Crowd sourced error checking is a wonderful thing! Thanks for your feedback I've made the corrections and we're back online. If you used Shapeshifter back in the day I'd love to hear of your experiences and uses. Links are in the description if you wish to set this up and you may also like to explore Fusion and Basilisk II as alternative emulators. Neil - RMC
Great video, I used Shapeshifter for all it was worth on my high-end Amiga 4000 in the 90's (68060@75MHz, RTG graphic card, dedicated MAC formated harddrive, SCSI CDROM). Adding a graphic card made all the difference in the world sort of when it came to running Shapeshifter. I also tested out running Mac OS on two monitors using extended desktop (Amiga AGA and RTG).
I've used Basilisk II in the past to emulate m68k-based Macs on my PC - using up to MacOS 7.6, and also SheepShaver (a word play on Shapeshifter) to emulate PowerPC models, which can run up to MacOS 9.0.4 IIRC (or is it 9.1? I can't remember). Never had an Amiga, but did have some m68k Macs; currently I have a G3 beige, a G4 blue and a G5. Never used any Intel macs. I also have a FrankenMac which I built from parts - essentially a G4 Sawtooth upgraded with a CPU from a Quicksilver model, 650MHz on a model that theoretically never supported over 500 (it's a 867MHz CPU running at 650 due to the lower FSB of the Sawtooth). Because of the mod it won't fit in an Apple case so I stuffed it in a beige ATX full tower from the late 1990s. :)
The Amiga was an amazing piece of technology. It’s such a shame that Commodore didn’t push it further and keep up with the changes in the market. We could be seeing a very different computer world if they had.
The new owners of the Commodore started by dropping the ball by slashing it’s R&D department (read: future Amigas in development), and then following horrible marketing advice for the CDTV, not even mentioning bankrupting the company by questionable means. They had the gold goose itself of the future computing and they utterly blew it, …and we have been stuck with Macro$**ks Windoze “95 and its successors ever since. :/
Windows 95 died with Windows ME. Everything since has been Windows NT (Windows 2000 was originally slated as NT 5). That being said, I would have loved to see where the Amiga would have ended up. At first, I thought that they would have ended up like Apple, basically making Wintel boxes running their own *nix, but maybe the great consolidation would have ended up happening around Amiga or at least they would have forced the market in different directions. I guess we'll never know.
@EpicureMammon: Hence I wrote “…and its successors…”! My venerable Amiga still seems to outperform my 21. century PC Windoze on two basic fronts (and it does certainly not run Win“95): • Firstly, on occasion my PC Windoze seems to suffer from a bad case of CPUfreeze when; going between files, opening up files, and making New Files. That just doesn’t happen on my Amiga 2000! • Secondly, both the text cursor (and sometimes the mouse cursor too) on my 21. century PC slows to a point where it freezes. Not surprisingly text input often has a lot of latency on said PC, …that still doesn’t happen on my gorgeous Amiga bought in 1989! Often have the feeling we are living in Biff’s alternative world, and the proper timeline Martin McFly left in Doc’s DeLorean was the one where Amiga and Workbench reigned supreme in 2015 and youngsters went about their business on hoverboards! *sigh*
At the computer store I used to work at, we had an Amiga 4000, with a 68040, an AmaxII card, a 24 bit graphic board, and a network card. I think it had 8 megs of RAM and a 500 MB HD. It was about a third of the price of a similar outfitted Mac, and blew it out of the water in performance. At the time, I think the Ethernet card for the Mac was the same price as the Amiga alone.
I worked in the IT dept at a school in London. We had BBC B, Archimedes, Macs (LCIII & 475's) and PC's. I would bring my Amiga 1200 in (68030 @50 at the time) and run emulators of all the systems on the Amiga (still used Beeb BASIC on the Arch) and while the PC emulation was slow it was usable for what I was doing. However, the other emulators were as fast if not faster than the systems being emulated and that included the Mac. The IT director was a huge Mac fan and one day saw me using my Amiga and asked what I was doing, so I explained that it was easier for me to use the emulators to create work across the systems. I then showed her running Shapeshifter and doing all the same work we used them for then without quitting I jumped to the BBC emulator and ran a program I had done, while the program was running I jumped to the PC emulator and ran a game (Moria maybe?) and just for giggles I jumped back to the Amiga loaded a MOD to play, formatted a floppy and while it was doing that jumped back to the Mac and proceeded to use Pagemaker and an Art package (I think it was Photoshop) the look on her face was priceless she didn't know what to say, she just blubbered something and left.
PC's at schools have never been fast, sometimes you see new iMACs in art classes, but until the latest iMAC Pro they have never been really fast either. And not to forget the force to use MS Office
The PCs of today do this regularly. Just today, I used my MBP to play a MOD playlist (timely nod to the Amiga there) while I coded in a Linux VM and jumped over to a Win 7 VM to run some Windows-only file conversion app.
Nick Wallette The PCs of today yes, but we are talking nearly twenty years ago. The Amiga really was so far ahead of its time that it couldn't succeed...
Actually, the Atari ST emulated the Mac first, with the Magic Sac (which evolved into the Spectre 128 and finally the Spectre GCR). So, the Atari ST was the very first Hackintosh.
@tone167 I think the Atari ST was referred as the "Jackintosh" when it was introduced, as by that point Jack Tramiel was running things at Atari. But yeah it isn't a stretch to Hackintosh later on.
Actually the Atari ST, I believe, offered the first Mac emulated experience of the Mac SE via their monochrome display. The ST had a higher resolution screen and ran 10 percent faster than the Mac itself. At this time, Apple made it very hard to obtain Apple roms or drives because the ST was substantially faster, yet cost substantially less to purchase. However, years later the 1200 made a wonderful colour Mac.
When I was in college learning graphic design back in 1998 I had an Amiga 4000T with 68060 plus one of those amazing graphic card upgrades (name alludes me now) I had a zip drive too. College was all Mac's with the current Adobe software. I copied Photoshop to a zip disk, brought it home and ran it in Shapeshifter. It worked amazingly well. I actually completed a lot of projects in Photoshop while using my Amiga. It's sad that Adobe didn't ever port Photoshop to Amiga OS, as it clearly would have run just fine with modern accelerated hardware. It's also sad, that the Photoshop clone put on on the Amiga just wasn't up to snuff.
I used Shapeshifter on both my Amiga 1200 with a DKB1202 expansion (added 8MB Fast RAM and a 16MHz 68882 FPU), and later on, my Amiga 4000/040 with 18MB RAM (2MB Chip, 16MB FAST) 6x CD-ROM and 200MB HDD. I didn't really do anything useful, but I was proud of having a machine that could run almost any software available, as I also had PC-Task, and would show people that I could run MS-DOS, Macintosh System 7, and AmigaOS all on the same machine, all at the same time - along with any software that would run on them. Sure PC-Task was too slow to be really useful for much, but it worked, and Shapeshifter worked much better than my friends who had "real" macs - which were Mac Plus or Mac Classic systems, which even my 1200 ran rings around, and the 4000 stomped all over.
I am jelly, I must admit. It would have a lot of fun to have an Amiga back in the day. As it was, I had never even heard of the thing. No regrets, though, that I always had a Mac to work, play and design on.
The Amiga was a great deal of fun, for me, it was the last "fun" computer, due to it's amazing flexibility and the fantastic software that was available for it and often came bundled with it, such as Deluxe Paint IV, which enabled anyone to play with animation using features such as anim-brushes, where you could make say 100 frames and then paint each frame as you so desired, being able to pick up any region of the screen as a 'brush' and paint with that, also there were perspective features that worked on the brushes in 3D space... And that's just DPaint, just one of many fantastic applications that I got many years of enjoyment out of.
And to top all the emulations off, the fact that often you could just drag down the menu bar and show an Amiga program working in the background was always priceless :)
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Well. If you aren't impressed enough then just try to do it the other way around. Emulate the Amiga on the Mac. Good luck :D
@@moow950 I think he was referring to a Mac of the relevant time period. 68000 series Mac weren't capable of emulating an Amiga, Power Macs never successfully emulated the Amiga well, with various problems from speed to graphics to sound. It took Apple abandoning PPC and moving to x86 in 2006 to emulate an Amiga from 1985 (ahum in my best spongebob voice over "21 years later!") successfully.
The Amiga cheats by offloading graphics onto custom chips which free up the equivalent 68k chip to be a bit faster than it would be on a same chip Mac of the 68k era. It would still be missing much of the network capability of that 68k mac since there's no native ethernet.
I was a desktop Publisher back in 1989. I had an Amiga 2000 setup with AMAX Macintosh Emulator software (it also had a Mac Rom dongle). I ran it as a Macintosh more often than I did as an Amiga. I used Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. I chose the Amiga specifically because it ran faster than the equivalent Macintosh system. I also wasn't restricted to using Apple printers. The fact that Amigas were faster was a well known fact among desktop publishers of the day.
@@IsaacKuo I got them from a computer dealer who sold both Apple and Amiga systems. My guess is he ordered them from Apple as "repair" parts and sold them to me. I did see some sold in the back of Amiga magazines. Now you can get the Rom images off the internet for use in emulators.
My IIci has 64 megs of ram, 4 meg video card. it can do like 20,000 polygons without texture mapping. saving large pictures to multiple floppies is slow as heck though.
Oh you have no idea.... It took a week to render some graphics. If you attended raves in the late '80s early '90s, chances are those fancy 3D techno graphics full bleed colorful glossy flyers you received were designed by some friends and I using Imagine on an Amiga. We must have done hundreds here in the States. Here's a fun fact... The typos and misspellings were my bad. We were in high school and almost always drunk when designing them.
Didn't see your first upload, but these 80's and 90's computers are so fascinating. Can't wait to get my hands on an Amiga down the road and try it out.
I ran it on my A2000 with a GVP 030 card and an extra 8MB of RAM. I was a poor college student at the time, so I only had demos for it. A10 Cuba ran incredibly smoothly. I think I tried Marathon and the first Warcraft game, too. I miss that machine.
I got this going back in the day on my A1200 with 040/40 card. I only really did it just to see it. I didn't have any Apple software at all so all I ended up doing was shifting some windows around. It did feel like a real achievement though. I emulated a completely different computer that was available to buy in the shops! haha Sadly I didn't have anyone to brag to about this so I just ended up deleting all the Apple software and moved on with my Amiga life happy that I'd made the right choice picking the Amiga.
I was an Amiga guy only until 2002 and ran both Shapeshifter and Fusion on my A500 with VXL-030 clocked at 43 MHz as well as my A4000 with CS Mk II 040/40 and CV64/3D. Never really got Basilsk to work properly, I guess I didn't bother to much since Fusion worked well enough. Mainly used it at the end for browsing the web since Amiga browsers didn't keep up but also used Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit. For DTP I still prefered PageStream on the Amiga before Pagemaker since it could do some things Pagemaker couldn't. Still play around with this a bit on my A4000 but it's just for the fun of it to show friends how good the emulation was.
