too long and basically wasted the capabilities of the 386 and 486. I also wish I had gotten into Amiga back then. But I didn't even SEE my first Amiga until like 1996 when they were already just about dead.
Amigas have some sort of revival over the last couple of years - emulation, FPGA reimplementation, faster CPUs, more memory, HDMI video output, etc. The Amiga sitting on my desk right here is more than 100 times faster than an original Amiga 500. :-) (no emulation) An "A500 Mini" has recently been released, like the "Nintendo Classic Mini" and "Super Nintendo Mini" etc. before. (emulation) And so on, lots of new stuff since the 80s. ;-)
@@fensoxx If you mean cheaper - then yes - you could pay less for playing most of the games the Amiga was playing which were optimized for STs in the first place because STs outsold the Amiga in Europe. Brand sniping aside, the ST was neat for having the first LAN party / FPS shooter - 'kill a happy face' played over MIDI ports in a serial network. Quite the mind-blower in the late 80s.
Not only is it a question that remains unanswered, I've not even seen anyone make a serious attempt at answering it. And yet Apple remains a competitive player in the marketplace.
The Atari ST could also emulate a Macintosh, and do a better job of it with its hi-res, non-interlaced monochrome graphics mode (compatible with a VGA monitor). Its GEM interface was also more Mac-like -- enough to get Digital Research sued by Apple, which resulted in the DOS version of GEM being crippled, although the Atari version (TOS) remained unaffected.
That not necessarily true depends on what amiga and chipset you had ocs vs ecs and or monitor you were using As the a2024 could do 1024x800 with ocs ntsc and 1024x1024 pal
@@vwestlife amiga 500 had ecs And if yours was ocs you could upgrade to ecs Or just get a a500+ or a2000 with flicker fixer Either way much cheaper than a crappy mac And way better than a atari I could throw in a600 here
@VWestlife - Ah, exactly! This explains why the Amiga solution was relatively unknown (to me at least) whereas I heard so much about Macintosh emulation option on the Atari ST. Interlace video is literally unusable, I know, as I tried using a Macintosh IIcx in 640x400 interlaced mode on an AppleColor RGB monitor (screen used by the Apple IIGS computer) and the results were not pretty to put it mildly. I couldn't use it more than a few minutes before giving up. Back in the 80's and early 90's, a non-interlaced display for the Amiga was extraordinarily expensive and few if any users owned one. The ST often already had the VGA-frequency compatible monochrome display, perfect for Macintosh video! Still, I am curious to try Mac emulation on my A500 and 1040ST and compare the two, just to experience what people had back in those days.
I was lucky to receive my Amiga 500 for Christmas 1987. Was the luckiest boy in town I, at least thats how I felt. Tried some DOS Emulators and found MS Flightsim was running quite OK-ish in Software Mode. We had some Macs in School for the older classes but one days they presented them on a "open Door" day. Learned some LOGO on it, I think that was my first "coding" experience. Nice Video!
Ha, I remember doing this on my accelerated Amiga. I spent days trying to work out how to do it, eventually got it working and then had no idea what to do next. I had no Mac software and so I just noodled around around the basic tools and prefs with this overwhelming high and mighty attitude that my Amiga was emulating a Mac, faster than the real thing. I think I really was an insufferable Amiga fan back then. Thankfully now I appreciate and love all the computers and just love tech in general.
@@MaxOakland well I know its shocking but back then everything was pirated and your only limit to how much you could get was how much blank media you had. And while I can't remember now I presume it all came as one warez package of software and roms. I used to tick off what I wanted from sheets of print outs. Today as an adult I do buy everything. lol
@@JaredConnell oh, you only needed all that hardware stuff in the early release. Later on you could do it all in software. I never owned any special hardware addons
I really liked the aside where you explained how you fixed the video problem you ran into. That's something that a lot of content creators would've just fixed and then never mentioned, but it's always fun to see good problem-solving.
I am happy I went the Amiga route back then even though the Mac "won" the computer battle. I had tons of fun with my Amiga's 1000, 500 and 2500. Great video!
I hauled my A3000 and 1950 monitor in to high school for a “show and tell” type event. Blowing the minds of the 6 kids of 20 in the class paying attention with all the awesome of the Amiga. Fired up games, sound digitizers/editor, 3D software, Dpaint, and more.
I did something similar, but fortunately, I only had to carry in disks with software and showed off what could be done, in the university computer lab. I did not have an Apple IIGS at that time, and so to be able to listen to some synthesized GS music, I hand-carried my boombox into the computer lab, and recorded the audio from their GS onto audio cassette so that I could listen to it at home. That took at least an hour or two, as that could only be done "in real time", no way to hurry it up.
Great to hear, my friend took his Amiga CD32 to school, and did DJ stuff on it, and was also great, but Amiga was falling way behind in 1992, when the Amiga 3000 came out, The Amiga 4000 was better but COST also a ton, and was also outdated when it came out in 1992, just like the Amiga 1200 i also had, wish they went for the AAA graphics chipset and 16Bit audio and such, but Commodore was run by unbelievable dumb CEO's in the end of 80s and in the 90s, that they put a PC on the market that was already outdated, and MS-DOS PC's could do about the same as Amiga PC's could do, if they only came out like i said with the AAA graphics chipset and 16Bit audio, the Amiga would be again the best, just like it was in the 80s. Yeah i really loved my Amiga computers, was terrible when it came out in 1994 that Commodore was bankrupt, i was years on a Amiga Club with my best friend, and we had a great time, i really miss does times.
@@AmigaWolf Computers should have been fun entertainment machines, but then we have all those IBM empty-head suits dull-heads insisting that it should be a dull boring business machine. What? You can't do accounting and spreadsheets on an Amiga or now on Linux?
During the switchover from 68k to PowerPC, I quite often used my Amiga 4000/030 with Shapeshifter to boot directly into MacOS, because the internet was just coming up here in Germany and getting the Amiga online was a lot more hassle than just using AOL on the Mac side :D I did end up using the Amiga with a lot of ported Unix tools later on, but for some time, I literally booted to MacOS every day and with a 68030 and a graphics card, it was sheer delight. By then, MacOS 7.5 and later got along a bit better with different screen resolutions and everything looked a lot more polished than on the Amiga, where a lot of applications still insisted on using Topaz 8 for their font, despite nicer fonts being available on higher resolutions. This also made for a lot more consistency which Apple still enforced a bit more back then.. if there was a dialog asking for "Yes, No or Cancel", you knew which order the buttons would be in and which one was the default.. Apple specified their UIs to that level of detail(and at some point, applications like Kai's Power Tools and Bryce completely went off that wagon :D ) and I think, that made for the appeal to new computer users, after explaining the basic concepts, everything looked the same. I've only very recently had the "joy" of having to use a modern MacOS for longer than a couple of hours and I almost went mad, because they seem to have tacked on a lot of functionality from other operating systems onto some of the same "old" design principles.. Only that now you have a second mouse button and most of the settings that seem to make sense for people coming from other operating systems are hidden in the accessibility settings as if we were dumb or something :D With the advent of hard drives, Apple also stayed a lot longer with the (then quicker) SCSI drives than everybody else who went for IDE drives instead and a lot of software for the media creation and publishing industry was Mac-first, like QuarkXpress and pretty much everything from Adobe, making it a nice choice for creative workers, that don't want the computer to be in the way too much. So in a way, it was worth the money for the computer to not have to deal with the computer too much. Back when you could almost render your PC unbootable by copying and pasting some magic garbage into your config.sys or autoexec.bat, you could easily boot a mac into failsafe without any extensions and you wouldn't miss too much. It was not as easy to delete relevant parts of your operating system, you had to put some more effort into that :D The PowerPC laptops that followed shortly after my Mac period actually made me think whether I should be buying a PC laptop to run Linux or get a Powerbook Duo 2300... But by then, I was already so much acquainted with the Unix ecosystem(which became the Amiga's official development environment(aka the Geek Gadgets)) and on my way to a career in Unix administration, so I went for Linux and I've only just recently installed MacOS 9 into a PPC emulator, just to play Escape Velocity again :D
@@nichderjeniche Well, something has. If you convert to today's money, that computer would have cost over $6000 (US). I know they charge $1000 for a monitor stand, but I don't think they charge $6000 for a computer.
One thing the Amiga couldn't do that a Mac could do was survive as a computer platform to this very day. I was working at a computer store in the early 80s in the 2nd largest city in washington state, and was selling the heck out of the Apple IIs. Then one day the Mac showed up. My sales skyrocketed. Across the street was a department store that had an electronics department and they sold the Amiga. I'd go over on my lunch hour and check out the competition. I never saw any customers. Then I'd go back to the store I worked at and was busy all day selling macs, mac software, mac printers, mac scanners. And after work some times my fellow salesmen and I would lock the doors and network all the macs and play maze wars. It was a glorious time.
That's true however as far as I know Macintosh computers were nearly dead and the Apple company likewise, before they came out with the iMac and Mac OS X. Please me correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK late PowerPC era Macinotsh computers were fairly unpopular and the company was not very profitable.
@@TassieLorenzo Yes and no, I was still selling macs in the "dark years" of the performa and centris. Apple had also licensed out the mac and clones were coming out that were faster than the apple macs so they put a end to that. They were both good and bad at the same time. Still, they were selling like crazy for me. But nothing like when the imac came out in 1999. Then we had lines in the showroom again.
I ran that myself. If you ever get a chance, get A Jim Drew EMPLANT card it had the Apple ports on there as well as could use Apple II ROMs and you have a color mac You could to 16 colors I believe on the stock. If you had a Picasso and retargetable graphics you could do a full 256 color and if you did do benchmarks and you had enough RAM, you would see that the Amiga would toast a real Mac in just about anything including performance
I wrote my novel on the last verison of Clarisworks, Appleworks. It must have combined MacDraw and MacPaint into the suite of tools, but if that's the case or not, I did use the Drawing tool to make visuals associated with my story.
I really felt the anecdote at the end, trying to convince schools to save tens of thousands of dollars by shopping smarter. We had an after-school computer club, where we dabbled in coding, board building, and primitive Internet content creation. We couldn't use the computers in our lab because they were 10 year old Macintosh computers. Albeit, they got the job done, the purpose of our computer lab was to teach basic word processing and publishing, but our club required us to bring in our own computers from home to do some things. We noticed the old Macintosh computers were starting to fail, though. We knew they would have to be replaced soon. A pitch as drawn up for a handful of cheap-ish modern computers for the school, an effective guide to begin a long-overdue upgrade to their decade-old computer lab. Unfortunately, the prevailing mindset at the time wasn't "what computer is best," but instead was "what computer is easiest for us teach?" Which, credit to Apple, they definitely had us cornered 10 years ago. Sadly, we came to find there is a rampant culture among teachers, this mindset of "my job is to TEACH, not to LEARN." They've used these Apple computers in the classroom ever since their Reagan-era unboxing, and haven't seen any need to upgrade for new confangled real-time video or Internet hootnanny. Watching video on the computer? Surfing the Internet Superhighway? Feh, those are just fads, they'll be gone like pogs and fanny packs. So, the old Apples stayed. Wasn't a huge defeat, though. We merged our computer club into a more organized (and state-sponsored) robotics club, which provided us with all the tech we needed. And with the soon-to-be roll-out of Windows 95, we got a massive donation of Windows 3.1 PCs from a local business, which one-by-one began replacing the aging Macs as they started to die of natural causes. It was actually kind of an exciting time, where our computer lab was kind of this jumbled hybrid mess of several computers running different generations of operating systems and different software libraries. Our lab had the row of still-functioning retro Macs, a new row of Windows 3.1 PCs, a handful of the more capable donated PCs that were upgraded to Windows 95, and the couple PCs specifically designated for the robotics club (though they could still run Sim City 2000 at cheetah speed, an imperative performance standard). It was a wild, chaotic, disorganized mishmash of everything. And it was beautiful. Nowadays, school computer labs just don't really exist anymore. There isn't really anything to teach. Computer interface design has become intuitive enough that people can figure it out on their own with relative ease, and the software handles most of the tricky stuff. But I still believe kids should somehow be given exposure to different operating systems wherever possible, and instead of blindly pledging allegiance to arbitrary "brand loyalty," just appreciate the unique capabilities each platform has to offer. Because you never really know when a company nowadays will do what Amiga did in the 90s, and release something truly extraordinary beyond everything else, without anyone really noticing. Kind of like what Apple is doing today, bringing the story full circle back to their local dominance of my school 40 years ago, releasing an exciting generation of chips that merges the CPU and GPU together with encouraging results. If today's Apple is that "something truly extraordinary beyond everything else," I'll be glad my school familiarized me with the OS way back when.