The highest i tried was the v4, but for Amiga needs 3.0.5 was enough, had layers and was all i needed; i also kept the 2.5 around due to some old plug-ins they gave me like first version of KPT that did not run on PS3
Since the video went down, i'll reiterate: The Amiga 4000 got 68040 before any Mac got it, that is where the saying came from, it was told (bragged about) in magazines at the time. It probably happened again when the 060 came out.
To be fair, if the operations were 68k native code and not ppc native, the ppc would take a performance hit due to needing to emulate the 68k instructions. It also didn't help that the first PowerMacs' Nubus implementation was slower than that of the top 68k Mac, the Quadra 840av, so anything involving an expansion card would have suffered another hit. I'm not sure how the 060 Amigas stacked up against the PPC 601 Amigas, though, as I haven't ever used any Amiga before.
The PPC 601 Macs were actually slower for 68k code than the 840AV. It was a known thing in the Mac developer community that that was the fastest Mac at the time. It took a while until apps were PPC native. If you had a PPC native app(s) that was your main app(s), then a PowerMac was your best choice.
@@RedHairdo Power Mac was released just when Commodore/Amiga went bankrupt, of course you want to compare new architecture to the now old and deceased Amiga. Can you point out the Amiga emulator for the Mac prior to OS X on Intel architecture in 2006 as I can't find it? X5000 is a licensed product with no Amiga hardware in it. It's kind of odd you think the G5 was so great when Steve jobs/Apple considered it the reason to jump to X86.
Jerri Kohl That’s exactly right. I was working at Apple back then. I kept my Quadra 650 and 840AV until I finally bought a G3 tower (although I may have had an 8100PPC at some point). System 7.1.2 on a 40MHz 68040 was a snappy system for several years. System 7.5 on a PPC 7200 was THE NIGHTMARE Mac. I had to deal with those systems while I was at Apple. There was a long period where the engineers at Apple could not get TCP/IP to reliably work in System 7.5 running on a 7200 and this went on forever. And then there was eWorld. Ha. I bet no one remembers that. It was Apple’s AOL (which Apple started anyway). I got an account and there was never anyone on the service. It was a complete ghost town. Anyway, long live the 840AV!
No, the 840av was the fastest 68k Mac. The 950 had more Nubus slots and more room for extra hard drives, but was held back a bit by the slightly lower processor and bus speed and the use of 30-pin SIMMs for memory expansion.
A 68060 Amiga was faster than the first PPC Macs, probably because Mac System 7 was still 68k code, so a PPC Mac had to emulate. I was doing digital photo compositing, vector graphics, and 3D modeling and rendering on an Amiga 3000 in the 90's. Even when it was still an '030@25MHz with a Phase V Cybergraphics64 video card, it was faster in Emplant and Shapeshifter than the first PPC Macs. It really flew when I put a Phase V 68060@50MHz in it. ae7hd.blogspot.com/2016/05/ hackaday.com/2016/06/05/how-an-amiga-graphics-business-ran-in-the-1990s/
Great to see this video. My very first computer was an Amega 2000 with 2 floppy disc drives and no storage drive. I purchased it in about 1987-88. It was outrageously expensive and was considered cutting-edge for its time.
Fun fact. I was the 1000th buyer of Shapeshifter emulator on Amiga and the owner sent me a book on fractals as a prize. I think I still have it. Shapeshifter allowed me to do java programming on my Amiga through college. Painful but possible.
Amiga hardware was years ahead of it's times in many regards. We can only guess what AAA would have been like before it was scraped and Commodore folded. A bit of a shame we'll never know.
Dave Haynie has stated that AAA would've been behind the crop of PC video cards that it would have been contemporary with, sadly. Now, if the C= design team had gotten any real support from management that wouldn't have been the case: the chipset updates would've come sooner and more frequently.
Amiga hardware actually wasn't years ahead, the software and general methode of coding was just increddibly good allowing the Amiga to get a LOT of of often slightly cheaper/older/worse hardware. Technically speaking, the Mac used in this video has better hardware specs.
Price was a major reason for them being far ahead of their time. Home computers for the masses. Solid components at a fair price. Not everyone could afford a Mac. Just as later allot of people couldn't afford a Silicon Graphics workstation, ATX PC's with 3dFX and later Nvidia & ATI cards helped people get into 3d graphics.
The Amiga was years ahead in 1985, but not ahead of PCs in 1992. However, it might have been better than the Mac when it comes to video acceleration. Did the Mac have any acceleration at all back then?
AAA was ditched because it underperformed. The Hombre chipset, on the other hand, was really efficient, but too late, and Commodore inc. had such a bad management they wasted their energies on useless priorities.
Back in the day when I was studying at UEA, I ran ShapeShifter on my Amiga 3000. 25Mhz 68030 goodness, I can’t remember if it had an FPU. It was WAY faster than the Mac labs that UEA had at the time. Needless to say, I used Code Warrior on my Amiga rather than the labs at school and got further ahead on the one and only game I’ve written from scratch.
Back in the early 90s the company I was working for at the time (NewTek) was Amiga based but we used macintoshes for our local office email. It was much faster than the physical mac I had in the office for doing the same thing. This was on an Amiga 4000 tower at the time and I really wish I could have kept that one.
That's really cool. Didn't either Dana Carvey's brother work there as well? Or was it Mike Myers' brother? I remember one of them wearing a NewTek t-shirt in Wayne's World II. Back in the day, the local cable company used a toaster to display their channel guide. I found that out when I turned on my TV one day and saw the Guru Meditation Error. LOL. Good times.
Hi! :) I really enjoy your channel! You asked for folks that used Amigas as daily drivers. I'm here! Long story that starts in 1990. My former high school (1988 grad) math teacher brings me a dead C64, asking if I can fix it. He said he was trying different power supplies. Long story short, replace the 5V reg, and it was happy. About a month later, he gave me an SVHS cassette recorded from his Amiga 500, and asked if I had heard of it. I hadn't, but I fired-up my C128, started DesTerm, and did some research. Skipping ahead (I obviously fell in love with it!) I went to work for an Amiga shop in 1991 after repairing a malfunctioning A500 on the fly in-front of the owner. In that shop, we used a stock A600 running Best Business Management, and Epson inkjet as our POS system. We had a Mac Quadra sitting right beside an A4000, and morons still left to buy a Mac, because it "looked better." I don't get it. Anyways, while working there for awhile, we sold a VideoToaster4000, an additional A4000 with SuperGenII genlock/overlay, an A1200, and several CD32s with sidecar A1200 expansions for student workstations to a school in Arkansas. They also got a KitchenSync, and a few more timebase corrector cards, housed in an old 286 case. The Toaster was obviously running it's software. The other A4000 with GenLockII was running ScalaMM 400 for adverts / announcements. The A1200s were running DPaintIV. They were used by the art students to generate backdrops for the text. We were live on two cable TV systems in the city, both on RamChannel-48. The newby students attending 1st period were given an opportunity to read AP stuff from a teleprompter while being recorded (onto a Panasonic AG-1970.) That footage was broadcast during 2nd period. 3rd period was LIVE! We used the Toaster as a video switcher and effects box, while using Scala and the SuperGenII as graphics overlay. Those were the days!
No surprise that a cheaper computer beats an expensive Mac, hasn't this always been the case? The gulf is even wider today, with Windows PC's crushing the Macs over three times the price of them. Apple seemingly always placing style and ease of use over speed.
Wow, an A1200! I did all my 3rd Year uni essays on one of these (in between playing Pinball Dreams until I became an all-time expert). It was nicked from the back of my brother's car in London in 1995 which was a nuisance because all those essays were on the hard drive - and not backed up, of course! If the thief still has it then I'd very much like those files back if you don't mind. What? You flogged it for 20 quid to a fence in South Harrow? Oh dear.
Me too, with a hacked copy of final writer. It was an amazing word processor. In retrospect I should have bought that software as it got me though my school years.
I remember throwing every OS I could find onto my 030 50mhz A1200. Windows 3.1 worked in PCTask but was slow, Windows 95 installation failed (yes, I tried installing from floppy), and Red Hat installation failed as well due to lack of MMU or FPU. Shapeshifter allowed for some serious work though - and Star Wars: Dark Forces of course! Amazing to see it compared to the real thing.
This is such a SICK coincidence! I literally had those exact computers, and I literally still do! The LC III/Performa 450 was the next computer I had after my Amiga 500+ back in the 90's, and I can totally see and understand the saying and the general sentiment- Macintosh (as was their name during the first 20 years of my life...) made great hardware around then, and while the Performas were a far cry from anything resembling actual performance, they had it where it counts, and you could tell that a lot of thought and micromanaging of detail went in to that line of products. The Amiga and the Performa reminded of each other quite a bit- and just the good bits! I still have both, lying on my shelf. Memories...
There were a lot of people running Mac software on the Amiga for a long time. In 1990 Amax II running on an A500 with a few megs of ram in black and white mode could outperform all the 68000 Mac line and some of the higher specs as well. I believe that was because in the 2 colour mode they could use the custom chips to draw the screen much faster than the Mac hardware could, and with little or no CPU overhead. I remember one of the guys at Amiga Format saying that Amax on his 7mhz A2000 was outperforming some of the 030 Macs that they had in the office on some tasks. The label of the fast possible Mac being emulated on an Amiga was because the 68060 line was never available on the Mac. The fastest would now probably be a Vampire running on an A600 or A500. Something that I was not sure about from the video, was the Amiga actually accelerated? You would expect an accelerated Amiga to outperform the Mac more or less in relation to the difference in processor speed. However, if the Amiga does not have a graphics card in place, there is a large overhead as the CPU needs to do the chunky to planar conversion (which the mentioned Akiko was designed to do, not particularly well). I am pretty sure that there was an Akiko Chunky to Planar routine out there. Amiga's with a half decent processor and a graphics card absolutely flew with Shapeshifter or Fusion.
The MacOS had no way of exploiting the Amiga's elegant custom hardware. That the Amiga was still a faster Mac is testament to how well-engineered the hardware is.
@@RedHairdo FPU requires FPU specific software, normally rendering software has an option to run that executable but little else uses it (I believe a few flight sims did but that's all) Custom chipset capable of moving up to 1 million pixels a second, 8 reusable per scan line sprites, stereo PCM sound, 64 colours on screen while scrolling 4096 colours pictures and all of this was DMA driven on an off tick of the CPU so that the CPU was not bottle necked unlike the Mac. of course this was from the original Amiga and the Mac still had 2 colours and mono sound at that time!!! I consider that well engineered. The Amiga could do everything the Mac could do for less $$ and then do more. And just to jab that point home when Video toaster was was released for the Mac and won best product at the show, what you was getting was an Amiga (with a sticker over the badge) attached to a Mac via a serial cable and a piece of software that displayed the Amiga software over the serial and everything was done on the Amiga. Basically the Amiga was using the Mac as a basic terminal SMH.
@UCx4zgoiHGoW2_g_QILT0Dyw It Virtualizes the CPU with just a few bits emulated (unless you have a 68060 which requires more emulation for the MMU and FPU) and the Video, sound and IO are emulated
@@MrChiel78 Modified software isn't emulation. Software doesn't get emulated, hardware does. It's more like changing the drivers to custom ones than anything else.
I remember hearing that back in the day. I also remember hearing from the pro-mac salesmen at the software stores that it wasnt true. Now I know, thanks
I grew up with classic Macs in the US in the 90's, and had never even heard of an Amiga or Commodore until a few years ago. Seeing this and other videos about modern Amiga users makes me want to play around with an Amiga, and knowing I could also play my old classic Mac favorites is a major bonus.
I was never, ever an Apple computer fan, but in hindsight I wish I had kept my souped-up (for the time) A1200 to run Shapeshifter on along with then-current Mac OS (7 whatever) to use as a daily driver rather than bail and go entirely PC. Then I could've had the best of both worlds for a few more years. At the time, my 1200 was specced out with an 030/28, 4mb RAM and a 60mb HD...
Fantastic video. I too had an Amiga 3000 back in the day which ran Emplant, a MAC emulator. It was faster than the actual Mac it was emulating. If memory serves it came on a zorro card for peripherals. I bought roms and macOS 6. Love this channel. Pip pip, cheerio from Canada.
I also used the Emplant board... I have it in a A4000/60 It was a fantastic board at the time.. I have the fully kitted out version which has built in SCSI & Appletalk and hardware to read/write Mac 800k disks. There was also an add on module for 586 processor emulation to allow you to run Windows / OS/2. It was supposed to eventually add other emulation modules including Atari ST, C64 and others I don't remember
This basically compared a Mac from 1993 to a 3rd party CPU board from 1995, the same year people were buying Pentium 200 and running Windows 95. By 1995 the market for both these machines was effectively dead, so that's probably another reason that the CPU-board was so cheap.
He could have compared it to an Amiga 4000 with a 25MHZ 68040 that was released in 1992. It would have been twice as fast the 3rd party CPU board in the A1200. Not sure about the market for 68k Macs, but the Amiga was still in production in 1995 and 1996 (by Escom at this point). By 1997-98 the Amiga market was starting to go down hill.
I used to run a mac emulator on my A600 around 1993. We had Macs at school in computer science class, and I would bring my floppy home and work on my Pascal code in the emulator. It ran great, in monochrome, similar to a mac classic.
I am not a fan of the A600 (in fact I think it was the worst of all Amiga systems) however the fact this was possible just shows how amazing the Amiga was.
I used Shapeshifter on an A3000 with 68060@25MHz turbo card, and my main "application" was the Star Trek Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual. I think it was one of the first programs to use the then new Quicktime VR, which combined with the Quicktime movies created a really great immersive experience. I recently reactivated the machine, found some System 7 disks and still have the STNG-ITM CD. Can't wait to hang out in Ten Forward again :)
Great video, really happy to see someone actually trying and testing such things and always happy to see a new RMC video in my subscription feed! Keep it up!
That urge is fully justified, have fun! I sometimes play the Macintosh version of The Incredible Machine on my expanded A600 via ShapeShifter while listening to tracker music just as your example with Prince of Persia.
Wow. I used to have an Amiga 500 (my first home computer). I worked with Macs at my job, and one reason I bought the Amiga was because I heard about the Amax emulator. So I thought I'd get a cheaper Amiga and get it to run Mac software as well and have the best of both worlds. Only after I bought the Amax did I realize I had to have a Mac ROM for it to work. I think I managed to find one to buy through the mail, but I think it ran pretty slow. And the other problem was I couldn't figure out how to get Mac software in the emulator. Eventually, I bought a Mac LC II to work on at home and used the Amiga just for fun. But I would have loved it if I had got my system to work like the Amiga on the video!
Yeah, you would have needed a Mac-compatible floppy drive to get the software in. And an accelerator as well, to run at a decent speed. A500's stock processor (7.16 NTSC/7.09 PAL MHz 68000) is actually a little slower than the original Mac (7.83MHz 68K). The Mac LC II had a 16MHz 68030. But several options were available to get to that level and higher (albeit expensive, though probably not as expensive as an equivalent Mac). I remember in like '91 or '92 having an Amiga 500 and lusting after a Mega Midget Racer (and yes I knew it was a rather silly name for a really neat piece of hardware) which I think went up to at least 33MHz 030 if not 40MHz... also with fast 32bit memory and 68882 math coprocessor support... I eventually ended up getting an A4000 instead, although I think I might have in hindsight had more fun Frankenstein-ing my A500. I had already done so to some degree with an ICD AdSpeed (14.32MHz 68K) and baseboard (4MB memory trapdoor) and upgraded the ROMs to 2.04 and the Agnus to fatter... so I had 1MB chip and 3.5 mb of fast ram... or whatever... plus I had an 80MB hard drive in a Trumpcard 500 enclosure hanging off the side, and a USRobotics Courier HST (later flashed to v.34/v.90/v.92) modem for high speed warez leeching... not a bad rig at the time.
Back in the day, I ran an Amiga 2000 with an 030 card. also had a bridgeboard in there with it's own vga card. Although it was just a stunt, I could run Amiga, Mac and DOS simultaneously.
Yup, I actually managed to have at work a B2000 with a 286 bridgeboard, VGA, and a hard-card in the PC slots, so it was a reasonable PC as well as an Amiga. We used the Amiga for some video stuff. Another department actually had a 2000 w/ Video Toaster as well.
That was a splendid comparison. Speedball II music on the end credits really does agree with me, as did your vocal mixing as they rolled up. You really should be working for the Beeb. Amiga - what a truly versatile machine.
I remember emulating ms-dos on my Amiga 500, it took about 15 minutes to load Wordperfect 5.1,but it worked, especially the emulation of 720kb PC floppy discs struck me as very futuristic.
As far as I can remember the reason the Amiga ate the apple's lunch with emulation was because of a much better system design. I can't remember the exact details however it was mostly due to the bus size between CPU and ram.. A mac using a 32bit CPU only had 8bit wide path to the ram. An Amiga using a 32bit CPU had a 32bit path to the ram. So even if the CPU speed was 25mhz on both systems, the Amiga could access its ram 4 times faster In the same number of clock cycles because it got a 4 times bigger chunk per operation. I loved my Amiga 4000 with video toaster.. 😍 Also back in the day, I remember buying a quantum 80mb scsi hard drive. In the supplier catalogue the first half was mac stuff, the second half was PC stuff. The seemingly same drive was in both sections, but cost $200 more in the Mac section. I asked the manager who I'd become friends with, is the mac drive faster? Why is it $200 more? He laughed and replied "same drive, it's just mac users are stupid and they will pay more"
I had several Amigas and two of them used Mac emulators. In the early '90s for a budget-conscious, business cooperative project, I connected a hardware-based Mac emulator, namely an external Readysoft AMAX II unit, to an Amiga 500. I also added a Commodore A2024 15" monochrome monitor. The A500 was unexpanded or accelerated yet was quite adequate for running Adobe Pagemaker, with the A2420 monitor providing 1024x1024 (PAL) resolution. We simply couldn't afford a Mac back then but the desktop publishing employee needed one and was amazed that the Amiga could do the job. We of course used Amiga software when we weren't emulating a Mac to spreadsheet our tasks and expenses and perform other chores.
Rodrigo B.P To see an Amiga run the MacOS of the time running Microsoft Flight Simulator and doing a better job, I'm just glad I made the right choice back in the day.
We wouldn't have a Hackintosh scene if IBM hadn't completely failed to deliver on PowerPC clock speeds and thermals, forcing Apple's hand in adopting Intel's architecture.
@@RedHairdo RedHairdo Can you point out the Amiga emulator for the Mac prior to OS X on Intel architecture in 2006 as I can't find it? In the end this was a look at two systems that were comparative technically, cost and time period. Not next generation systems running software that didn't actually exist when you say it did. Amiga A1200 was released in 92 and was out of production (Commodore bankrupt) in 94 . Power PC was released in 94, I guess they need Commodore to go bankrupt to compete. Still had to wait years to get an Apple OS that could preemptively multitask (OS X) Said it before ! X5000 is only Amiga in name as it has licensed the Amiga name. It has no Amiga hardware, even the OS is licensed from a 3rd party company. It's a nice idea that's expensive due to the limited market.
I drove an Amiga 4000 040 as a daily driver, having started with a series 1 500 and the changing the for a 500 Plus with hard drive. I used it for desktop,publishing and running an American Football team in the British league. I still have them both in storage and I am seriously planning to restore them to use when time allows.
You are familiar with the leaking battery issues with the A500 Plus? If not, de-solder that battery from the motherboard now! ...Oh, wait. You moved to the A4000, right?
Commented on the last one but ... the faster than a real mac thing applies to the fusion emulator. According to Jim Drew in some comments on amiga.org (I think, memory is fuzzy) Fusion replaces a bunch of MacOS components with hand optimised versions that are significantly faster.
It also applies to any Amiga with a 68060 in it, because Apple never used the things themselves and MacOS was slowly ported to PowerPC with 68K emulation for... not trivial portions of the OS, so the '060 Amigas outrun any native '040 Macs on 68K code, and outrun the PPC Macs on any of the emulated 68K code, even though the PPC running native code is tangibly faster. (Especially once you get to the 604e based stuff, which was pretty beastly in all fairness.)
That 2.5" drive, being newer, may have a big speed advantage-especially in vital low-KB random reads... the HD was often a Mac's biggest bottleneck by a large margin...
I can't say for certain how fast the Amiga Connor drive was, however the 2.5" HDD's of the time were much slower than the 3.5" equivalent drives (they were designed for laptop low power use) and the IDE port on the A1200 isn't fast either (2.4 MB max) . The Mac SCSI interface could run rings around it on a hardware level (5 MB Max) but the HDD bundled with the Mac was a 3.5" 80MB 3,600 RPM drive so I'm unsure of how quick either was (one thing is for certain neither would have been considered quick)
scsi drives are faster than 2.5 IDE, and 3.5 IDe of that era. SCSI requirs no CPU control (DMA) - Bottlenecks are usually in the contoller arhitecture and memory access configs.
@@TheSudsy As a generalization that's true, however the SCSI drive in use was a cheap slow one and the implementation in the LCIII was the same as the LC & LCII which was well below optimal (Prior to the LCIII they had a data bus that had been slow). It was the slowest version of the AM85C80 and that would have caused some bus clashing even with DMA. Originally I found that the LCIII should have been capable of 5MB Max, however due to the way it was used I have read that it was actually ~1.5MB. Basically Apple took a race car and removed a wheel or two. I remember reading that Seagate used to use the Amiga to test their drives as they were faster than the Mac. Makes sense now.