I think it isn't that teaching culture does not want to learn, it is that they are generally already expected to put in significant amounts of unpaid labor and schools tend to be really bad about retraining people, so learning new systems means even more unpaid time to do the same thing they were already doing. Ones who did computer stuff as part of their hobby life might already be learning things, but for those where computers are a tool for their job and that is it, it can be a real pain for little gain.
@@QuintusAntonious Well they do make better stuff than the likes of windows and android. But their stubbornness is what turned me off. Like the non removable power cable on the studio display. Or the notch on the new MacBook Pro
@@antoniuskelvinkurniawan Maybe the software (though that's still arguable), which seems like what you meant given your comparisons, but certainly not the hardware. They have, for a looooooong time, charged way more than they should for the hardware (and probably still do). We can easily say this with certainty, because until recently, they were using x86 stuff. Comparing similarly spec'd PCs to their Mac counterparts in price - the difference was laughable.
I grew up on the 64 at home and the IIe at school. Never really had much exposure to Mac but my school did get a Novell network with XT (ps/2) clients and a ps/2 386 server. I SO wanted an Amiga back in the day Oh and Protip: if you are running a school network based on Novell netware, make sure you put a password on the SUPERVISOR login lol
also, perhaps dont put the “server” in the same room accessible to everyone at any time with unmonitored access to it… or else you could put a floppy in and create an admin account… on boy it seems school netware servers were all the same everywhere on this planet :) :) “hacking” :)))) but i liked the text based snake screensaver :)
back in 2019, on the Atari 8 Bit convention called "Fujiama", my friend Beetle (named after the Volkswagen car) ran Shape Shifter on his Amiga, and inside it on Mac OS Classic he ran the Atari 8 Bit Emulator called Rainbow. Machine on machine on machine is quite cool I think.
That was a truly fascinating video, and I’m sure as a kid it was probably about one of the coolest computing solutions. Emulating a super expensive computer on a budget computer is spectacular!
While the Amiga was clocked a little slower than the Mac Plus, the way the logic was implemented meant the Mac seems to run at the same speed, despite the faster cpu clock. SpectreGCR on the ST did a similar thing but used the full 640 by 400 on the ST high resolution screen, as well as doing some funky stuff with the disk drive via a cable from the SpectreGCR box to the ST floppy port. The ST had the same cpu clocked at the same speed as the Mac plus but appeared to run faster, however most of the logic on the Mac SE was condensed into a single chip, making the SE faster than the Mac Plus, despite being clocked at the same speed! A few years ago on my old Atari Music Network site, I ran a comparison between my Mega ST and my Mac SE and found that natively, the Atari was snappier but as I didn’t have a working SpectreGCR system, couldn’t compare them running Mac software.
Never knew about these old emulators. I used Shapeshifter later on in the late 90s early 00s, mainly to use Office and Java for University. But I imagine few people cared about emulating a Mac until the Amiga started to lose software support.
I owned an Amiga as well, back in the day. I started with an A2000. But, later I also got an A500 and even an A1000 just for fun. Sad that commodore mismanaged things so horribly. The A3000 wasn't the major step forward that was needed at that time, and the graphics chips that once allowed the Amiga to shine became a prison of sorts (while other computers could take advantage of higher resolution modes via graphics cards). The Amiga market tried to catch up with devices such as DCTV and HAM-E (I had both of those), the Video Toaster, etc... and eventually the AGA chipset. But it was all too little too late. I loved all the crazy inventive products that offered inexpensive solutions. Like the Mac emulators. I owned a VBS (Video Backup System) that allowed a person to backup their Amiga data to a regular VHS tape. Outstanding product that only cost about $30 and gave you all the storage space you could ever want or need for the cost of VHS tapes. I owned a device (can't remember the name) that allowed you to connect a fiber optic cable to the print head on any printer and turn it into a page scanner! It was only about $45 when page scanners used to cost about $1200. I also owned an Atari ST, but preferred the Amiga. The ST also had a Mac emulator. I had lots of fun with my Amiga. Great video!
I've never seen the AMax in action. I had an Emplant card for my 4000, and it worked well. It emulated a Quadra 700. I used to run Quark, Illustrator, and Photoshop on it because the magazine I worked for had Mac SEs that were terrible for doing any sort of design work.
Se/30 was even better at the time. My school used it for newspaper use. It had a high resolution portrait monochrome monitor on its side. It could go up to 128 MB of RAM.
I graduated the same year you did and we had the same macs in school. I also had a commodore 128 at home...we never got the Amiga and when I was out on my own at 19 i ended up buying a 486 dx2 from Packard Bell. I love watching your videos and seeing all the old tech, and learning about stuff I never had the chance to see back then!
Wow, this was new to me, thanks! I remember having a similar argument among friends, I was the Amiga 500 guy, and a friend of mine had his fathers work laptop that ran Mortal Kombat 1 and 3, Duke3D and such. I really liked the Amiga but they said that it's just a game machine. I knew in my heart that it was capable of more than "just" games (even though we only used it for games) I didn't really use any office software and didn't tinker with Workbench much to defend my position. Well, by the time these PC games were out, the Amiga was surpassed, but for a long time a simple Amiga 500 could do much more than PCs at the time. I still remember this argument to this day... Amiga was not only a gaming machine, dammit!
I feel the same way. So did Electronic Arts (Deluxe Paint, used to make most of those assets for games, on all platforms), NewTek (Lightwave 3D, used in 'Sea Quest' and 'Babaylon 5' TV shows ) & Caligari (Truespace 3D). Then there was the assortment of powerful music applications. But Macintosh won out the graphic arts and video production market, eventually the musicians too. Maybe if NewTek had bought Amiga when Commodore was having trouble, they could have saved it. Though business software was almost non existent. And there wasn't much engineering stuff to attract the CAD stuff from the IBM market. No real Autocad or other CAD-CAM solutions on the Amiga. despite have good expansion for industrial peripherals like the PC clones. Mac had Hollywood and graphic design, IBM-PC and clones had business and industry. Games, Paint & 3D held the Amiga up. It was too soon for 3D though, cpus were not fast enough, rendering took way too long.
Indeed, the Amiga was a music composition tool mainly for me. And i also fiddled with the Atari ST, each had their strengths and weaknesses. But yes, at a young age when the Amiga and Atari ST still were relevant. Games was almost exclusively what i used them for. Funnily enough, my first "proper" use of a computer was AFTER the Amiga and Atari where i was given a Commodore PET. Then i learned some BASIC (pun intended) programming. I then got a hold of an IBM PC 2:86 and tried some games, they were boring. But the other stuff it could do was really cool and i learned a lot. And when i got a 4:86 i read the entire DOS 5.0 manual in one night and went bonkers making my very own personalized computer with a non-breakable (I.E, no CTRL+C or CTRL+BREAK) login prompt all using a .bet file (batch file). From there i played around with QBasic and the rest is history as they say.
@@peterbelanger4094 *the* niche for the Classic Mac was desktop publishing, supported by very robust font support and really jolly good laser printers.
I sucked at gaming so I started doing music and programming on my Amiga 500. I got it by the end of 1989. Some years ago I replaced a number of capacitors to make it stable again. Just last weekend I placed it in my new studio (moved last autumn). Needing it soon for accessing some of my 90's music. Going to rework in Reaper on Linux.
I know it takes more than one day to put a video together which is why it's weird that ONLY YESTERDAY, the "Amiga Love" channel made a video about Mac OS on Amiga hardware.
I remember running an Mac-emulator called "Shapeshifter" on my Amiga 1200, which could run Mac OS 7. A friend of mine had a Mac, and the way we transferred stuff from his Mac to my Amiga, was to use PC-formatted (720k) disks which both of our computers could read. I did have a turbo-card with 8 mb additional ram, 68030 (or 68040?) CPU + MMU on it. Though, the emulation was still a bit slow. Although, I used a TV (Pal here in Sweden) as my screen, and the flickering in the interlaced mode was quite intense. So, it was more of a fun novelty to launch Shapeshifter, but nothing I used to any serious extent.
Thanks for reminding me of the name "Shapeshifter". I had that running on my A4000 with a Picasso (?) graphics card and a massive 2+16MB RAM. Party trick was to drag down the virtual Mac screen with the mouse to reveal the Amiga Workbench. Ran Mac version of MS Office and some Mac magazine CD cover discs. Must have been around mid 90s I think.
Yep, Shapeshifter was the way to go. I could easily get the ROM and System 7 Disks from Apples at our university. I invested money in buying "Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual", which was one of the first game/edutainment software to use QuicktimeVR - totally amazing back in the days. When I upgraded my A3000 with an 68060 card, it would outrun any M68k-based Mac that ever existed.
Hi, I am a timetraveler. I just came here to let you know thank you for your videos. Your videos are mush watch for all the time travellers who want to visit 1960-1999!
Yay!!! Class of 93!!! I had an Amiga 500 as well, but my experience with the Mac came from doing a group project with the son of a newspaper editor. They had a fully loaded Mac with a hard drive and Adobe PageMaker with a laser printer. I was amazed by the results. I had a star nx2420 color printer and could not get anything close to what that Mac/printer combo could do. However, I used that Amiga all throughout High School and my first year of college.
Impressive. As some others said, the Atari ST had Magic Sac and later, Spectre GCR from the same developer that provided the same functionality and ran 20% faster than a Mac because of the ST's faster clock rate.
Spetctre GCR didn't run faster because of Atari's CPU was faster. It was just because Macs were overpriced garbage. Steve Jobs scammed ignorant people with literal 1980, ZX81 technology where the CPU couldn't access RAM while the screen was drawn. While on the Amiga and ST you only had a performance penalty depending on the screenmode. So in some cases the Emulation was faster, even providing the inner workings of a Mac, just because the Mac was MUCH slower. How slow? Watch Hickock45's video on his Mac experience. :D
For the Amgiga's competitor, the Atari ST, there was a Mac emulator called Aladin which delivered flawless Mac emulation particularly with the Atari's hi-res, paper-white, larger display, including flawless matrix printer support. It was my gateway into the blissful world of Macintosh before I got my first Mac SE.
A childhood friend of mine and his dad were huge Amiga fans. I remember his dad having something on his Amiga that could emulate a Mac. (they had at least four Amigas over the years so I don't remember if it was on the 1000 or 2000 let alone how he emulated the Mac. All I know is it wasn't on the his mom's 500). Unfortunately I can't ask how they did it as Jon and his dad have both passed away.
I had Amax running on my A500+. Had a GVP HD with Amax installed along with the Lattice C compiler. I wrote my dissertation using Amax running Word. This allowed me to use my Amiga as my full home Dev machine and then be able to take my files back and fourth to university.
From 1995-1999 I ran Shapeshifter on my A4000, just for Netscape. Until I got a G4 Powermac, Mac prices at the time were competitive with PCs in the UK. Not in the last 10 years they haven't
I also used AMax to run Mac stuff on the Amiga was running 640x480, used my parallel printer (the Mac utility program PowerPrint was able to print through the Amigas parallel port to a espon compatible printer) Had a second hard drive to boot and run Mac stuff. also an Apple Power CD to do CD stuff It was quite usable till I got a real Mac a couple years later. Very usable.
I remember a co-worker around 1996 was a huge amiga fan. I always thought he was just being eccentric, because to me it was an expensive computer that only people doing video production used. I never experienced the “cheap” amigas or if I did, I didn’t know what they were at the time. It’s interesting to see what was and how the “better” machine doesn’t always come out on top.