I had that exact setup A1200 with Phase 5 68030/50/882/50/SCSI 16Meg Fast with altec SCSI to CF-card interface and it boots from CF and i still have this machine :)
ehr...1mb Ram was common on 286 machines or lowend 386sx, in 1992 and 1993. Windows 3.1 came out on 1992 and it ran better on 4mb ram. I remember that PC memory mapping was a bit frustrating, having conventional memory (0-640k), expanded memory (till 1mb), end extended memory (over 1mb), and these mapping needed proper setup (EMM386.sys, Himem.sys). I bought 8mb ram for my 486dx4 just before Windows 95 came out, and after a while maxed it with 16mb ram. Cheers, M
Memories...in 1996 my second PC was an Epson ActionTower 5000 486dx2/66 8mb ram, and my trusty old A2000 was maxed with a GVP 030/40Mhz and 12mb ram (still have it up and running, waiting for a V4). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC#MPC_Level en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide
Derek Tweedie You are dead wrong. Most desktop PCs for sale in 1993 had at least 4MB ram. Just look at the ads in Byte Magazine from 1993 (you can find them on archive.org), No one sold 1MB desktops then. 4MB simms cost 130-155usd in 1993. Sure some cheapo laptops had 1MB ram but most had a minimum of 2MB. So you are just dreaming up your facts, just check PC magazines and you will see that you are wrong.
Derek Tweedie OH and just for shits and giggles, look at Byte magazine from mid 1995, the norm was 16MB ram and plenty of machines sold with 32MB and only budget machines had less then 16MB ram so your computer in 1996 with 16MB was not crazy at all haha. In 1996 I had already upgraded my pentium machine to 32MB ram.
If you had access to a graphics card with chunky modes like a Picasso IV the Amiga would just obliterate an equivalent Mac. That's how I got back on the internet back on the day, as Netscape for Mac was a far superior browser to any Amiga browser of the era. I don't know what it was but there's something about the classic Mac hardware that makes it very inefficient. Maybe it's bus contention, maybe it's something to do with how the processor modes were used, I don't know, but the Mac's architecture stymied the 68K processor's real potential performance, something that the Lads from Los Gatos managed to avoid so long as you had some fast RAM in the system.
The Amiga separated the chipset RAM speed (known as Chip RAM) from the CPU RAM (known as Fast RAM) and this gave it a huge speed boost. So yes on the Mac (and PC) it was bus contention (one bus shared by all) When Jay Minor designed the Amiga he said that part of the design was to work around the 68000 inefficiencies by off loading to a chipset to make it efficient.
Excellent video as always. This was why our PCI Amiga would have been so powerful had it made it to market. Look out for David Pleasance new book to find out why.
I used an Amax II card in my A4000 back in the computer shop where I used to work back in the day. The Amiga had a 24 bit graphic board, and a stock 68040 processor, and a new thing called an ethernet board. It was by far faster than the best Mac of the day, and even with the extra boards, it was less expensive.
No, it was marketed awfully. The Amiga could run Apple software faster than an Apple, and the complete combination was cheaper than an Apple was. It could also run as an IBM compatible - but if you told somebody that back in 1988 - the first thing the person would ask would be: "Amiga is a computer?" then next: "I've never heard of it." The engineering of the machine was great, but the marketing was terrible. The marketing stressed how great it was for playing video games (and it was), but not how it could be used for work. Most Amiga users didn't even know it could run as an IBM compatible, and those that did would ask "why would I want to downgrade my machine to a piece of crap IBM compatible?" - well you wouldn't, but an office worker would want to be certain that the programs everybody else in the office used, would work on their computer too. People simply didn't know this could be done.
@@fuzzywzhe A Bridgeboard was never a downgrade since the IBM was hardware emulated on the Amiga and you needed a Zorro II at least. If not to run a AT/XT it was to be able to have a huge HHD, HDF and CD-ROM. Because of the hardware emulation you can switch on the fly between PC and Amiga. With a 8Mb fast memory Zorro II expansion the Amiga outperformed any AT/XT of that time though only 4Mb could be used at that time together with a Bridgeboard due to Zorro II limitations.
Biggest issue with the Amiga is that the hardware never kept up. IBM PC had 256 colour VGA graphics in 1987, whilst it took until almost the end of 1992 for the Amiga to get it with AGA. IBM PC had 9 channel sound in 1987 (AdLib), but the A1200 still had 4 channel sound from 1985...
@@yukatoshi Very true. However, CGA cards ability to scale enabling games such as Wolfenstein produced the killing blow. The once more capable custom video hardware via 2D could not keep up to the explosive FPS games. I am impressed with what many developers did with games such as Gloom, but it simply was not enough. Also the hardware expansion paths available were far too expensive and with machines like the A500, quite limited.
Out of curiosity, does Shapeshifter have any connection to the modern day 68k Mac emulator SheepShaver? The names sound close enough that I can't see it just being coincidence
there are indeed an obvious connection between ShapeShifter (68k Mac emulation) and SheepShaver (PowerPC Mac emulation) both were originaly developed by the same guy.
I don't know whether someone commented this already, but I just go ahead: I think the graphics speed is really something you can recognize. I am not familiar with the graphics technology of the Mac, but the Amiga had this chunky-to-planar problem, i.e., having to write three color values per pixel instead of just one, e.g., on the PC. I may be wrong, but you can see a very annoying delay in the graphics on the AMIGA. In the light of history, the AMIGA was ahead of its time to produce steady graphics, but when playing animations or videos with the old graphics modes it had a disadvantage. Are you able to comment on this with more knowledge that me? :) I cannot remember the exact details there. Update: I should have watched the video to the very end, where you comment on the graphics conversion already :) Sorry.
If the prices are comparable then the Amiga really does have a price/performance advantage over the LC III. But the LC III is at an incredible disadvantage here being a non-FPU 25mhz 68030 where as the Amiga with an accelerator card has both an FPU and a 50mhz 68030, strictly hardware wise this is not a very fair comparison if you're only trying to ascertain performance per clock "emulation" vs native. The LCIII has similarly specced accelerator cards that would probably allow it to match the Amiga's performace quite easily. I suppose it'd be good to define your terms before you start, are you comparing dollar to dollar performance, overall maximum performance, clock for clock performance, which one is it? It's also difficult to call Amiga's multitasking an advantage since if you install Mac OS 8 on the LC III you get similar abilities, since they use very similar hardware and the 68030 is identical between both machines (this is literally all just down to the kernel and OS software).
Flüg A Mac accelerator would be fun to try as would dropping an FPU into it. When I show the benchmark of the LCIII with FPU it's a lot closer, I'm not sure how much that would have cost in 1993/4, and as I say at the end it's fast and loose, there are faster Macs and there are fasted Amigas but it was fun to see what the Amiga could do with this software.
It was fun to watch! I had no idea you could straight emulate a 68k mac on an Amiga, it actually has me interested in getting an Amiga to do play with. Currently I have an LC III with a 50mhz 030 + FPU acceletor card and also a LC475 with the 68LC040 (even without an FPU the LC475 still seems to edge out the 50mhz 68030). I was very young when these machines came out so didn't have much of a choice but to game on a 68030 LCIII. The accelerator I have now is a DiiMO 030 and apparently retailed for $199 www.micromac.com/products/diimo_030.html.
I agree with the disadvantage you mentioned. However, the A1200 was a) Emulating b) running a GFX Chipset on 14MHz only. No matter how fast the Blizzard card was, the Mainboard remained on 14MHz. ;-)
Not that I think it would have made a difference, but as they aged, a number of those spin drives have gotten rather slow, and replacement disks become a must. Of course that would apply equally to both systems, but my LCIII benefitted from a replaced harddrive.
I also have a place in my heart for the Mac, as when my main system an A2000/GVP 040/33 with its GVP gfx, toccata, SD64, Picasso-II, A2286, paradise VGA died, i bought a Pulsar-II+ mac clone with dual 604e and 256megs, later upgraded to G3....And the reason why the Mac is so "slow" is the fact that everytime you do a cold startup (power on) it checks its ram read/write and it takes longer when more ram is installed...i still wait for at least one minute more when my P-II+ G3/786Megs boots for the first time after real power off.
The LCIII at least has a proper 32bit data bus though unlike the crappy LC/LCII. Having a 32bit data bus Amiga against a hampered 16bit data bus LC/LCII would indeed be pretty unfair comparison wise. Also the 68030 in the Amiga is double the speed! Having said that I used Amigas in the 90s to emulate Macs they did indeed perform easily as good as the equivalent Mac. Once you got a 68040 40MHz or better, they were pretty awesome against the late Quadras and Centris machines, and they even held their own against the early PPC machines given they often hampered by having to emulate the 68k for a lot of the mainstream software that wasn't yet ported to the PPC. The really weak link for emulating a Mac on the Amiga was the Amiga's AGA chipset, it was pretty slow in 256 colours, but as I had a graphics card in the Amiga, that wasn't an issue (lucky me!) - although AGA in 16 colours was perfectly good. Once the faster PowerMac 7300s in 1997 and thereabouts started coming along with PPC native software on the Mac, no question that having a Power Mac with a decent 603 with native PPC was a no brainer! Hopefully that's a fairly equitable viewpoint!
The Amiga was 50mhz and also had L2 Cache... so it would be even more than double. but its accelerator was 3 years newer, so not a direct comparison imo.
I used Shapeshifter back in the day to run the Mac version of Netscape. The Amiga devs just never quite seemed able to provide a browser that was quite up to the standard of Netscape so there was no Flash and Javascript support was kind of dicey. The smulated Netscape, on the other hand, ran just fine. Could even play early Flash games in it like Slap a Spice Girl
This is a *very* cool video, bringing back memories. In my experience, the Macs of that period always seemed to be somewhat sluggish when compared to contemporary PCs. Particularly, mouse operation was very much a drag, and I usually had to max out mouse acceleration.
Well, I must say your vid made my day:) Althought I only had a C64 with a BB4 cartridge and the Datasette (or how it was called...) and never used any Macs, all my life I was sure that the Amigas were the fastest ones when it was about the graphics - especially the most powerful ones - A3000 and A4000. Back in the days I remember there was a duel between the A1200 and the Atari Falcon and it come out that the younger Falcon still was no match for Amiga. Commodores were the best:) I took a look accidentally, but it was worth.