5:28 I remember my School having Kid Pix on the Macintosh Computers and yeah it was similar to Mac Paint but had some Cool Things Mac Paint didn't have!
Wow, that was my high school typing class too (not that exact one, but it was full of those same Macs in 1997). -- My grandma was super insistent that I take a typing class in HS because "computers are the future". -- Thanks Grandma. ❤ I remember for the typing test, they put a piece of paper over our hands, and made us type without being able to see the keyboard (not bragging; I think most people can do this now; it just seems funny looking back on it). -- And we used to type a few pages and then copy and hold down paste, and then copy the whole document again and hold down paste again (over and over increasing the copy size by like 10x each time) until the machines ran out of memory and quit responding (those poor Macs. 😅).
Oh the memories. I had an emplant card in my A4000 which was how I got on the Internet in 1994. Mac's were even more expensive in the UK back then so this really was an affordable solution. Enjoyed the video.
Most people did creative and good things with their Amigas. I only used my Amiga to redraw the mouse cursor to look like the male genitalia...... I feel like an ant among gods, and I love it.
Toward the end of my senior year of High School, when so many students hadn't seen anything but the ancient Franklin (Apple II clone) systems we had, I got my teacher to allow me to bring my Amiga 1000 to school to show the students apps like Sculpt3D and where the current state of computing was actually at.
So cool to see this in action! I wonder - did it get updated to support newer ROMs and overall Mac compatibility at any point? How did it handle audio? What was the highest Mac OS version it supported (limited by the ROMs?)? Any relation between this and ShapeShifter? Any relation to the modern Basilisk II emulator? Also, I think the Atari was supposed to have a similar option available for Mac compatibility, based on something I saw on an episode of the Computer Chronicles about the Atari. Any chance you might cover that at some point?
I was very confused until you mentioned that there is (or was) a software only solution, because I still have the AMax disk and a couple of disks with macintosh software and they work without any additional hardware!
Was this “emulation” of a Mac contemporary to the existing Amiga or did it run an “older” version of Mac OS, etc? I’m trying to grasp the timeline. For instance if you had an Amiga new in 1987 would it be able to “emulate,” as shown here, 1:1 essentially, the same time frame 1987 Mac and software? If yes, I truly don’t understand how or why Amiga didn’t become “2 systems in 1” and increase their market share based on the ability of running ANY Mac program of the day.
@@GratefulRob Well, remember, to do it you either needed to (a) buy an AMAX card **and** gut an actual Mac for the ROM chips; or (b) have pirate MacOS floppy discs (in AMAX format). The first is generally unappealing, since you would need to somehow have a Mac *anyway* yet prefer doing it on the Amiga (or find a broken Mac to scavenge the chips from); and the second could never be advertised.
seeing those innumerable hordes of Mac's in that lab struck me how wealthy schools are in the US. my art dept had one Mac, that was the only Mac in the school of 1800 pupils!
"were" might be more correct. Today public schools in the US literary fall apart in many areas from what I heared. However i think it also depends a lot on the area, as all public schools are just funded by taxes of the local school district, which is very small (maybe like a county or city district), so public schools in rich areas have much more money than those in poor areas.
Apple sold Macs to schools at a very steep discount. They smartly were thinking long term, if a kid used an Apple product at school, that would make them more likely to buy and use Macs in the future.
I had a similar Mac emulator for my Atari ST computer. It plugged into the cartridge port and like the AMax you had to plug in Mac ROMs to use it. It was pretty slick and the Atari's floppy drive could read/write the Mac disks ok. Only drawback was that it would not run Mac System 7, just earlier versions.
Where's my new episode of Retro Recipes?! I demand satisfaction or we duel to the death in COMBAT on the Atari 2600! Choose your weapon, Atari OG joystick or Wico Command!
I used to emulate a mac on my Atari ST... it was a box with Mac Roms a d a cable to connect to the floppy driver interface... could read mad disks, it was awesome, and slightly faster than a mac plus, Spectre GCR. The manual was hilarious!
A-Max was a very popular early emulator from Readysoft (the same software house of Wrath of the Demon and Dragon's Lair). It was much publicized on magazines and very well reviewed . Then come other emulators of that fruit branded computer, but A-Max was the first from what i recall.
I had to laugh when you said your high school's computer lab was stuffed with Macs as mine was at the same time in elementary school. I credit this as the reason why buying a Mac comes with a bit of nostalgia. Macs certainly seemed less troublesome than the hand-me-down IBM hardware my stepfather would tinker with at the same time.
We only had Apple lle's in our high school lab. You could program in basic, Prolog, and assembly language. No Amiga's. But we definitely discussed the 16-bit upgrades (Macs/Amiga/Atari) in class. No-one was happy.
You're making me miss my Amiga again... such a great machine! Sadly, the wrong company acquired them. I remember asking a Commodore rep at the World of Commodore Show in Toronto one year why they didn't advertise more, and their reply was that costs money... I was floored. And the ads they did have were really bad. I recall Jay Minor (father of the Amiga) stating that they needed more ads that compared the Amiga to other machines, but Commodore had some real dufus' working in advertising. They had the best machine out there yet they still went bankrupt.
Your writing lab: Apple was super smart about getting their computers into schools. Most people who aren't in technology field (and some who do) make up their mind on computer/phone (and other) brands in Jr High and High School, and rarely change their minds after that.
@@The8BitGuy The Mac's main buisness was in corporate creative departments. They lost the school business early on to Gateway. But they dominated in Desktop Publishing and music production.
I think EVERY school around here had macs - my elementary school in the 80s had a bunch of IIGS that I kept screwing up (I somehow got into the setup menu and just did whatever - after I was done, the computer had a ton of weird characters or was making some weird noises - no idea what I did but someone had to come and fix them, and after the third time I did that they made me watch what the guy did to fix it, and I asked him some questions. He was annoyed at me but nice enough to see that I had an interest in what I broke and why) and we even had a lab full of them for learning how to type on them. That was like 30 years ago - I wonder where they all ended up?
@@The8BitGuy I believe they tried a similar strategy in the UK, pushing the Mac as "the" DTP platform but they were late to the game and a bit on the dear side even with an education "discount. I was at school about the same time as you and as well as the two Macs in typing/DTP (the rest of the "typing" computers were Amstrads I think...shudder) we had an Amiga in the art dept, ST in the music dept and physics somehow wrangled itself an Acorn Archimedes. The Mac, with it's poky b&w monitor and silly mouse was the least pleasant to use and I (and my Amiga/ST owning friends) could never understand why people raved about them or why they so bloody expensive at £1500 compared to an Amiga that was £399 including.
Spectre GCR on Atari ST was a more elegant solution because it didn't need an Apple external floppy drive and its monochrome monitor was better suited to display Macintosh graphics than most Amiga monitors.
This video combined with RMC - The Cave's "The Fastest Apple Mac Is An Amiga" video now really has me fired up about restoring my A500. I have now managed to find emulators/"virtualisers" for the Mac, the ST, and even the Sinclair QL which will all run on an Amiga. Heck, I even have a 1040STf which I know I can get to run MacOS too. Essentially, I will end up having more "Mac"s than STs or Amigas. For a while at least. Great video! I think this would fit well as a companion piece to the Commodore documentary.
Maybe you could try to use a PowerPC upgrade and run newer Mac OS versions on an Amiga. I think there was a G3 upgrade for 68k macs, so if there’s a way to add a PDS slot it might be possible to run Mac OS X on an Amiga! Edit: I just remembered that there are PowerPC upgrades for the Amiga, so it would be another way of running PPC Mac OS
A number of late 68k Macs could be upgraded to a 66 or 100 MHz 601 processor via an upgrade card. If you wanted a G3 upgrade, you’d probably need a motherboard swap.
I 100% agree with you on the Star Trek synopsis. I enjoy the show, but I do wish they experienced and solved a problem in one episode (sometimes two) like years past. I to this day put on TNG and Voyager to get sleepy before bed, the episodes never get old. Thanks for making great content!
Mansfield, is a city located in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Many school districts got Macs to replace the old Apple IIs they had in their labs 'Because its from Apple'
I had it all. Top of the line was a internal card with color support of Mac on my A3000. Since it had a HD disk drive, it did support all Mac formatted disks as well. It was the fastest avilable Mac at the time. it all workt very nicely.
Ha that takes me back, I had an Aladin cartridge on the Atari ST that worked in a similar fashion. You needed some real Apple Roms to make it work, but on a high res mono Atari monitor it was a perfect emulation. Pretty soon realised that Macs were a lot more boring than Ataris and went back to native Atari.
Even to this day, I find the 8-bit Apple II, C64 or Atari 800 vastly more fun, interesting and entertaining than a Macintosh. I've always found the Mac such a utilitarian and appliance-like machine, probably because it's so closed in both hardware and software.
Marketing at Commodore. While it was very popular in Europe Commodore never pushed it hard enough for it to be everywhere in US. Commodore was banking on the idea the popularity of the C64 it would also apply to the Amiga. I loved my Amiga 500 in 1988 and it had great games that I was able to find on the BBS at the time.
The Amiga was split into two, really. You had the "Big Box" PC style Amigas, which were expensive and you had the 500 all in the keyboard style Amigas, which were... well, not cheap, but cheaper. And they sold very well as games machines overseas. But Commodore US was DETERMINED to sell it as a business machine. TLDR: Commodore.
Not hard to understand really considering that marketing was more or less non-existant for the entire life of the Amiga. The little there was in the beginning turned to nothing at all in the end. But realistically it wouldn't have changed all that much since Commodore was a fairly small company, they didn't have the resources to develop new products quickly enough to keep up with the competition. Atari failed for the same reasons, more or less. Apple had Steve Jobs, one of the best businessmen ever. Without him Apple would have gone the same way. They almost did after he left.
Marketing was an issue but having the right software for the target matters. Amiga had a shot with Genlock for video stuff but Commodore never managed to secure ports for software that really mattered in desktop publishing or office work. Macs could run Microsoft Excel or Adobe photoshop (with 2Mb of Ram). Amigas could have had these too but it never happened.
@@TheTurnipKing I know history of Commodore, but this is unfair (I can't find another word) that such an advanced computer failed. Apple had educational market with Apple II as a mik cow. But Commodore had C64 and 17 mln sold unit. Why, WHY we don't have Amiga Studio and Amiga Silicon ? :)
I wonder if the black bar on one of the screens visible when recording at 60fps has anything to do with the NTSC video standard? NTSC analog video standard is 59.97Hz rather than an even 60 with digital standards. Or maybe it was just the camera's 60fps setting not having a long enough exposure time to help blend the phosphor scan lines.
David: I watched this episode on my PS4 which is hooked up to my stereo system… I never realized how great your intro music sounds on proper equipment. Kudos!
Another great video! Thanks! I remember in my youth writing a game for the Commodore 64. It was a combination of Jumpan and LodeRunner. Had 8 levels. You could dig holes like in LodeRunner but Jump across like Jumpman. Each level added something new. I remember adding bricks that were false and you'd fall through (like in LodeRunner). I also remember adding diagonal vines that you climbed on and slid all the way down. I remember copying the character set to RAM so that I could modify the extra characters to look like ladders/vines etc. Was great, but used up desperately needed RAM. LOL. Good memories of many hours and hours of 6510 assembly language programming! On another note: I still have my C64 disks and boxes of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Elite!
Amiga's continue to increase me after all these years. Actually pretty amazed to see it running MacOS - love this, David. For my gaming interests I still look at the Amiga, C64, and DOS as tops.
Yes! I worked at Software Etc in early 1990 and a co-worker of mine was a big Amiga fan. He brought this device into work one day to show me Mac OS running on the Amiga we had in our store. I asked him where he got the Mac ROMs and he said it wasn't easy and kinda pricey. He pushed me over the edge to get an A500 (plus a friend from high school had one).
A modern Mac: No, you can't swap SSDs, you'll need a second Mac then to restore the OS. And don't even think of installing a second one. 1980's Mac: Ah, an Amiga CPU? Bah, I'll work just fine.
> No, you can't swap SSDs, you'll need a second Mac then to restore the OS. lolwat? You can boot of any external media. And Thunderbolt 4 is fast af. You can ALSO boot off another computer's drive. This is actually pretty cool feature IMO. Something you can't do with a PC without physically moving the drive. > And don't even think of installing a second one. Installing a second what? OS? You mean like Asahai Linux? Apple makes no effort to stop you from booting alternative OS. But good luck writing drivers....
This reminds me of the good old days.. I used to do this emulation with the Atari ST .. and it was even faster than the Mac .I also had a PC emulator on my Atari too ..I used my PC emulation to teach me programming .And my Mac emulation to do documents .This at the time when PCs Xt were expensive and Macs prohibitive ..I still have my Atari ST ..You should do a video on it!
thank you David for a good video.. always enjoy watching it. Stay safe 🙂 Ps. the things you experienced trying to convince people in regards to the amiga.. thats what I experience in regards to my VR and trying to get friends to get it too.
I remember running full capability full color fully native MacOS 9.X on my 060/66 604e Picasso RTG A3000 with ShapeShifter, quite a bit faster than a native Mac, but it wasn’t very interesting to an Amiga enthusiast, as it was a Mac. The most useful aspect was running native MS Office.
As someone who worked with a real Mac back in the day, despite the speed boost, the Mac emulation was totally unsuited for the kind of professional work I did in the day.
Though it pains me to say as an old Amiga user - there is some point to Apple making so much money. In the mid to late 980s they had mountains of cash to keep developing new machines even as Atari and Commodore raced to the bottom, cutting costs, but at the same time, cutting off all the money they needed for R&D. Eventually, the amazing Amiga looked very dated and Commodore had no money left to develop a successor machine. I doubt any computer will ever amaze me as much as my first A500 - it was just so far ahead of the pack; not even my final A4000 - a monster computer for the time - quite blew me away like the first time I fired up the A500. Somewhere in an alternative universe, Commodore actually realised what they had bought from Amiga Inc. and made a success of it.
@@fattiger6957 I had a company iPhone recently - It was by far better than my $60 Alcatel Walmart phone (that only needs to call, text, and do my 2FA) but not as good as my outgoing S7 Edge - I don't see the allure of spending $1,000 on something that a $200 phone can do. But do I have Apple stock? Sure do! Because people keep lapping it up.
ermigard this is so old. I had an Amiga 500 and 4000 in the late 80s/early 90s. they were cool back then, not so much now. This video belongs on a kiosk in a museum.
Nothing changed till this day. Even today the price is 95% percent marketing and 5% actual hardware - every Huawei or even Xiaomi mobile device has more capability and quality than any Iphone, not to mention the castrated and patronising software on Apple devices - but some people still believe if they spend that much money they get an actually good product...
@@deineroehre Except, now, a $600 Mac mini is faster / quieter / more efficient than any Windows PC in the sub-$1,000 range. It's thanks to the M1 CPU.
The M1 Macs are currently a leap ahead of the competition. New Macbooks are leading in the performance per watt category. Also the display quality is hard to match.
@@jimb12312 m1 macs are all locked down garbage that will be e-waste in 3 years thanks to all soldered components, and apple silicon is going to run into a wall if apple's MO continues to be "just glue more M1s together for more performance" LOL. display quality? all of apple's panels are made by samsung and LG, both of which sell similar (and better) panels in their own monitors (and without that horrible notch apple has ;P )
Back in ye olde days (late 80's/early 90's), we had a Commodore 64 at home and at school, they had Apple IIe in the computer labs. I remember thinking "Wow, these Apples suck compared to what I have at home, they must be cheap garbage!" When I learned how much the cost compared to what I had, I was confused as to how the one with less features (I had color and sound! The computer lab teacher tried to tell me that I was lying, and that the Apple was the most advanced computer and what I was describing was impossible, lol) were more expensive. To this day, I still have a very low opinion of anything from Apple.
FYI - In defense of the Apple IIe, it natively supported color graphics by simply plugging an RCA cable into a composite monitor (like the Commodore 1702) or TV, and displayed up to 16 colors in its high resolution mode. It also produced sound, but paled against the SID in the C64 obviously. It had decent games, like Prince of Persia (which originated on the IIe!), Wings of Fury, Wolfenstein, Rampage, the Ultima series, etc. And incredible expandibility with 7 slots, so you could add better sound and do a lot more than just games. Though don't get me wrong, I do highly respect what the C64 could do, and also have a very low opinion of Apple of the past and present.
I hear you. For starters the early Macs, especially in the days of the Commodore 64, were soooooo expensive as to be basically unattainable. A few years later I got to use one and I couldn't believe how slow they were - they were in black and white and the constant disk swapping almost drove me crazy. The Commodore 64 and later C128D, especially with GEOS were cheaper and superior.
you also had plain "old" computers. If your school had PCs, XT, or ATs, you'd feel the same way. Apple IIs in the mid-80s were really great machines that were so much more repairable and easy to service. Your views were from the times they were seven to 10 years old.🙂
@@squirlmy They were great computers........if you could afford them. Back in 1983 you couldn't buy an Apple II for $500 - you could buy a Commodore 64, and I did.
Owning an Atari ST back in the day I had a similar experience with my Mac and PCS in the area friends. Of course, being young and idealistic, the idea of superior marketing--superior business acumen, really--never occurred to us as the reason.
I keep thinking about emulating Mac OS in Pimiga... i dunno though what i could run that would even be interesting now though. certainly not Tetris. Maybe some old bbs software or something totally rare.
Because there never was any 060 upgrade card for the Mac. Supposedly one company made a prototype but dropped it because it didn't perform as well as PowerPC.
@@maighstir3003 Nice Thanks your right. I get the 2 mixed up. never had to use either of them. I find them both interesting and then im at a loss for discovering what of interest i would install. Something uniquely appropriate that was on nothing else.
Neat to see this in action with it's rom card approach. I definitely like the idea, as only needing to possibly get a spare Plus ROM upgrade kit and an 800k external drive would definitely make it a cost-effective option, and the ability to forgo both and do it all in software is a nice touch. Our house had always been a hand-me-down PC kind of household for most of my adolescence, so my experiences getting Mac software running would have been through Fusion PC or SoftMac. It's always interesting to see solutions like this that were available when the actual product was still on the market.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 88 | คู่เอก "ป้อมเพชร vs อัสลามจอน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ZqTVVbMgbo/mqdefault.jpg)
Indeed I had Amax running on my 2000 and the machine sported VGA output via the Commodore Flickr fixer. It really did look amazing on my crisp VGA monitor and I used it as needed while attending university for writing and stuff.
Hi Adrian. Happy Easter. You guys should do an episode togheter
Hi Adrian, you and David should do an episode together where you BBQ
I love watching both your TH-cam channels, it would be fantastic to see a collaboration video. And the Amax would be a great topic as it’s the intersection of Amiga and Mac
@@organiccold Hi Adrian. Happy Easter. Continue using these beautiful email signatories and sign offs as it's really cute. Love Jamie.
I had an Amiga 3000 at one point with VGA monitor and flicker fixer. It was indeed amazing to see the crisp video and be able to run any Mac software or PC software, even if via a clunky hardware add-on. (I didn’t have the PC emulator though.) What I never understood was how much other kids were prejudiced against Amiga, even though they clearly never used one. I changed their minds when I invited them to my house to see mine work. (Though I don’t believe anyone actually ever bought an Amiga because of me.)
Those Amigas keep on impressing me. They were completely off my radar until the mid 90s, and by then Apple was already onto PowerPC.
Around the same time, just after the bankruptcy of Commodore US, there were actually Power PC boards for the Amiga, too, though the lack of Commodore meant there wound up being a couple competing standards.
The engineers at Commodore had all sorts of great ideas, but the management was terrible and killed off most things. The A3000 was supposed to ship with 16-bit sound and a DSP but that was scrapped. The AGA machines were only stop-gap but the AAA and other replacements never got finished.
Even with good management, I think the Amiga was doomed to never really make it in business where the real market was. The system relied too heavily on hardware acceleration and programs hitting the hardware directly. And yeah, having to move to a new CPU architecture would be extremely disruptive.
The personal computer was moving towards more robust operating systems that could hide the hardware behind layers of drivers and APIs which makes switching to new architectures that much easier. Look at MacOS and Linux. In both a new architecture is just a recompile away for most applications.
Plus Amiga had typecast itself as a gaming platform. I like to imagine if they went anywhere in the 90's it would have been more gaming console to compete with Nintendo, Playstation, et al. BUt competition there was pretty stiff. So I dunno.
Either way, it is always sad when the best technology doesn't prevail. Happens all too often. Like MSDOS was garbage that lasted WAY too long and basically wasted the capabilities of the 386 and 486. I also wish I had gotten into Amiga back then. But I didn't even SEE my first Amiga until like 1996 when they were already just about dead.
Same, I had never heard of an Amiga until I saw an ad for one of those aftermarket Tower conversions in the late 90’s
Amigas have some sort of revival over the last couple of years - emulation, FPGA reimplementation, faster CPUs, more memory, HDMI video output, etc. The Amiga sitting on my desk right here is more than 100 times faster than an original Amiga 500. :-) (no emulation) An "A500 Mini" has recently been released, like the "Nintendo Classic Mini" and "Super Nintendo Mini" etc. before. (emulation) And so on, lots of new stuff since the 80s. ;-)
In other words: Amigas were the world's first Hackintosh.
Actually I think the ST's did it first.
@@fmlazar ahh the ST, a poor man’s Amiga. 🤣 I jest but had fun with that line in high school!
@@fmlazar yup
@@fensoxx If you mean cheaper - then yes - you could pay less for playing most of the games the Amiga was playing which were optimized for STs in the first place because STs outsold the Amiga in Europe. Brand sniping aside, the ST was neat for having the first LAN party / FPS shooter - 'kill a happy face' played over MIDI ports in a serial network. Quite the mind-blower in the late 80s.
@@fensoxx Still a lot better than the mac or pc back then.
"There MUST be some reason the Mac is so much more expensive ....." a question that remains unanswered to this day.
Well, M1 Macs do easily win on a performance per watt base. So there is that ;)
@@SanderEvers cool but I already spent the money I would have saved on energy bills on the mac
they just want your money
@@dawnlewis60 Well on laptops higher ppw means better battery life too! :D
Not only is it a question that remains unanswered, I've not even seen anyone make a serious attempt at answering it. And yet Apple remains a competitive player in the marketplace.
The Atari ST could also emulate a Macintosh, and do a better job of it with its hi-res, non-interlaced monochrome graphics mode (compatible with a VGA monitor). Its GEM interface was also more Mac-like -- enough to get Digital Research sued by Apple, which resulted in the DOS version of GEM being crippled, although the Atari version (TOS) remained unaffected.
You and David should do a video together, but don't invite Adrian. Oh OK, invite Adrian.
That not necessarily true depends on what amiga and chipset you had ocs vs ecs and or monitor you were using
As the a2024 could do 1024x800 with ocs ntsc and 1024x1024 pal
@@primus711 Sure, but if you had enough money to buy an Amiga 3000 and a hi-res monitor, then you probably could've also afforded a real Macintosh.
@@vwestlife amiga 500 had ecs
And if yours was ocs you could upgrade to ecs
Or just get a a500+ or a2000 with flicker fixer
Either way much cheaper than a crappy mac
And way better than a atari
I could throw in a600 here
@VWestlife - Ah, exactly! This explains why the Amiga solution was relatively unknown (to me at least) whereas I heard so much about Macintosh emulation option on the Atari ST. Interlace video is literally unusable, I know, as I tried using a Macintosh IIcx in 640x400 interlaced mode on an AppleColor RGB monitor (screen used by the Apple IIGS computer) and the results were not pretty to put it mildly. I couldn't use it more than a few minutes before giving up. Back in the 80's and early 90's, a non-interlaced display for the Amiga was extraordinarily expensive and few if any users owned one. The ST often already had the VGA-frequency compatible monochrome display, perfect for Macintosh video! Still, I am curious to try Mac emulation on my A500 and 1040ST and compare the two, just to experience what people had back in those days.