I too was an Amigan. Started with a A500, then a 2000 which I cut a trace near my new Agnus to release an extra 0.5mb of chip mem! I put a Fusion40 in there, but then ended with a 4000 before I departed to pc. My main uses were 3d and video captions. Used Warm and Fuzzy Logic's Toaster crack to get Lightwave, but moved to 3dStudio4 (dos) soon after. For all the talk of speed, the rendering speed for fpu calculations was pretty dire. I remember using alot of Adpro, Morph Plus, Imagemaster, Broadcast Titler, DPaint IV, Scala and eventually got Opalvision 24 bit card and paint package which was - I have to say - superb, and usable professionally. First job with the Amiga though was with a local production company providing captions for the closed circuit for Crufts dog show at the NEC back in '93. Used a 1u Neriki genlock and Scala with a 16 colour palette for captions. Just made sure that my designs didn't go off screen so no-one would know we were keying an underscanned frame over pal! Amiga's and their native rgb video out was what got them where they were. When composite video was still king, and low/high band were still pro video formats - which wasn't long - Amiga was a king among serfs. I still know many gfx artists who started out on Amiga's... Imagine, Vista Pro, Lightwave, and with ARexx scripting there were pretty much a good sized bunch of well skilled 3d techie's heading towards a career in tv. Heady days.
The A1200's GFX Chipset (and totally different architecture) and Mainboard still runs at only 14MHz, plus it is emulating a Mac (while still providing native OS Operations simultaneously). ;-) Same Price range as well.
Was using Shapeshifter and Fusion Mac emulators back i the days on A1200 and A4000 with graphic card and Cyberstorm 6060 card. Was doing some Photoshop and playing Warcraft 2... it was fantastic :) thanks for the video
Ah, those were t’days. I wonder how good the Amiga would be now if Commodore had continued development. I still have my 1200 in a tower. It hasn't seen the light of day for about 15 years though.
This was a really interesting video. I was not aware that you could run the Mac operating system on an Amiga. The hardware options are very interesting for someone looking to dabble with this kind of vintage stuff.
I did run a Mac emulator back in the day in my Amiga 500. I did that to run the Mac version of Netscape which was the browser to use back in the day. But it wasn’t fast!!! This was back using a 68000 CPU.
Shapeshifter was an awesome 68k Mac emulator during the day. I used it to run Matlab and Microsoft Office on my accelerated Amiga 3000. Running in parallel with a C compiler on the Amiga side. In fact I could run MS-Dos stuff (slowly) in PC-Task as well so in practice I could run Mac, Amiga and MS-Dos at the same time in separate screens or on the same screen in separate windows. Just awesome for its day.
The superb marketing of Apple has always fooled a lot of people into thinking that Apple is better, more innovative, superior - etc. They really have amazing marketing. They have convinced a significant number of people to spend a GRAND on a *phone* that has a bill of materials of around $300. You have to respect them for that. They really do have good marketing. Their products? Engh.
Spot on fella, apple have never been anything special at all, in fact pretty far from it, but when adverts are rammed down your throat every 5 minutes people start believing it. AMD dont advertise on tv they put their money into product development instead, ryzen 2 2700x is a freaking amazing cpu
Engh, x86 is dead, ARM is going to eat their lunch over time. AMD hasn't posted a profit in over a decade. How they stay in business??? No idea. I thought that PPC or even the DEC Alpha years ago was going to be the x86 killer, but it's going to be ARM. Everybody uses ARM, it's everywhere. It's a beautiful architecture, wonderful assembly, and it's easy to port to. My next desktop is going to be an ARM variant of some sort, tired of this crap x86 architecture. It's basically a space heater. I've got an "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770S CPU @ 3.10GHz" - this is more than the enough power. I think an ODroid would handle about everything I want. I've not thought "gee, I wish my processor was faster" in about 15 years, and I'm an electrical and computer engineer. Heck, I don't even want a higher resolution monitor anymore. The future is going to be low power CPUs, even for servers and that's ARM.
Just had to lol at this comment, amd have done better in the last 12 months than ever thanks to ryzen, even beating intels 8800K, there will always be gamers demanding the best so no arm wont cut it im afraid, too slow. everyones an electrical engineer on youtube.
Amiga was the fastest Mac because Mac 68k never had 060. Amiga did and with RTG Amiga was faster. For Amiga user Mac was way to get newer software. Lots of users used Mac emulator for MS Word and mainly for internet browsers (late 90s). Also using hd images is not good on A1200, its better to make dedicated partition.
There was certainly an improvement using PFS instead of FFS for the file system and I understand more gains can be made using a drive natively, I should certainly try it. I was using the CFlash card to add sit files to the single HD file on my PC and then copying it across to the IDE drive, so it was really for convenience. I moved on to PC around 1992 so it's an era of Amiga fun I'm catching up on
TheMrKocour This is also what I always thought when I heard the saying. The sole fact that Amiga had better 68k hardware available made it undeniable. Also the version of it that I know specified "fastest 68k Macintosh is an Amiga".
lucas rem Steve Jobs did not develop the ARM processor. They was Acorn, out of the UK. Jobs did go on to create NEXT, which had an advanced Unix-based desktop operating system,which later became the basis of Mac OSX.
I miss my A500 with the attaching 20 MB HD and 2.5 MB RAM. Ironically, I just got my M4 MacBook Pro with 24 GB RAM and 1TB HD. That said, the Amiga graphics bring back fond memories
Ah, the Amiga vs Mac war- I well remember that. My computer may have been a lowly A500, but I didn't let that didn't stop me from participating in it. A couple memories from the time- if I recall correctly there was Amiga hardware available to plug a Mac ROM into, which could actually be purchased directly from Apple (the ROM, not the board). Shortly after this, Apple pulled them from sale. Also, a friend of mine in college noted (correctly or not) that Amiga GUI objects seemed to be named to make sure that Amiga didn't step on Apple's toes legally. Like "buttons" vs "gadgets." We laughed at this, but I have always wondered if Apple really would have sued over this had the Amiga had similar terms, and if Apple would have had a case.
The A-Max plugged into the Amiga external floppy port and allowed Mac drives to be plugged in. It also had sockets for the Mac ROMS to allow for legal :-/ emulation.
Apple would have never had a case. They ripped all of their crap off from Xerox, right down to the mouse pointer. As did Microsoft, except that Microsoft inverted the mouse pointer's colors. Xerox should have filed against them both. Apple _did_ file suit against Microsoft later, but failed.
All I remember was the Amiga vs Atari wars. If someone ever even mentioned Mac, the common reaction was like: "A what now?" Then at best: "I think it's one of those video editing stations." :) There were of course similar preconceptions about the only uses for both Amigas and Ataris too though.
90's from highschool to college i was an amiga guy. i had an amiga 500 and 3000. with the amiga 3000 i had both memory upgrades reaching 16 megabytes and both PC and Mac emulation by way of the Emplant emulation card. Basically the card provided what mac chips that were crucial to its replication and everything else was routed thru the amigas native chips. And trust me when i say it was fast. Not only that, since the amiga OS was true multitasking, i was able to run all three emulations at the same time!! drag down one deskop of one computer and their was the next computers OS. in fact the only emulation that was always rather slow was the PC/windows os, As windows was simply a clutter mess of an OS. Both mac and amiga OS were designed mostly light and clever. i had the thrill of going thru college utilizing all three computers under emulation. which opened the doors to using a wealth of software.
Just half through the video, but of course a 68030 @ 50 Mhz beats a 68030 @ 25 Mhz (you can basically see the double time that the Mac takes). It's impressive how little time the emulation/virtulization takes though. So yeah, the Amiga wins at being the better Apple ;)
Same processor family, so it's like running VMWare on x86, very little hypervisor overhead and no machine code translation. It's not really emulation so much as VM. You imply that it's not a fair comparison, 50 vs. 25MHz. But I'll bet that given a certain budget, say, $1000-1500, IDK, because of Apple's inflated prices for inferior spec systems, you could still buy a faster Amiga than a Mac back in the day. So is it a fair comparison? Dollar for dollar, yep.
After owning an Amiga it took about 8 years before i switched to the pc before the pc got good enough, and i only switched because i had no other choice, Apples sucked and Commodore had gone under, if Commodore had not gone under i would most likely still own an Amiga now.
I've had several Amigas, including a 1000 and a 2000 and would still be working and programming on them if Amiga had continued to exist. I stopped programming when Amiga went down because I could not in good conscience advise people to use PCs. Even now, so many years later, I find the unreliability of PCs and the software they run shocking.
I used my 1200 tower ( home modified with blizzard, a pc tower, pc psu, pc keyboard 2 harddrives, a cdrom, a midi interface ) as a "DAW" with bars&pipes for over 10 years..even in proffesional studios ... and it still works great. but ok..it only do MIDI in the DAW ( you cAN record live sound in to it ...no problem but it is best s a pure MIDI sequencer).
For a more "portable" system i had a modified A600 with a HD and a blizzard card...it was easy to put in your backpack... hoock up to any monitor and just go .. simple machine and I made alot of fun stuff with it
the most glorious time in the amiga history was when A600 and A1200 came.. they had a PCMCIA slot WICH ment .. ethernet suddenly became available ... before there was only full lenght zorro slot cards for the A2000 and A3000 ...hoocking up your A600 to a network in a copy party/ hackerens was HUGE back then....no more slow null modems :)
the TCP-IP protokoll finally came to the amigaworld and I've surfed ALOT on the web with my A600 and A1200 It was mostly IrC back then but still.... and you had grapewine to surf with.... suddenly the amiga was like the mysterios LINUx.. you could do anything you wanted to do....
oooh I could talk for hours and hours about what I used my Amigas for and how much fun it was.. and how much fun it was to be part of the development .... maybe I should star my own Amiga youtube channel about that ... I never sold or got rid of all my amigas so I still have them and they all works fine... even my Amiga cdtv wich was known for alot of problems... all the hardware hacks we did...modifying, fixing so we could show those stupid pc owners who was boss haha... great times...
Back in my day, the common saying was that Atari ST (aka Jackintosh) was faster at being a Macintosh from the original Macintoshes. And this was in the early days of the Atari ST, without any extension boards etc.
The ST could also run Macintosh software at a higher video resolution, something the Mac couldn't do until the Mac II and SE (with video card) came out in 1987.
The quote originated at a time when the Mac used the CPU for everything, grafics, sound, and about half the time , number crunching. The Amiga's gfx coprocessors gave it a huge advantage. The Atari ST was a smidge faster. But the Mac only truly caught up when the Ami & ST were out of production.
Crowd sourced error checking is a wonderful thing! Thanks for your feedback I've made the corrections and we're back online. If you used Shapeshifter back in the day I'd love to hear of your experiences and uses. Links are in the description if you wish to set this up and you may also like to explore Fusion and Basilisk II as alternative emulators. Neil - RMC
When you re-uploaded the video, you could have read your own specs sheet correctly, @ 0:54 the 68K CPU is clocked at 25mhz not 20mhz like you said.
That is indeed a mistake you have noticed, with the correct information on the text. I hope this did not detract from your enjoyment of the video.