I was lucky to receive my Amiga 500 for Christmas 1987. Was the luckiest boy in town I, at least thats how I felt. Tried some DOS Emulators and found MS Flightsim was running quite OK-ish in Software Mode. We had some Macs in School for the older classes but one days they presented them on a "open Door" day. Learned some LOGO on it, I think that was my first "coding" experience. Nice Video!
I learned LOGO at school when I was 11 or 12, on C64s 🥲
This comment gave me a nostalgia rush even though I was born later
Ha, I remember doing this on my accelerated Amiga. I spent days trying to work out how to do it, eventually got it working and then had no idea what to do next. I had no Mac software and so I just noodled around around the basic tools and prefs with this overwhelming high and mighty attitude that my Amiga was emulating a Mac, faster than the real thing. I think I really was an insufferable Amiga fan back then. Thankfully now I appreciate and love all the computers and just love tech in general.
How’d you get the ROMs? Seems like that would be a big barrier to entry
@@MaxOakland well I know its shocking but back then everything was pirated and your only limit to how much you could get was how much blank media you had. And while I can't remember now I presume it all came as one warez package of software and roms. I used to tick off what I wanted from sheets of print outs. Today as an adult I do buy everything. lol
@@ClayMann no he means the actual rom chips you need not disk images of warez
@@JaredConnell oh, you only needed all that hardware stuff in the early release. Later on you could do it all in software. I never owned any special hardware addons
I really liked the aside where you explained how you fixed the video problem you ran into. That's something that a lot of content creators would've just fixed and then never mentioned, but it's always fun to see good problem-solving.
I am happy I went the Amiga route back then even though the Mac "won" the computer battle. I had tons of fun with my Amiga's 1000, 500 and 2500. Great video!
I used AMax to run PCB design software when developing my Amiga SCSI interface, which was published as the cover story in AC Tech’s Amiga magazine.
I hauled my A3000 and 1950 monitor in to high school for a “show and tell” type event. Blowing the minds of the 6 kids of 20 in the class paying attention with all the awesome of the Amiga. Fired up games, sound digitizers/editor, 3D software, Dpaint, and more.
When did you do this? Recently or back when it was new?
@@jimb12312 high school, early 90s. :)
I did something similar, but fortunately, I only had to carry in disks with software and showed off what could be done, in the university computer lab.
I did not have an Apple IIGS at that time, and so to be able to listen to some synthesized GS music, I hand-carried my boombox into the computer lab, and recorded the audio from their GS onto audio cassette so that I could listen to it at home. That took at least an hour or two, as that could only be done "in real time", no way to hurry it up.
Great to hear, my friend took his Amiga CD32 to school, and did DJ stuff on it, and was also great, but Amiga was falling
way behind in 1992, when the Amiga 3000 came out, The Amiga 4000 was better but COST also a ton, and was also
outdated when it came out in 1992, just like the Amiga 1200 i also had, wish they went for the AAA graphics chipset and
16Bit audio and such, but Commodore was run by unbelievable dumb CEO's in the end of 80s and in the 90s, that they put
a PC on the market that was already outdated, and MS-DOS PC's could do about the same as Amiga PC's could do, if they
only came out like i said with the AAA graphics chipset and 16Bit audio, the Amiga would be again the best, just like it was
in the 80s.
Yeah i really loved my Amiga computers, was terrible when it came out in 1994 that Commodore was bankrupt, i was years
on a Amiga Club with my best friend, and we had a great time, i really miss does times.
@@AmigaWolf
Computers should have been fun entertainment machines, but then we have all those IBM empty-head suits dull-heads insisting that it should be a dull boring business machine. What? You can't do accounting and spreadsheets on an Amiga or now on Linux?
During the switchover from 68k to PowerPC, I quite often used my Amiga 4000/030 with Shapeshifter to boot directly into MacOS, because the internet was just coming up here in Germany and getting the Amiga online was a lot more hassle than just using AOL on the Mac side :D I did end up using the Amiga with a lot of ported Unix tools later on, but for some time, I literally booted to MacOS every day and with a 68030 and a graphics card, it was sheer delight.
By then, MacOS 7.5 and later got along a bit better with different screen resolutions and everything looked a lot more polished than on the Amiga, where a lot of applications still insisted on using Topaz 8 for their font, despite nicer fonts being available on higher resolutions.
This also made for a lot more consistency which Apple still enforced a bit more back then.. if there was a dialog asking for "Yes, No or Cancel", you knew which order the buttons would be in and which one was the default.. Apple specified their UIs to that level of detail(and at some point, applications like Kai's Power Tools and Bryce completely went off that wagon :D ) and I think, that made for the appeal to new computer users, after explaining the basic concepts, everything looked the same. I've only very recently had the "joy" of having to use a modern MacOS for longer than a couple of hours and I almost went mad, because they seem to have tacked on a lot of functionality from other operating systems onto some of the same "old" design principles.. Only that now you have a second mouse button and most of the settings that seem to make sense for people coming from other operating systems are hidden in the accessibility settings as if we were dumb or something :D
With the advent of hard drives, Apple also stayed a lot longer with the (then quicker) SCSI drives than everybody else who went for IDE drives instead and a lot of software for the media creation and publishing industry was Mac-first, like QuarkXpress and pretty much everything from Adobe, making it a nice choice for creative workers, that don't want the computer to be in the way too much. So in a way, it was worth the money for the computer to not have to deal with the computer too much. Back when you could almost render your PC unbootable by copying and pasting some magic garbage into your config.sys or autoexec.bat, you could easily boot a mac into failsafe without any extensions and you wouldn't miss too much. It was not as easy to delete relevant parts of your operating system, you had to put some more effort into that :D
The PowerPC laptops that followed shortly after my Mac period actually made me think whether I should be buying a PC laptop to run Linux or get a Powerbook Duo 2300...
But by then, I was already so much acquainted with the Unix ecosystem(which became the Amiga's official development environment(aka the Geek Gadgets)) and on my way to a career in Unix administration, so I went for Linux and I've only just recently installed MacOS 9 into a PPC emulator, just to play Escape Velocity again :D
"There must be something the Macintosh can do that the Amiga can't do." Yes, there is. It can empty your parents' bank account much faster.
So nothing has changed with 🍏
@@nichderjeniche Well, something has. If you convert to today's money, that computer would have cost over $6000 (US). I know they charge $1000 for a monitor stand, but I don't think they charge $6000 for a computer.
the handle on the mac made it a better boat anchor.
I mean, to be fair, Amiga expansions could empty your bank account pretty damn quickly too.
One thing the Amiga couldn't do that a Mac could do was survive as a computer platform to this very day. I was working at a computer store in the early 80s in the 2nd largest city in washington state, and was selling the heck out of the Apple IIs. Then one day the Mac showed up. My sales skyrocketed. Across the street was a department store that had an electronics department and they sold the Amiga. I'd go over on my lunch hour and check out the competition. I never saw any customers. Then I'd go back to the store I worked at and was busy all day selling macs, mac software, mac printers, mac scanners. And after work some times my fellow salesmen and I would lock the doors and network all the macs and play maze wars. It was a glorious time.
That's true however as far as I know Macintosh computers were nearly dead and the Apple company likewise, before they came out with the iMac and Mac OS X. Please me correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK late PowerPC era Macinotsh computers were fairly unpopular and the company was not very profitable.
@@TassieLorenzo Yes and no, I was still selling macs in the "dark years" of the performa and centris. Apple had also licensed out the mac and clones were coming out that were faster than the apple macs so they put a end to that. They were both good and bad at the same time. Still, they were selling like crazy for me. But nothing like when the imac came out in 1999. Then we had lines in the showroom again.
I ran that myself. If you ever get a chance, get A Jim Drew EMPLANT card it had the Apple ports on there as well as could use Apple II ROMs and you have a color mac You could to 16 colors I believe on the stock. If you had a Picasso and retargetable graphics you could do a full 256 color and if you did do benchmarks and you had enough RAM, you would see that the Amiga would toast a real Mac in just about anything including performance
if you wake up in a trench with other people getting ready to be buried alive get up and run for it
Too bad Jim Drew didn't finish Fusion PPC.
@@jjdigitalvideosolutionsllc5343 yea it was built off his EMPLANT emulator ..
@@jjdigitalvideosolutionsllc5343 fusion. PPC was released for amiga. What never came out was fusion ppc for x86
@@RobSnyder I thought there was a version that did get released for the x86
I wrote my novel on the last verison of Clarisworks, Appleworks. It must have combined MacDraw and MacPaint into the suite of tools, but if that's the case or not, I did use the Drawing tool to make visuals associated with my story.
I really felt the anecdote at the end, trying to convince schools to save tens of thousands of dollars by shopping smarter. We had an after-school computer club, where we dabbled in coding, board building, and primitive Internet content creation. We couldn't use the computers in our lab because they were 10 year old Macintosh computers. Albeit, they got the job done, the purpose of our computer lab was to teach basic word processing and publishing, but our club required us to bring in our own computers from home to do some things.
We noticed the old Macintosh computers were starting to fail, though. We knew they would have to be replaced soon. A pitch as drawn up for a handful of cheap-ish modern computers for the school, an effective guide to begin a long-overdue upgrade to their decade-old computer lab. Unfortunately, the prevailing mindset at the time wasn't "what computer is best," but instead was "what computer is easiest for us teach?" Which, credit to Apple, they definitely had us cornered 10 years ago. Sadly, we came to find there is a rampant culture among teachers, this mindset of "my job is to TEACH, not to LEARN." They've used these Apple computers in the classroom ever since their Reagan-era unboxing, and haven't seen any need to upgrade for new confangled real-time video or Internet hootnanny. Watching video on the computer? Surfing the Internet Superhighway? Feh, those are just fads, they'll be gone like pogs and fanny packs.
So, the old Apples stayed.
Wasn't a huge defeat, though. We merged our computer club into a more organized (and state-sponsored) robotics club, which provided us with all the tech we needed. And with the soon-to-be roll-out of Windows 95, we got a massive donation of Windows 3.1 PCs from a local business, which one-by-one began replacing the aging Macs as they started to die of natural causes. It was actually kind of an exciting time, where our computer lab was kind of this jumbled hybrid mess of several computers running different generations of operating systems and different software libraries. Our lab had the row of still-functioning retro Macs, a new row of Windows 3.1 PCs, a handful of the more capable donated PCs that were upgraded to Windows 95, and the couple PCs specifically designated for the robotics club (though they could still run Sim City 2000 at cheetah speed, an imperative performance standard).
It was a wild, chaotic, disorganized mishmash of everything. And it was beautiful.
Nowadays, school computer labs just don't really exist anymore. There isn't really anything to teach. Computer interface design has become intuitive enough that people can figure it out on their own with relative ease, and the software handles most of the tricky stuff. But I still believe kids should somehow be given exposure to different operating systems wherever possible, and instead of blindly pledging allegiance to arbitrary "brand loyalty," just appreciate the unique capabilities each platform has to offer. Because you never really know when a company nowadays will do what Amiga did in the 90s, and release something truly extraordinary beyond everything else, without anyone really noticing.
Kind of like what Apple is doing today, bringing the story full circle back to their local dominance of my school 40 years ago, releasing an exciting generation of chips that merges the CPU and GPU together with encouraging results. If today's Apple is that "something truly extraordinary beyond everything else," I'll be glad my school familiarized me with the OS way back when.
It's funny, Apple still relies on the "It's more expensive so it must be better" thing today, and people are still buying it.
I think it isn't that teaching culture does not want to learn, it is that they are generally already expected to put in significant amounts of unpaid labor and schools tend to be really bad about retraining people, so learning new systems means even more unpaid time to do the same thing they were already doing. Ones who did computer stuff as part of their hobby life might already be learning things, but for those where computers are a tool for their job and that is it, it can be a real pain for little gain.
@@QuintusAntonious Well they do make better stuff than the likes of windows and android. But their stubbornness is what turned me off. Like the non removable power cable on the studio display. Or the notch on the new MacBook Pro
@@antoniuskelvinkurniawan They certainly do not make better stuff than Microsoft or top Android phone makers lmao
@@antoniuskelvinkurniawan Maybe the software (though that's still arguable), which seems like what you meant given your comparisons, but certainly not the hardware. They have, for a looooooong time, charged way more than they should for the hardware (and probably still do). We can easily say this with certainty, because until recently, they were using x86 stuff. Comparing similarly spec'd PCs to their Mac counterparts in price - the difference was laughable.
I grew up on the 64 at home and the IIe at school. Never really had much exposure to Mac but my school did get a Novell network with XT (ps/2) clients and a ps/2 386 server. I SO wanted an Amiga back in the day
Oh and Protip: if you are running a school network based on Novell netware, make sure you put a password on the SUPERVISOR login lol
If you got away with that the person in charge of IT should be fired.
Also make sure other accounts can't inherit supervisor rights, ask me how I know... Lmao
also, perhaps dont put the “server” in the same room accessible to everyone at any time with unmonitored access to it… or else you could put a floppy in and create an admin account…
on boy it seems school netware servers were all the same everywhere on this planet :) :)
“hacking” :))))
but i liked the text based snake screensaver :)
@@ImreNagyM Servers can be protected from floppy boots. It's all in the hardware security.
@@fmlazar can be :) but it was not ;)
back in 2019, on the Atari 8 Bit convention called "Fujiama", my friend Beetle (named after the Volkswagen car) ran Shape Shifter on his Amiga, and inside it on Mac OS Classic he ran the Atari 8 Bit Emulator called Rainbow. Machine on machine on machine is quite cool I think.
That was a truly fascinating video, and I’m sure as a kid it was probably about one of the coolest computing solutions. Emulating a super expensive computer on a budget computer is spectacular!
"There's gotta be a reason macs are so much more expensive, I'm sure there's things it can do that others can't".
I guess some things never change.
Yeah, there's two things it can do that others can't: 1) be more expensive, and 2) nothing else
Can only speak about the apple products of today, but I assume the same applies: You pay for build quality and longevity.
@@TheNacropolice but not repairability.
@@brandonmack111 You obviously never used a real Mac back in the day for professional work.
@@TheNacropolice As did every Amiga owner, just half the price for the same quality.
While the Amiga was clocked a little slower than the Mac Plus, the way the logic was implemented meant the Mac seems to run at the same speed, despite the faster cpu clock.
SpectreGCR on the ST did a similar thing but used the full 640 by 400 on the ST high resolution screen, as well as doing some funky stuff with the disk drive via a cable from the SpectreGCR box to the ST floppy port. The ST had the same cpu clocked at the same speed as the Mac plus but appeared to run faster, however most of the logic on the Mac SE was condensed into a single chip, making the SE faster than the Mac Plus, despite being clocked at the same speed!
A few years ago on my old Atari Music Network site, I ran a comparison between my Mega ST and my Mac SE and found that natively, the Atari was snappier but as I didn’t have a working SpectreGCR system, couldn’t compare them running Mac software.
Never knew about these old emulators. I used Shapeshifter later on in the late 90s early 00s, mainly to use Office and Java for University. But I imagine few people cared about emulating a Mac until the Amiga started to lose software support.
I owned an Amiga as well, back in the day. I started with an A2000. But, later I also got an A500 and even an A1000 just for fun. Sad that commodore mismanaged things so horribly. The A3000 wasn't the major step forward that was needed at that time, and the graphics chips that once allowed the Amiga to shine became a prison of sorts (while other computers could take advantage of higher resolution modes via graphics cards). The Amiga market tried to catch up with devices such as DCTV and HAM-E (I had both of those), the Video Toaster, etc... and eventually the AGA chipset. But it was all too little too late.
I loved all the crazy inventive products that offered inexpensive solutions. Like the Mac emulators.
I owned a VBS (Video Backup System) that allowed a person to backup their Amiga data to a regular VHS tape. Outstanding product that only cost about $30 and gave you all the storage space you could ever want or need for the cost of VHS tapes.
I owned a device (can't remember the name) that allowed you to connect a fiber optic cable to the print head on any printer and turn it into a page scanner! It was only about $45 when page scanners used to cost about $1200.
I also owned an Atari ST, but preferred the Amiga. The ST also had a Mac emulator.
I had lots of fun with my Amiga. Great video!
I've never seen the AMax in action. I had an Emplant card for my 4000, and it worked well. It emulated a Quadra 700. I used to run Quark, Illustrator, and Photoshop on it because the magazine I worked for had Mac SEs that were terrible for doing any sort of design work.
SE's? We used Quadras with 040 chips, high end graphic cards that outputted 1600x900 24 bit graphics and Ethernet networking.
Se/30 was even better at the time. My school used it for newspaper use. It had a high resolution portrait monochrome monitor on its side. It could go up to 128 MB of RAM.
I graduated the same year you did and we had the same macs in school. I also had a commodore 128 at home...we never got the Amiga and when I was out on my own at 19 i ended up buying a 486 dx2 from Packard Bell. I love watching your videos and seeing all the old tech, and learning about stuff I never had the chance to see back then!
Wow, this was new to me, thanks!
I remember having a similar argument among friends, I was the Amiga 500 guy, and a friend of mine had his fathers work laptop that ran Mortal Kombat 1 and 3, Duke3D and such. I really liked the Amiga but they said that it's just a game machine. I knew in my heart that it was capable of more than "just" games (even though we only used it for games) I didn't really use any office software and didn't tinker with Workbench much to defend my position. Well, by the time these PC games were out, the Amiga was surpassed, but for a long time a simple Amiga 500 could do much more than PCs at the time. I still remember this argument to this day... Amiga was not only a gaming machine, dammit!
i believe you
I feel the same way. So did Electronic Arts (Deluxe Paint, used to make most of those assets for games, on all platforms), NewTek (Lightwave 3D, used in 'Sea Quest' and 'Babaylon 5' TV shows ) & Caligari (Truespace 3D).
Then there was the assortment of powerful music applications.
But Macintosh won out the graphic arts and video production market, eventually the musicians too.
Maybe if NewTek had bought Amiga when Commodore was having trouble, they could have saved it.
Though business software was almost non existent. And there wasn't much engineering stuff to attract the CAD stuff from the IBM market. No real Autocad or other CAD-CAM solutions on the Amiga. despite have good expansion for industrial peripherals like the PC clones.
Mac had Hollywood and graphic design, IBM-PC and clones had business and industry.
Games, Paint & 3D held the Amiga up. It was too soon for 3D though, cpus were not fast enough, rendering took way too long.
Indeed, the Amiga was a music composition tool mainly for me. And i also fiddled with the Atari ST, each had their strengths and weaknesses.
But yes, at a young age when the Amiga and Atari ST still were relevant. Games was almost exclusively what i used them for.
Funnily enough, my first "proper" use of a computer was AFTER the Amiga and Atari where i was given a Commodore PET. Then i learned some BASIC (pun intended) programming.
I then got a hold of an IBM PC 2:86 and tried some games, they were boring. But the other stuff it could do was really cool and i learned a lot.
And when i got a 4:86 i read the entire DOS 5.0 manual in one night and went bonkers making my very own personalized computer with a non-breakable (I.E, no CTRL+C or CTRL+BREAK) login prompt all using a .bet file (batch file).
From there i played around with QBasic and the rest is history as they say.
@@peterbelanger4094 *the* niche for the Classic Mac was desktop publishing, supported by very robust font support and really jolly good laser printers.
I sucked at gaming so I started doing music and programming on my Amiga 500. I got it by the end of 1989. Some years ago I replaced a number of capacitors to make it stable again. Just last weekend I placed it in my new studio (moved last autumn). Needing it soon for accessing some of my 90's music. Going to rework in Reaper on Linux.
I know it takes more than one day to put a video together which is why it's weird that ONLY YESTERDAY, the "Amiga Love" channel made a video about Mac OS on Amiga hardware.
I remember running an Mac-emulator called "Shapeshifter" on my Amiga 1200, which could run Mac OS 7. A friend of mine had a Mac, and the way we transferred stuff from his Mac to my Amiga, was to use PC-formatted (720k) disks which both of our computers could read. I did have a turbo-card with 8 mb additional ram, 68030 (or 68040?) CPU + MMU on it. Though, the emulation was still a bit slow. Although, I used a TV (Pal here in Sweden) as my screen, and the flickering in the interlaced mode was quite intense. So, it was more of a fun novelty to launch Shapeshifter, but nothing I used to any serious extent.
Thanks for reminding me of the name "Shapeshifter". I had that running on my A4000 with a Picasso (?) graphics card and a massive 2+16MB RAM. Party trick was to drag down the virtual Mac screen with the mouse to reveal the Amiga Workbench. Ran Mac version of MS Office and some Mac magazine CD cover discs. Must have been around mid 90s I think.
Yep, Shapeshifter was the way to go. I could easily get the ROM and System 7 Disks from Apples at our university. I invested money in buying "Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual", which was one of the first game/edutainment software to use QuicktimeVR - totally amazing back in the days. When I upgraded my A3000 with an 68060 card, it would outrun any M68k-based Mac that ever existed.
Hi, I am a timetraveler. I just came here to let you know thank you for your videos. Your videos are mush watch for all the time travellers who want to visit 1960-1999!
Very interesting software! The more i learn about the Amiga the more i wish i was born in the 80s instead of the mid 2000s.
Yay!!! Class of 93!!! I had an Amiga 500 as well, but my experience with the Mac came from doing a group project with the son of a newspaper editor. They had a fully loaded Mac with a hard drive and Adobe PageMaker with a laser printer. I was amazed by the results. I had a star nx2420 color printer and could not get anything close to what that Mac/printer combo could do. However, I used that Amiga all throughout High School and my first year of college.
Impressive. As some others said, the Atari ST had Magic Sac and later, Spectre GCR from the same developer that provided the same functionality and ran 20% faster than a Mac because of the ST's faster clock rate.
Spetctre GCR didn't run faster because of Atari's CPU was faster. It was just because Macs were overpriced garbage. Steve Jobs scammed ignorant people with literal 1980, ZX81 technology where the CPU couldn't access RAM while the screen was drawn. While on the Amiga and ST you only had a performance penalty depending on the screenmode. So in some cases the Emulation was faster, even providing the inner workings of a Mac, just because the Mac was MUCH slower. How slow? Watch Hickock45's video on his Mac experience. :D
@@AmstradExin Hickock45? The gun guy???
@@AmstradExin Macs were overpriced for sure though the Mac's CPU ran at
@@yarnosh Yeah, he ranted about his Mac. I think it's easy to find.
@@arifeldman6365 Imagine that the Atari ST was developed in 6 months. I still have a Mega STE with a Vortex 386 card.
For the Amgiga's competitor, the Atari ST, there was a Mac emulator called Aladin which delivered flawless Mac emulation particularly with the Atari's hi-res, paper-white, larger display, including flawless matrix printer support. It was my gateway into the blissful world of Macintosh before I got my first Mac SE.
A childhood friend of mine and his dad were huge Amiga fans. I remember his dad having something on his Amiga that could emulate a Mac. (they had at least four Amigas over the years so I don't remember if it was on the 1000 or 2000 let alone how he emulated the Mac. All I know is it wasn't on the his mom's 500). Unfortunately I can't ask how they did it as Jon and his dad have both passed away.
I had Amax running on my A500+. Had a GVP HD with Amax installed along with the Lattice C compiler. I wrote my dissertation using Amax running Word. This allowed me to use my Amiga as my full home Dev machine and then be able to take my files back and fourth to university.
From 1995-1999 I ran Shapeshifter on my A4000, just for Netscape. Until I got a G4 Powermac, Mac prices at the time were competitive with PCs in the UK. Not in the last 10 years they haven't
I also used AMax to run Mac stuff on the Amiga was running 640x480, used my parallel printer (the Mac utility program PowerPrint was able to print through the Amigas parallel port to a espon compatible printer) Had a second hard drive to boot and run Mac stuff. also an Apple Power CD to do CD stuff It was quite usable till I got a real Mac a couple years later. Very usable.