RetroManCave I actually played sim city 2000 on psx or ps1
Great video, I used Shapeshifter for all it was worth on my high-end Amiga 4000 in the 90's (68060@75MHz, RTG graphic card, dedicated MAC formated harddrive, SCSI CDROM). Adding a graphic card made all the difference in the world sort of when it came to running Shapeshifter. I also tested out running Mac OS on two monitors using extended desktop (Amiga AGA and RTG).
I've used Basilisk II in the past to emulate m68k-based Macs on my PC - using up to MacOS 7.6, and also SheepShaver (a word play on Shapeshifter) to emulate PowerPC models, which can run up to MacOS 9.0.4 IIRC (or is it 9.1? I can't remember). Never had an Amiga, but did have some m68k Macs; currently I have a G3 beige, a G4 blue and a G5. Never used any Intel macs. I also have a FrankenMac which I built from parts - essentially a G4 Sawtooth upgraded with a CPU from a Quicksilver model, 650MHz on a model that theoretically never supported over 500 (it's a 867MHz CPU running at 650 due to the lower FSB of the Sawtooth). Because of the mod it won't fit in an Apple case so I stuffed it in a beige ATX full tower from the late 1990s. :)
The Amiga was an amazing piece of technology. It’s such a shame that Commodore didn’t push it further and keep up with the changes in the market. We could be seeing a very different computer world if they had.
The new owners of the Commodore started by dropping the ball by slashing it’s R&D department (read: future Amigas in development), and then following horrible marketing advice for the CDTV, not even mentioning bankrupting the company by questionable means. They had the gold goose itself of the future computing and they utterly blew it, …and we have been stuck with Macro$**ks Windoze “95 and its successors ever since. :/
Well, we all might something derived from DR-DOS instead, or even PC-DOS/OS/2 if decisions were different.
Windows 95 died with Windows ME. Everything since has been Windows NT (Windows 2000 was originally slated as NT 5). That being said, I would have loved to see where the Amiga would have ended up. At first, I thought that they would have ended up like Apple, basically making Wintel boxes running their own *nix, but maybe the great consolidation would have ended up happening around Amiga or at least they would have forced the market in different directions. I guess we'll never know.
@EpicureMammon: Hence I wrote “…and its successors…”!
My venerable Amiga still seems to outperform my 21. century PC Windoze on two basic fronts (and it does certainly not run Win“95):
• Firstly, on occasion my PC Windoze seems to suffer from a bad case of CPUfreeze when; going between files, opening up files, and making New Files. That just doesn’t happen on my Amiga 2000!
• Secondly, both the text cursor (and sometimes the mouse cursor too) on my 21. century PC slows to a point where it freezes. Not surprisingly text input often has a lot of latency on said PC, …that still doesn’t happen on my gorgeous Amiga bought in 1989!
Often have the feeling we are living in Biff’s alternative world, and the proper timeline Martin McFly left in Doc’s DeLorean was the one where Amiga and Workbench reigned supreme in 2015 and youngsters went about their business on hoverboards! *sigh*
We could of had CDi Zelda games
At the computer store I used to work at, we had an Amiga 4000, with a 68040, an AmaxII card, a 24 bit graphic board, and a network card. I think it had 8 megs of RAM and a 500 MB HD. It was about a third of the price of a similar outfitted Mac, and blew it out of the water in performance. At the time, I think the Ethernet card for the Mac was the same price as the Amiga alone.
I still have my 3000/040 with a PII video card and a 386 BB. I use System 7 using "Shapeshifter."
I worked in the IT dept at a school in London. We had BBC B, Archimedes, Macs (LCIII & 475's) and PC's. I would bring my Amiga 1200 in (68030 @50 at the time) and run emulators of all the systems on the Amiga (still used Beeb BASIC on the Arch) and while the PC emulation was slow it was usable for what I was doing. However, the other emulators were as fast if not faster than the systems being emulated and that included the Mac. The IT director was a huge Mac fan and one day saw me using my Amiga and asked what I was doing, so I explained that it was easier for me to use the emulators to create work across the systems. I then showed her running Shapeshifter and doing all the same work we used them for then without quitting I jumped to the BBC emulator and ran a program I had done, while the program was running I jumped to the PC emulator and ran a game (Moria maybe?) and just for giggles I jumped back to the Amiga loaded a MOD to play, formatted a floppy and while it was doing that jumped back to the Mac and proceeded to use Pagemaker and an Art package (I think it was Photoshop) the look on her face was priceless she didn't know what to say, she just blubbered something and left.
PC's at schools have never been fast, sometimes you see new iMACs in art classes, but until the latest iMAC Pro they have never been really fast either. And not to forget the force to use MS Office
If only the computers of today could do this...
@daishi5571 I wish I'd known that while I was editing Amiga Format - would have made a great interview! :D
The PCs of today do this regularly. Just today, I used my MBP to play a MOD playlist (timely nod to the Amiga there) while I coded in a Linux VM and jumped over to a Win 7 VM to run some Windows-only file conversion app.
Nick Wallette The PCs of today yes, but we are talking nearly twenty years ago. The Amiga really was so far ahead of its time that it couldn't succeed...
that amiga can be considered the very first hackintosh if you think about it
piecaruso97 Not that one, but yeah. He says that in the video as well.
Actually, the Atari ST emulated the Mac first, with the Magic Sac (which evolved into the Spectre 128 and finally the Spectre GCR). So, the Atari ST was the very first Hackintosh.
@tone167 I think the Atari ST was referred as the "Jackintosh" when it was introduced, as by that point Jack Tramiel was running things at Atari. But yeah it isn't a stretch to Hackintosh later on.
Actually the Atari ST, I believe, offered the first Mac emulated experience of the Mac SE via their monochrome display. The ST had a higher resolution screen and ran 10 percent faster than the Mac itself. At this time, Apple made it very hard to obtain Apple roms or drives because the ST was substantially faster, yet cost substantially less to purchase. However, years later the 1200 made a wonderful colour Mac.
@@RetroDawn I owned this back in the day via ST 520FM on monochrome for university lab write ups and papers and gamed via my Amiga.
When I was in college learning graphic design back in 1998 I had an Amiga 4000T with 68060 plus one of those amazing graphic card upgrades (name alludes me now) I had a zip drive too.
College was all Mac's with the current Adobe software. I copied Photoshop to a zip disk, brought it home and ran it in Shapeshifter. It worked amazingly well. I actually completed a lot of projects in Photoshop while using my Amiga. It's sad that Adobe didn't ever port Photoshop to Amiga OS, as it clearly would have run just fine with modern accelerated hardware. It's also sad, that the Photoshop clone put on on the Amiga just wasn't up to snuff.
An Amiga is a small beast that eats Apples.
#AnimalFacts
😀
It'd be fun to emulate the Mac in UAE. Perhaps on a Raspberry Pi.
Animal Facts I'd make a "Yo dawg" joke, but I hate that meme.
I approves this fact o7
God this is so unbelievably wild. The Amiga was such an incredible little beast
The Amiga fans will love you forever!
We do
I used Shapeshifter on both my Amiga 1200 with a DKB1202 expansion (added 8MB Fast RAM and a 16MHz 68882 FPU), and later on, my Amiga 4000/040 with 18MB RAM (2MB Chip, 16MB FAST) 6x CD-ROM and 200MB HDD. I didn't really do anything useful, but I was proud of having a machine that could run almost any software available, as I also had PC-Task, and would show people that I could run MS-DOS, Macintosh System 7, and AmigaOS all on the same machine, all at the same time - along with any software that would run on them. Sure PC-Task was too slow to be really useful for much, but it worked, and Shapeshifter worked much better than my friends who had "real" macs - which were Mac Plus or Mac Classic systems, which even my 1200 ran rings around, and the 4000 stomped all over.
for me - not having PC at those days - shapeshifter was critical to deliver work in digital form when Word6.0 was a standard
This sounds EXACTLY like me. I also had a 4000/40 with 16+2MB RAM, CD-ROM and a big HDD (340 MB, I believe). Awesome machine!
I am jelly, I must admit. It would have a lot of fun to have an Amiga back in the day. As it was, I had never even heard of the thing. No regrets, though, that I always had a Mac to work, play and design on.
The Amiga was a great deal of fun, for me, it was the last "fun" computer, due to it's amazing flexibility and the fantastic software that was available for it and often came bundled with it, such as Deluxe Paint IV, which enabled anyone to play with animation using features such as anim-brushes, where you could make say 100 frames and then paint each frame as you so desired, being able to pick up any region of the screen as a 'brush' and paint with that, also there were perspective features that worked on the brushes in 3D space... And that's just DPaint, just one of many fantastic applications that I got many years of enjoyment out of.
And to top all the emulations off, the fact that often you could just drag down the menu bar and show an Amiga program working in the background was always priceless :)
Well. If you aren't impressed enough then just try to do it the other way around.
Emulate the Amiga on the Mac. Good luck :D
No problem. The Amgia runs very well on macOS th-cam.com/video/Rlfkk4Hy_2M/w-d-xo.html
@@moow950 I think he was referring to a Mac of the relevant time period. 68000 series Mac weren't capable of emulating an Amiga, Power Macs never successfully emulated the Amiga well, with various problems from speed to graphics to sound. It took Apple abandoning PPC and moving to x86 in 2006 to emulate an Amiga from 1985 (ahum in my best spongebob voice over "21 years later!") successfully.
@@daishi5571 🤦🏻♂️
@@moow950 haha compare with an old Amiga and a new Mac. Very fair? The Mac used in this video you linking to did not exist in the 90's
The Amiga cheats by offloading graphics onto custom chips which free up the equivalent 68k chip to be a bit faster than it would be on a same chip Mac of the 68k era. It would still be missing much of the network capability of that 68k mac since there's no native ethernet.
I was a desktop Publisher back in 1989. I had an Amiga 2000 setup with AMAX Macintosh Emulator software (it also had a Mac Rom dongle). I ran it as a Macintosh more often than I did as an Amiga. I used Aldus Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. I chose the Amiga specifically because it ran faster than the equivalent Macintosh system. I also wasn't restricted to using Apple printers. The fact that Amigas were faster was a well known fact among desktop publishers of the day.
Where did you get the ROMs, back in the day? I remember considering AMAX, but I had no idea where the heck to get the required ROMs.
@@IsaacKuo I got them from a computer dealer who sold both Apple and Amiga systems. My guess is he ordered them from Apple as "repair" parts and sold them to me. I did see some sold in the back of Amiga magazines. Now you can get the Rom images off the internet for use in emulators.
@@brianh9358 Thanks for the info! At the time, I had no access to any Amiga dealers at all locally.
The main thing I learned today was that graphic designers of the nineties must have been very patient indeed.
custardo A friend of mine did desktop printing and layout work on his A1000 for a local convention. It took freaking forever.
Vector gfx apps had outline-only and low quality modes for editing
Not to mention printing at hi-res mode on a dot-matrix 9-pin noisemaker. Especially using a prog to enhance the graphics!