I remember a co-worker around 1996 was a huge amiga fan. I always thought he was just being eccentric, because to me it was an expensive computer that only people doing video production used. I never experienced the “cheap” amigas or if I did, I didn’t know what they were at the time. It’s interesting to see what was and how the “better” machine doesn’t always come out on top.
Amigafans were almost always eccentric and/or fanatic (so was I)...
5:28 I remember my School having Kid Pix on the Macintosh Computers and yeah it was similar to Mac Paint but had some Cool Things Mac Paint didn't have!
Wow, that was my high school typing class too (not that exact one, but it was full of those same Macs in 1997). -- My grandma was super insistent that I take a typing class in HS because "computers are the future". -- Thanks Grandma. ❤
I remember for the typing test, they put a piece of paper over our hands, and made us type without being able to see the keyboard (not bragging; I think most people can do this now; it just seems funny looking back on it). -- And we used to type a few pages and then copy and hold down paste, and then copy the whole document again and hold down paste again (over and over increasing the copy size by like 10x each time) until the machines ran out of memory and quit responding (those poor Macs. 😅).
Oh the memories. I had an emplant card in my A4000 which was how I got on the Internet in 1994. Mac's were even more expensive in the UK back then so this really was an affordable solution. Enjoyed the video.
Most people did creative and good things with their Amigas. I only used my Amiga to redraw the mouse cursor to look like the male genitalia...... I feel like an ant among gods, and I love it.
That sounds like a very Amiga thing to do.
Well, the Kickstart 1.x default pointer already kind of looked like that!
Toward the end of my senior year of High School, when so many students hadn't seen anything but the ancient Franklin (Apple II clone) systems we had, I got my teacher to allow me to bring my Amiga 1000 to school to show the students apps like Sculpt3D and where the current state of computing was actually at.
So cool to see this in action! I wonder - did it get updated to support newer ROMs and overall Mac compatibility at any point? How did it handle audio? What was the highest Mac OS version it supported (limited by the ROMs?)? Any relation between this and ShapeShifter? Any relation to the modern Basilisk II emulator?
Also, I think the Atari was supposed to have a similar option available for Mac compatibility, based on something I saw on an episode of the Computer Chronicles about the Atari. Any chance you might cover that at some point?
This was so fascinating! I had no idea even that the Amiga had the same CPU chip as the macs at the time. Thanks for doing this vid I loved it
I was very confused until you mentioned that there is (or was) a software only solution, because I still have the AMax disk and a couple of disks with macintosh software and they work without any additional hardware!
Was this “emulation” of a Mac contemporary to the existing Amiga or did it run an “older” version of Mac OS, etc? I’m trying to grasp the timeline. For instance if you had an Amiga new in 1987 would it be able to “emulate,” as shown here, 1:1 essentially, the same time frame 1987 Mac and software? If yes, I truly don’t understand how or why Amiga didn’t become “2 systems in 1” and increase their market share based on the ability of running ANY Mac program of the day.
@@GratefulRob Well, remember, to do it you either needed to (a) buy an AMAX card **and** gut an actual Mac for the ROM chips; or (b) have pirate MacOS floppy discs (in AMAX format).
The first is generally unappealing, since you would need to somehow have a Mac *anyway* yet prefer doing it on the Amiga (or find a broken Mac to scavenge the chips from); and the second could never be advertised.
@@sanityormadness makes sense thank you
The intro tune is Awesome 👍🏻I've never mentioned that before. Keep the great content coming. Thanks!
Maybe you could have set your camcorder shutter speed to 30 so that both even and odd fields would be blended together for each frame.
Interesting video. Reminds me of the days of using Spectre GCR on the Atari ST.
seeing those innumerable hordes of Mac's in that lab struck me how wealthy schools are in the US. my art dept had one Mac, that was the only Mac in the school of 1800 pupils!
"were" might be more correct. Today public schools in the US literary fall apart in many areas from what I heared. However i think it also depends a lot on the area, as all public schools are just funded by taxes of the local school district, which is very small (maybe like a county or city district), so public schools in rich areas have much more money than those in poor areas.
Apple sold Macs to schools at a very steep discount. They smartly were thinking long term, if a kid used an Apple product at school, that would make them more likely to buy and use Macs in the future.
I had a similar Mac emulator for my Atari ST computer. It plugged into the cartridge port and like the AMax you had to plug in Mac ROMs to use it. It was pretty slick and the Atari's floppy drive could read/write the Mac disks ok. Only drawback was that it would not run Mac System 7, just earlier versions.
Very interesting! Because as they say, “Once you go Mac, you never go Jack. Tramiel.” Or something.
Jack was working on the Atari ST at the time. The ST's OS was called by some people the Jackintosh. :D
Lol
Where's my new episode of Retro Recipes?! I demand satisfaction or we duel to the death in COMBAT on the Atari 2600! Choose your weapon, Atari OG joystick or Wico Command!
But the Amiga had the biggest expansion slot 😉
Once you go Mac, you're now broke.
I used to emulate a mac on my Atari ST... it was a box with Mac Roms a d a cable to connect to the floppy driver interface... could read mad disks, it was awesome, and slightly faster than a mac plus, Spectre GCR. The manual was hilarious!
A-Max was a very popular early emulator from Readysoft (the same software house of Wrath of the Demon and Dragon's Lair). It was much publicized on magazines and very well reviewed . Then come other emulators of that fruit branded computer, but A-Max was the first from what i recall.
Just another Reason to keep in your pocket! Nice to see A-Max II in Action as I wondered how it could read Mac till you explained it! Wow! Thanks!
I had to laugh when you said your high school's computer lab was stuffed with Macs as mine was at the same time in elementary school. I credit this as the reason why buying a Mac comes with a bit of nostalgia. Macs certainly seemed less troublesome than the hand-me-down IBM hardware my stepfather would tinker with at the same time.
We only had Apple lle's in our high school lab. You could program in basic, Prolog, and assembly language. No Amiga's. But we definitely discussed the 16-bit upgrades (Macs/Amiga/Atari) in class. No-one was happy.
You're making me miss my Amiga again... such a great machine! Sadly, the wrong company acquired them. I remember asking a Commodore rep at the World of Commodore Show in Toronto one year why they didn't advertise more, and their reply was that costs money... I was floored. And the ads they did have were really bad. I recall Jay Minor (father of the Amiga) stating that they needed more ads that compared the Amiga to other machines, but Commodore had some real dufus' working in advertising. They had the best machine out there yet they still went bankrupt.
RMC: YOU STEAL IDEA!
The 8-Bit Guy: DID NOT!
RMC: DID SO!
Didn't you really mean the video by Amiga Love posted yesterday?
th-cam.com/video/MIevBm0qodA/w-d-xo.html
Rmc?
@@paco3523 RMC is short for RetroManCave
The amount of effort and love put into your videos astounds me. You're the best!
Your writing lab: Apple was super smart about getting their computers into schools. Most people who aren't in technology field (and some who do) make up their mind on computer/phone (and other) brands in Jr High and High School, and rarely change their minds after that.
Indeed, I honestly think their proliferation into schools was the only thing that kept them in business.
@@The8BitGuy as evidenced by the existence of the eMac and eMate!
@@The8BitGuy The Mac's main buisness was in corporate creative departments. They lost the school business early on to Gateway. But they dominated in Desktop Publishing and music production.
I think EVERY school around here had macs - my elementary school in the 80s had a bunch of IIGS that I kept screwing up (I somehow got into the setup menu and just did whatever - after I was done, the computer had a ton of weird characters or was making some weird noises - no idea what I did but someone had to come and fix them, and after the third time I did that they made me watch what the guy did to fix it, and I asked him some questions. He was annoyed at me but nice enough to see that I had an interest in what I broke and why) and we even had a lab full of them for learning how to type on them. That was like 30 years ago - I wonder where they all ended up?
@@The8BitGuy I believe they tried a similar strategy in the UK, pushing the Mac as "the" DTP platform but they were late to the game and a bit on the dear side even with an education "discount.
I was at school about the same time as you and as well as the two Macs in typing/DTP (the rest of the "typing" computers were Amstrads I think...shudder) we had an Amiga in the art dept, ST in the music dept and physics somehow wrangled itself an Acorn Archimedes. The Mac, with it's poky b&w monitor and silly mouse was the least pleasant to use and I (and my Amiga/ST owning friends) could never understand why people raved about them or why they so bloody expensive at £1500 compared to an Amiga that was £399 including.
Spectre GCR on Atari ST was a more elegant solution because it didn't need an Apple external floppy drive and its monochrome monitor was better suited to display Macintosh graphics than most Amiga monitors.
The Atari ST hads everal Mac "emulators" - The Magic Sac, and several iterations of the Spectre
This video combined with RMC - The Cave's "The Fastest Apple Mac Is An Amiga" video now really has me fired up about restoring my A500. I have now managed to find emulators/"virtualisers" for the Mac, the ST, and even the Sinclair QL which will all run on an Amiga. Heck, I even have a 1040STf which I know I can get to run MacOS too. Essentially, I will end up having more "Mac"s than STs or Amigas. For a while at least. Great video! I think this would fit well as a companion piece to the Commodore documentary.
It's nice to see that Apple's trend of selling less powerful hardware for 3x the price of competitors goes way back to the 80s!
So much fun! Thanks for the video. 💜
Maybe you could try to use a PowerPC upgrade and run newer Mac OS versions on an Amiga. I think there was a G3 upgrade for 68k macs, so if there’s a way to add a PDS slot it might be possible to run Mac OS X on an Amiga!
Edit: I just remembered that there are PowerPC upgrades for the Amiga, so it would be another way of running PPC Mac OS
A number of late 68k Macs could be upgraded to a 66 or 100 MHz 601 processor via an upgrade card. If you wanted a G3 upgrade, you’d probably need a motherboard swap.
I 100% agree with you on the Star Trek synopsis. I enjoy the show, but I do wish they experienced and solved a problem in one episode (sometimes two) like years past. I to this day put on TNG and Voyager to get sleepy before bed, the episodes never get old.
Thanks for making great content!
I'm convinced at this point that the 8-Bit Guy grew up in Europe. Noone bought a Mac here because of 'It's more expensive, so it MUST be better'.
Mansfield, is a city located in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Many school districts got Macs to replace the old Apple IIs they had in their labs 'Because its from Apple'
@@KnightRanger38 Advertising!
I had it all. Top of the line was a internal card with color support of Mac on my A3000. Since it had a HD disk drive, it did support all Mac formatted disks as well. It was the fastest avilable Mac at the time. it all workt very nicely.
Ha that takes me back, I had an Aladin cartridge on the Atari ST that worked in a similar fashion. You needed some real Apple Roms to make it work, but on a high res mono Atari monitor it was a perfect emulation. Pretty soon realised that Macs were a lot more boring than Ataris and went back to native Atari.
Even to this day, I find the 8-bit Apple II, C64 or Atari 800 vastly more fun, interesting and entertaining than a Macintosh. I've always found the Mac such a utilitarian and appliance-like machine, probably because it's so closed in both hardware and software.
I do not understand why I love this channel like I don't find myself getting bored and usually big technical talk becomes too hard for me to follow
I don't understand why Amiga failed, they had better computer. Imagine having (A)Phone and (A)Pad with Workbench X :)
Marketing at Commodore. While it was very popular in Europe Commodore never pushed it hard enough for it to be everywhere in US. Commodore was banking on the idea the popularity of the C64 it would also apply to the Amiga. I loved my Amiga 500 in 1988 and it had great games that I was able to find on the BBS at the time.
The Amiga was split into two, really. You had the "Big Box" PC style Amigas, which were expensive and you had the 500 all in the keyboard style Amigas, which were... well, not cheap, but cheaper. And they sold very well as games machines overseas. But Commodore US was DETERMINED to sell it as a business machine.
TLDR: Commodore.