My IIci has 64 megs of ram, 4 meg video card. it can do like 20,000 polygons without texture mapping. saving large pictures to multiple floppies is slow as heck though.
Oh you have no idea.... It took a week to render some graphics. If you attended raves in the late '80s early '90s, chances are those fancy 3D techno graphics full bleed colorful glossy flyers you received were designed by some friends and I using Imagine on an Amiga. We must have done hundreds here in the States.
Here's a fun fact... The typos and misspellings were my bad. We were in high school and almost always drunk when designing them.
Didn't see your first upload, but these 80's and 90's computers are so fascinating. Can't wait to get my hands on an Amiga down the road and try it out.
I ran it on my A2000 with a GVP 030 card and an extra 8MB of RAM. I was a poor college student at the time, so I only had demos for it. A10 Cuba ran incredibly smoothly. I think I tried Marathon and the first Warcraft game, too. I miss that machine.
I got this going back in the day on my A1200 with 040/40 card. I only really did it just to see it. I didn't have any Apple software at all so all I ended up doing was shifting some windows around. It did feel like a real achievement though. I emulated a completely different computer that was available to buy in the shops! haha Sadly I didn't have anyone to brag to about this so I just ended up deleting all the Apple software and moved on with my Amiga life happy that I'd made the right choice picking the Amiga.
I was an Amiga guy only until 2002 and ran both Shapeshifter and Fusion on my A500 with VXL-030 clocked at 43 MHz as well as my A4000 with CS Mk II 040/40 and CV64/3D. Never really got Basilsk to work properly, I guess I didn't bother to much since Fusion worked well enough. Mainly used it at the end for browsing the web since Amiga browsers didn't keep up but also used Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit. For DTP I still prefered PageStream on the Amiga before Pagemaker since it could do some things Pagemaker couldn't.
Still play around with this a bit on my A4000 but it's just for the fun of it to show friends how good the emulation was.
anakondase Photoshop on the Amiga, that's just absolutely fantastic. Have to try it some day. I'm guessing version 5 or 6? :)
No, I used to run version 4.
Fun fact: Basilisk II and SheepShaver are at least named after, if not based off of the code, of ShapeShifter and Basilisk.
The highest i tried was the v4, but for Amiga needs 3.0.5 was enough, had layers and was all i needed; i also kept the 2.5 around due to some old plug-ins they gave me like first version of KPT that did not run on PS3
Since the video went down, i'll reiterate: The Amiga 4000 got 68040 before any Mac got it, that is where the saying came from, it was told (bragged about) in magazines at the time. It probably happened again when the 060 came out.
No Mac ever got an 060. They switched to PPC after the 040.
To be fair, if the operations were 68k native code and not ppc native, the ppc would take a performance hit due to needing to emulate the 68k instructions. It also didn't help that the first PowerMacs' Nubus implementation was slower than that of the top 68k Mac, the Quadra 840av, so anything involving an expansion card would have suffered another hit.
I'm not sure how the 060 Amigas stacked up against the PPC 601 Amigas, though, as I haven't ever used any Amiga before.
The PPC 601 Macs were actually slower for 68k code than the 840AV. It was a known thing in the Mac developer community that that was the fastest Mac at the time. It took a while until apps were PPC native. If you had a PPC native app(s) that was your main app(s), then a PowerMac was your best choice.
@@RedHairdo Power Mac was released just when Commodore/Amiga went bankrupt, of course you want to compare new architecture to the now old and deceased Amiga.
Can you point out the Amiga emulator for the Mac prior to OS X on Intel architecture in 2006 as I can't find it?
X5000 is a licensed product with no Amiga hardware in it.
It's kind of odd you think the G5 was so great when Steve jobs/Apple considered it the reason to jump to X86.
Jerri Kohl That’s exactly right. I was working at Apple back then. I kept my Quadra 650 and 840AV until I finally bought a G3 tower (although I may have had an 8100PPC at some point). System 7.1.2 on a 40MHz 68040 was a snappy system for several years. System 7.5 on a PPC 7200 was THE NIGHTMARE Mac. I had to deal with those systems while I was at Apple. There was a long period where the engineers at Apple could not get TCP/IP to reliably work in System 7.5 running on a 7200 and this went on forever. And then there was eWorld. Ha. I bet no one remembers that. It was Apple’s AOL (which Apple started anyway). I got an account and there was never anyone on the service. It was a complete ghost town. Anyway, long live the 840AV!
If you had a 68060 in the Amiga, then it was faster than any pre-PPC era Mac.
Quite astonishing really. And it makes you wonder how native Adobe products would have run on the Amiga
Not really surprising considering the Mac never used an 060 processor. The fastest 68k Mac used an 040 at 33MHz (Quadra 950).
Was the 33 MHz Quadra 950 actually faster than the 40 MHz Quadra 840 AV?
No, the 840av was the fastest 68k Mac. The 950 had more Nubus slots and more room for extra hard drives, but was held back a bit by the slightly lower processor and bus speed and the use of 30-pin SIMMs for memory expansion.
A 68060 Amiga was faster than the first PPC Macs, probably because Mac System 7 was still 68k code, so a PPC Mac had to emulate. I was doing digital photo compositing, vector graphics, and 3D modeling and rendering on an Amiga 3000 in the 90's. Even when it was still an '030@25MHz with a Phase V Cybergraphics64 video card, it was faster in Emplant and Shapeshifter than the first PPC Macs. It really flew when I put a Phase V 68060@50MHz in it.
ae7hd.blogspot.com/2016/05/
hackaday.com/2016/06/05/how-an-amiga-graphics-business-ran-in-the-1990s/
Great to see this video. My very first computer was an Amega 2000 with 2 floppy disc drives and no storage drive. I purchased it in about 1987-88. It was outrageously expensive and was considered cutting-edge for its time.
Fun fact. I was the 1000th buyer of Shapeshifter emulator on Amiga and the owner sent me a book on fractals as a prize. I think I still have it. Shapeshifter allowed me to do java programming on my Amiga through college. Painful but possible.
Now that is a great fun fact! Tweet me a pic if you still have the book @theretromancave
I did buy a keyfile together with two friends of mine to use full Shapeshifter capabilities
Amiga hardware was years ahead of it's times in many regards. We can only guess what AAA would have been like before it was scraped and Commodore folded. A bit of a shame we'll never know.
Dave Haynie has stated that AAA would've been behind the crop of PC video cards that it would have been contemporary with, sadly. Now, if the C= design team had gotten any real support from management that wouldn't have been the case: the chipset updates would've come sooner and more frequently.
Amiga hardware actually wasn't years ahead, the software and general methode of coding was just increddibly good allowing the Amiga to get a LOT of of often slightly cheaper/older/worse hardware.
Technically speaking, the Mac used in this video has better hardware specs.
Price was a major reason for them being far ahead of their time. Home computers for the masses. Solid components at a fair price. Not everyone could afford a Mac. Just as later allot of people couldn't afford a Silicon Graphics workstation, ATX PC's with 3dFX and later Nvidia & ATI cards helped people get into 3d graphics.
The Amiga was years ahead in 1985, but not ahead of PCs in 1992. However, it might have been better than the Mac when it comes to video acceleration. Did the Mac have any acceleration at all back then?
AAA was ditched because it underperformed. The Hombre chipset, on the other hand, was really efficient, but too late, and Commodore inc. had such a bad management they wasted their energies on useless priorities.
Back in the day when I was studying at UEA, I ran ShapeShifter on my Amiga 3000. 25Mhz 68030 goodness, I can’t remember if it had an FPU.
It was WAY faster than the Mac labs that UEA had at the time. Needless to say, I used Code Warrior on my Amiga rather than the labs at school and got further ahead on the one and only game I’ve written from scratch.
Amiga 3000's 68030 at 25 Mhz had a 68882 FPU at 25 Mhz.
God I love the Amiga! It just kicks so much arse. I wish it was still around.
Back in the early 90s the company I was working for at the time (NewTek) was Amiga based but we used macintoshes for our local office email.
It was much faster than the physical mac I had in the office for doing the same thing.
This was on an Amiga 4000 tower at the time and I really wish I could have kept that one.
Also the company that helped to bring us Babylon 5.
Awesome!
That's really cool. Didn't either Dana Carvey's brother work there as well? Or was it Mike Myers' brother? I remember one of them wearing a NewTek t-shirt in Wayne's World II.
Back in the day, the local cable company used a toaster to display their channel guide. I found that out when I turned on my TV one day and saw the Guru Meditation Error. LOL. Good times.
I remember seeing several higher end New Tek products for Amiga.
Hi! :) I really enjoy your channel!
You asked for folks that used Amigas as daily drivers. I'm here!
Long story that starts in 1990. My former high school (1988 grad) math teacher brings me a dead C64, asking if I can fix it. He said he was trying different power supplies. Long story short, replace the 5V reg, and it was happy.
About a month later, he gave me an SVHS cassette recorded from his Amiga 500, and asked if I had heard of it. I hadn't, but I fired-up my C128, started DesTerm, and did some research.
Skipping ahead (I obviously fell in love with it!) I went to work for an Amiga shop in 1991 after repairing a malfunctioning A500 on the fly in-front of the owner. In that shop, we used a stock A600 running Best Business Management, and Epson inkjet as our POS system.
We had a Mac Quadra sitting right beside an A4000, and morons still left to buy a Mac, because it "looked better." I don't get it.
Anyways, while working there for awhile, we sold a VideoToaster4000, an additional A4000 with SuperGenII genlock/overlay, an A1200, and several CD32s with sidecar A1200 expansions for student workstations to a school in Arkansas. They also got a KitchenSync, and a few more timebase corrector cards, housed in an old 286 case.
The Toaster was obviously running it's software. The other A4000 with GenLockII was running ScalaMM 400 for adverts / announcements. The A1200s were running DPaintIV. They were used by the art students to generate backdrops for the text.
We were live on two cable TV systems in the city, both on RamChannel-48.
The newby students attending 1st period were given an opportunity to read AP stuff from a teleprompter while being recorded (onto a Panasonic AG-1970.) That footage was broadcast during 2nd period.
3rd period was LIVE! We used the Toaster as a video switcher and effects box, while using Scala and the SuperGenII as graphics overlay.
Those were the days!
No surprise that a cheaper computer beats an expensive Mac, hasn't this always been the case? The gulf is even wider today, with Windows PC's crushing the Macs over three times the price of them. Apple seemingly always placing style and ease of use over speed.
Wow, an A1200! I did all my 3rd Year uni essays on one of these (in between playing Pinball Dreams until I became an all-time expert). It was nicked from the back of my brother's car in London in 1995 which was a nuisance because all those essays were on the hard drive - and not backed up, of course! If the thief still has it then I'd very much like those files back if you don't mind. What? You flogged it for 20 quid to a fence in South Harrow? Oh dear.