Not hard to understand really considering that marketing was more or less non-existant for the entire life of the Amiga. The little there was in the beginning turned to nothing at all in the end. But realistically it wouldn't have changed all that much since Commodore was a fairly small company, they didn't have the resources to develop new products quickly enough to keep up with the competition. Atari failed for the same reasons, more or less. Apple had Steve Jobs, one of the best businessmen ever. Without him Apple would have gone the same way. They almost did after he left.
Marketing was an issue but having the right software for the target matters. Amiga had a shot with Genlock for video stuff but Commodore never managed to secure ports for software that really mattered in desktop publishing or office work. Macs could run Microsoft Excel or Adobe photoshop (with 2Mb of Ram). Amigas could have had these too but it never happened.
@@TheTurnipKing I know history of Commodore, but this is unfair (I can't find another word) that such an advanced computer failed. Apple had educational market with Apple II as a mik cow. But Commodore had C64 and 17 mln sold unit. Why, WHY we don't have Amiga Studio and Amiga Silicon ? :)
This is really neat. I love that you also had footage from your school
I wonder if the black bar on one of the screens visible when recording at 60fps has anything to do with the NTSC video standard? NTSC analog video standard is 59.97Hz rather than an even 60 with digital standards. Or maybe it was just the camera's 60fps setting not having a long enough exposure time to help blend the phosphor scan lines.
Yes, that's exactly the problem. And my camera doesn't have a setting for 59.97 hz.
Could also be TH-cam's video compression, I believe every other frame is skipped or something
I was the resident Amiga evangelist in my high school at about the same time as you - I understand your story quite well and had similar experiences.
David: I watched this episode on my PS4 which is hooked up to my stereo system… I never realized how great your intro music sounds on proper equipment. Kudos!
Another great video! Thanks!
I remember in my youth writing a game for the Commodore 64. It was a combination of Jumpan and LodeRunner. Had 8 levels. You could dig holes like in LodeRunner but Jump across like Jumpman. Each level added something new. I remember adding bricks that were false and you'd fall through (like in LodeRunner). I also remember adding diagonal vines that you climbed on and slid all the way down. I remember copying the character set to RAM so that I could modify the extra characters to look like ladders/vines etc. Was great, but used up desperately needed RAM. LOL. Good memories of many hours and hours of 6510 assembly language programming!
On another note: I still have my C64 disks and boxes of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Elite!
Amiga's continue to increase me after all these years. Actually pretty amazed to see it running MacOS - love this, David. For my gaming interests I still look at the Amiga, C64, and DOS as tops.
Yes! I worked at Software Etc in early 1990 and a co-worker of mine was a big Amiga fan. He brought this device into work one day to show me Mac OS running on the Amiga we had in our store. I asked him where he got the Mac ROMs and he said it wasn't easy and kinda pricey. He pushed me over the edge to get an A500 (plus a friend from high school had one).
5:40 What the hell is Claris McWright? It's MAC-WRITE. It's not an Irishman.
That hurt my ears as well.
Thank you for this great series of videos. I love this channel. Excellent work!!!
A modern Mac: No, you can't swap SSDs, you'll need a second Mac then to restore the OS. And don't even think of installing a second one.
1980's Mac: Ah, an Amiga CPU? Bah, I'll work just fine.
I mean you say that, but I am currently writing this comment on a hackintosh
I saw Linus experiment with those none ssd drives as well.
@@sac3528 Not for much longer, as soon as Apple ditches X86 Hackintosh is dead.
@@6581punk The ARM CPU is not the problem. The problem is Apple is going full custom SoC hardware.
> No, you can't swap SSDs, you'll need a second Mac then to restore the OS.
lolwat? You can boot of any external media. And Thunderbolt 4 is fast af. You can ALSO boot off another computer's drive. This is actually pretty cool feature IMO. Something you can't do with a PC without physically moving the drive.
> And don't even think of installing a second one.
Installing a second what? OS? You mean like Asahai Linux? Apple makes no effort to stop you from booting alternative OS. But good luck writing drivers....
This reminds me of the good old days.. I used to do this emulation with the Atari ST .. and it was even faster than the Mac .I also had a PC emulator on my Atari too ..I used my PC emulation to teach me programming .And my Mac emulation to do documents .This at the time when PCs Xt were expensive and Macs prohibitive ..I still have my Atari ST ..You should do a video on it!
I so remember doing this and wow my uncle didn't like it as mine was the faster Mac! hahahahaha
thank you David for a good video.. always enjoy watching it. Stay safe 🙂 Ps. the things you experienced trying to convince people in regards to the amiga.. thats what I experience in regards to my VR and trying to get friends to get it too.
Apple: Does less, costs more since 1987
I remember running full capability full color fully native MacOS 9.X on my 060/66 604e Picasso RTG A3000 with ShapeShifter, quite a bit faster than a native Mac, but it wasn’t very interesting to an Amiga enthusiast, as it was a Mac. The most useful aspect was running native MS Office.
Apple charging 3x as much as the competition despite their products not being any better. Good to see they're keeping tradition alive.
As someone who worked with a real Mac back in the day, despite the speed boost, the Mac emulation was totally unsuited for the kind of professional work I did in the day.
Though it pains me to say as an old Amiga user - there is some point to Apple making so much money. In the mid to late 980s they had mountains of cash to keep developing new machines even as Atari and Commodore raced to the bottom, cutting costs, but at the same time, cutting off all the money they needed for R&D. Eventually, the amazing Amiga looked very dated and Commodore had no money left to develop a successor machine.
I doubt any computer will ever amaze me as much as my first A500 - it was just so far ahead of the pack; not even my final A4000 - a monster computer for the time - quite blew me away like the first time I fired up the A500. Somewhere in an alternative universe, Commodore actually realised what they had bought from Amiga Inc. and made a success of it.
Good if you own shares, I guess?
@@the_kombinator I dunno. I read that Apple sells less phones than they used to and that may be why they're so expensive.
@@fattiger6957 I had a company iPhone recently - It was by far better than my $60 Alcatel Walmart phone (that only needs to call, text, and do my 2FA) but not as good as my outgoing S7 Edge - I don't see the allure of spending $1,000 on something that a $200 phone can do. But do I have Apple stock? Sure do! Because people keep lapping it up.
ermigard this is so old. I had an Amiga 500 and 4000 in the late 80s/early 90s. they were cool back then, not so much now. This video belongs on a kiosk in a museum.
"If the Mac is so expensive then it must be good for something." There we have Apple's marketing strategy.
Nothing changed till this day. Even today the price is 95% percent marketing and 5% actual hardware - every Huawei or even Xiaomi mobile device has more capability and quality than any Iphone, not to mention the castrated and patronising software on Apple devices - but some people still believe if they spend that much money they get an actually good product...
@@deineroehre Except, now, a $600 Mac mini is faster / quieter / more efficient than any Windows PC in the sub-$1,000 range. It's thanks to the M1 CPU.
@@icantgivecredit871 I'm going to assume you're talking about a prebuilt PC from a company like Dell.
@@phcgamer8733 It's the case even if you build a PC with new parts. (Granted, I think GPU prices are finally falling.)
All of you except for ICan'tGiveCredit don't have a single clue whatsoever.
I was running the ST emulator back in the day, which ran superbly via the monochrome monitor.
"There must be some reason why the Mac is more expensive, it can do things [the others] can't" - Still Apple's current marketing strategy....
The M1 Macs are currently a leap ahead of the competition. New Macbooks are leading in the performance per watt category. Also the display quality is hard to match.
@@jimb12312 But god forbid if ouy want copy file on flash drive :)
@@lamichka Yes that's the one thing I hate about the new stuff.
@@lamichka double-ended flash drives with USBA and USBC connectors exist...
@@jimb12312 m1 macs are all locked down garbage that will be e-waste in 3 years thanks to all soldered components, and apple silicon is going to run into a wall if apple's MO continues to be "just glue more M1s together for more performance" LOL. display quality? all of apple's panels are made by samsung and LG, both of which sell similar (and better) panels in their own monitors (and without that horrible notch apple has ;P )
Love that outro music. Happy Easter! And thanks for a fun video :) What a cool piece of tech.
Back in ye olde days (late 80's/early 90's), we had a Commodore 64 at home and at school, they had Apple IIe in the computer labs. I remember thinking "Wow, these Apples suck compared to what I have at home, they must be cheap garbage!" When I learned how much the cost compared to what I had, I was confused as to how the one with less features (I had color and sound! The computer lab teacher tried to tell me that I was lying, and that the Apple was the most advanced computer and what I was describing was impossible, lol) were more expensive. To this day, I still have a very low opinion of anything from Apple.
FYI - In defense of the Apple IIe, it natively supported color graphics by simply plugging an RCA cable into a composite monitor (like the Commodore 1702) or TV, and displayed up to 16 colors in its high resolution mode. It also produced sound, but paled against the SID in the C64 obviously. It had decent games, like Prince of Persia (which originated on the IIe!), Wings of Fury, Wolfenstein, Rampage, the Ultima series, etc. And incredible expandibility with 7 slots, so you could add better sound and do a lot more than just games. Though don't get me wrong, I do highly respect what the C64 could do, and also have a very low opinion of Apple of the past and present.
I hear you. For starters the early Macs, especially in the days of the Commodore 64, were soooooo expensive as to be basically unattainable. A few years later I got to use one and I couldn't believe how slow they were - they were in black and white and the constant disk swapping almost drove me crazy. The Commodore 64 and later C128D, especially with GEOS were cheaper and superior.
you also had plain "old" computers. If your school had PCs, XT, or ATs, you'd feel the same way. Apple IIs in the mid-80s were really great machines that were so much more repairable and easy to service. Your views were from the times they were seven to 10 years old.🙂
@@squirlmy They were great computers........if you could afford them. Back in 1983 you couldn't buy an Apple II for $500 - you could buy a Commodore 64, and I did.
Owning an Atari ST back in the day I had a similar experience with my Mac and PCS in the area friends. Of course, being young and idealistic, the idea of superior marketing--superior business acumen, really--never occurred to us as the reason.
68060 worked for Amiga, and with Sheepsaver, you can run Mac OS (68k) on an Amiga......faster than on a real mac? ✔️💥
Shapeshifter, wasn't it? Sheepshaver is a Mac/PPC emulator whose name refers to the former.
I keep thinking about emulating Mac OS in Pimiga... i dunno though what i could run that would even be interesting now though. certainly not Tetris. Maybe some old bbs software or something totally rare.
Because there never was any 060 upgrade card for the Mac. Supposedly one company made a prototype but dropped it because it didn't perform as well as PowerPC.
@@maighstir3003 Nice Thanks your right. I get the 2 mixed up. never had to use either of them. I find them both interesting and then im at a loss for discovering what of interest i would install. Something uniquely appropriate that was on nothing else.
Neat to see this in action with it's rom card approach. I definitely like the idea, as only needing to possibly get a spare Plus ROM upgrade kit and an 800k external drive would definitely make it a cost-effective option, and the ability to forgo both and do it all in software is a nice touch. Our house had always been a hand-me-down PC kind of household for most of my adolescence, so my experiences getting Mac software running would have been through Fusion PC or SoftMac. It's always interesting to see solutions like this that were available when the actual product was still on the market.
brony 🤢
The fastest Mac was actually an Amiga. Apple never made an 060 Mac, but there was an 060 Amiga. Hence, the Amiga could run Mac OS quicker than a Mac.
And now there's the Vampire...
WRONG THINK AGAIN BUD THE MACS HAD POWERPC 601 BY THEN AND COULD RUN IT *FAST*
@@craigjensen6853 Calm down. You're embarrassing yourself. Perhaps you should go read about it and get back to me.
It kinda reminds me of the time around 2017-2018 when Hackintoshes were better Mac Pros than an actual Mac Pro (which at the time was the trashcan).
The 060 came out at the same year as PowerPC Macs, but at an earlier point it was certainly true
Back in the day I put Mac ROMs in my Atari 520 ST. Also made an IDE adapter and had a hard drive. Probably the first Hackintosh :)