My Amiga 1200 had that included 40mb IDE drive in 1992 and I felt so lucky.
Me too, with a hacked copy of final writer. It was an amazing word processor. In retrospect I should have bought that software as it got me though my school years.
I remember throwing every OS I could find onto my 030 50mhz A1200. Windows 3.1 worked in PCTask but was slow, Windows 95 installation failed (yes, I tried installing from floppy), and Red Hat installation failed as well due to lack of MMU or FPU.
Shapeshifter allowed for some serious work though - and Star Wars: Dark Forces of course! Amazing to see it compared to the real thing.
This is such a SICK coincidence! I literally had those exact computers, and I literally still do! The LC III/Performa 450 was the next computer I had after my Amiga 500+ back in the 90's, and I can totally see and understand the saying and the general sentiment- Macintosh (as was their name during the first 20 years of my life...) made great hardware around then, and while the Performas were a far cry from anything resembling actual performance, they had it where it counts, and you could tell that a lot of thought and micromanaging of detail went in to that line of products. The Amiga and the Performa reminded of each other quite a bit- and just the good bits! I still have both, lying on my shelf. Memories...
Amiga is Awesome!!
There were a lot of people running Mac software on the Amiga for a long time. In 1990 Amax II running on an A500 with a few megs of ram in black and white mode could outperform all the 68000 Mac line and some of the higher specs as well. I believe that was because in the 2 colour mode they could use the custom chips to draw the screen much faster than the Mac hardware could, and with little or no CPU overhead. I remember one of the guys at Amiga Format saying that Amax on his 7mhz A2000 was outperforming some of the 030 Macs that they had in the office on some tasks. The label of the fast possible Mac being emulated on an Amiga was because the 68060 line was never available on the Mac. The fastest would now probably be a Vampire running on an A600 or A500.
Something that I was not sure about from the video, was the Amiga actually accelerated? You would expect an accelerated Amiga to outperform the Mac more or less in relation to the difference in processor speed. However, if the Amiga does not have a graphics card in place, there is a large overhead as the CPU needs to do the chunky to planar conversion (which the mentioned Akiko was designed to do, not particularly well). I am pretty sure that there was an Akiko Chunky to Planar routine out there. Amiga's with a half decent processor and a graphics card absolutely flew with Shapeshifter or Fusion.
The MacOS had no way of exploiting the Amiga's elegant custom hardware. That the Amiga was still a faster Mac is testament to how well-engineered the hardware is.
@@RedHairdo FPU requires FPU specific software, normally rendering software has an option to run that executable but little else uses it (I believe a few flight sims did but that's all)
Custom chipset capable of moving up to 1 million pixels a second, 8 reusable per scan line sprites, stereo PCM sound, 64 colours on screen while scrolling 4096 colours pictures and all of this was DMA driven on an off tick of the CPU so that the CPU was not bottle necked unlike the Mac. of course this was from the original Amiga and the Mac still had 2 colours and mono sound at that time!!! I consider that well engineered.
The Amiga could do everything the Mac could do for less $$ and then do more. And just to jab that point home when Video toaster was was released for the Mac and won best product at the show, what you was getting was an Amiga (with a sticker over the badge) attached to a Mac via a serial cable and a piece of software that displayed the Amiga software over the serial and everything was done on the Amiga. Basically the Amiga was using the Mac as a basic terminal SMH.
I had no idea you could emulate Mac OS on Amiga! Great video!
It's not emulating Mac OS, it's running it directly with some modifications to make up for the hardware differences.
@UCx4zgoiHGoW2_g_QILT0Dyw It Virtualizes the CPU with just a few bits emulated (unless you have a 68060 which requires more emulation for the MMU and FPU) and the Video, sound and IO are emulated
@@thorham1346 some modifications makes it emulation. :)
@@MrChiel78 Modified software isn't emulation. Software doesn't get emulated, hardware does. It's more like changing the drivers to custom ones than anything else.
@@thorham1346 true , you're right
I had a Cyberstorm MKII in the past, 060 at 50mhz and a SCSI interface. Mac was really flying :)
I remember hearing that back in the day. I also remember hearing from the pro-mac salesmen at the software stores that it wasnt true. Now I know, thanks
I grew up with classic Macs in the US in the 90's, and had never even heard of an Amiga or Commodore until a few years ago. Seeing this and other videos about modern Amiga users makes me want to play around with an Amiga, and knowing I could also play my old classic Mac favorites is a major bonus.
If you are still in the US, be aware of the dreaded PAL vs NTSC version complications. ;-)
I was never, ever an Apple computer fan, but in hindsight I wish I had kept my souped-up (for the time) A1200 to run Shapeshifter on along with then-current Mac OS (7 whatever) to use as a daily driver rather than bail and go entirely PC. Then I could've had the best of both worlds for a few more years. At the time, my 1200 was specced out with an 030/28, 4mb RAM and a 60mb HD...
Fantastic video. I too had an Amiga 3000 back in the day which ran Emplant, a MAC emulator. It was faster than the actual Mac it was emulating. If memory serves it came on a zorro card for peripherals. I bought roms and macOS 6.
Love this channel. Pip pip, cheerio from Canada.
Toodle pip! Thanks for watching I'll have a look at Emplant
I also used the Emplant board... I have it in a A4000/60 It was a fantastic board at the time.. I have the fully kitted out version which has built in SCSI & Appletalk and hardware to read/write Mac 800k disks. There was also an add on module for 586 processor emulation to allow you to run Windows / OS/2. It was supposed to eventually add other emulation modules including Atari ST, C64 and others I don't remember
I played Marathon with Mac OS 7.5 on my A-4000 with Cybervision and 68060 with 50 MHz. So much joy!
This basically compared a Mac from 1993 to a 3rd party CPU board from 1995, the same year people were buying Pentium 200 and running Windows 95.
By 1995 the market for both these machines was effectively dead, so that's probably another reason that the CPU-board was so cheap.
He could have compared it to an Amiga 4000 with a 25MHZ 68040 that was released in 1992. It would have been twice as fast the 3rd party CPU board in the A1200. Not sure about the market for 68k Macs, but the Amiga was still in production in 1995 and 1996 (by Escom at this point). By 1997-98 the Amiga market was starting to go down hill.
In 1993, Pentium 60 and 66 were released. A1200 had 68030 40Mhz accelerators in 1993.
Thanks for reviewing the old emulator that I wrote so I could play Marathon on my Amiga. ;-)
Hey that's great! Thank you for writing it!
I did pay for the key at the time and was money well spent!
I used to run a mac emulator on my A600 around 1993. We had Macs at school in computer science class, and I would bring my floppy home and work on my Pascal code in the emulator. It ran great, in monochrome, similar to a mac classic.
I am not a fan of the A600 (in fact I think it was the worst of all Amiga systems) however the fact this was possible just shows how amazing the Amiga was.
I used Shapeshifter on an A3000 with 68060@25MHz turbo card, and my main "application" was the Star Trek Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual. I think it was one of the first programs to use the then new Quicktime VR, which combined with the Quicktime movies created a really great immersive experience. I recently reactivated the machine, found some System 7 disks and still have the STNG-ITM CD. Can't wait to hang out in Ten Forward again :)
I think you mean 68040@25Mhz, 060's always come at least on 50Mhz on the Amiga.
No, I meant 68060@50Mhz. It's a Cyberstorm Mk2 with an 68060, and you are right, that was only available with at least 50 MHz.
Great video, really happy to see someone actually trying and testing such things and always happy to see a new RMC video in my subscription feed! Keep it up!
Thanks Ergo it was fun to make and I have an overwhelming urge to play more SimCity2000
That urge is fully justified, have fun! I sometimes play the Macintosh version of The Incredible Machine on my expanded A600 via ShapeShifter while listening to tracker music just as your example with Prince of Persia.
Wow. I used to have an Amiga 500 (my first home computer). I worked with Macs at my job, and one reason I bought the Amiga was because I heard about the Amax emulator. So I thought I'd get a cheaper Amiga and get it to run Mac software as well and have the best of both worlds. Only after I bought the Amax did I realize I had to have a Mac ROM for it to work. I think I managed to find one to buy through the mail, but I think it ran pretty slow. And the other problem was I couldn't figure out how to get Mac software in the emulator. Eventually, I bought a Mac LC II to work on at home and used the Amiga just for fun. But I would have loved it if I had got my system to work like the Amiga on the video!
Yeah, you would have needed a Mac-compatible floppy drive to get the software in. And an accelerator as well, to run at a decent speed. A500's stock processor (7.16 NTSC/7.09 PAL MHz 68000) is actually a little slower than the original Mac (7.83MHz 68K). The Mac LC II had a 16MHz 68030. But several options were available to get to that level and higher (albeit expensive, though probably not as expensive as an equivalent Mac).
I remember in like '91 or '92 having an Amiga 500 and lusting after a Mega Midget Racer (and yes I knew it was a rather silly name for a really neat piece of hardware) which I think went up to at least 33MHz 030 if not 40MHz... also with fast 32bit memory and 68882 math coprocessor support... I eventually ended up getting an A4000 instead, although I think I might have in hindsight had more fun Frankenstein-ing my A500. I had already done so to some degree with an ICD AdSpeed (14.32MHz 68K) and baseboard (4MB memory trapdoor) and upgraded the ROMs to 2.04 and the Agnus to fatter... so I had 1MB chip and 3.5 mb of fast ram... or whatever... plus I had an 80MB hard drive in a Trumpcard 500 enclosure hanging off the side, and a USRobotics Courier HST (later flashed to v.34/v.90/v.92) modem for high speed warez leeching... not a bad rig at the time.
Top retro calculator input - keep up the great work.
Cheers Lee it's the recommended way to test a calculator
Back in the day, I ran an Amiga 2000 with an 030 card. also had a bridgeboard in there with it's own vga card. Although it was just a stunt, I could run Amiga, Mac and DOS simultaneously.
Yup, I actually managed to have at work a B2000 with a 286 bridgeboard, VGA, and a hard-card in the PC slots, so it was a reasonable PC as well as an Amiga. We used the Amiga for some video stuff. Another department actually had a 2000 w/ Video Toaster as well.
The Amiga has always been my favourite Computer of all time. It’s just brilliant! Great video. ;)
That was a splendid comparison. Speedball II music on the end credits really does agree with me, as did your vocal mixing as they rolled up. You really should be working for the Beeb. Amiga - what a truly versatile machine.
My office/game 060 A2000 ran all software Amiga, Mac and Windows from their dedicated HD partition. Worked great.
I didn't know Shapeshifter was that good, I assumed it'd be rough and have a lot of bugs. An Amiga 4000 with this would have been ideal for DTP.
I did a 1200 page catalog in Quark XPress on an Amiga 2000 instead of doing it win the crappy Performa 5200s we had in the ad agency. :D
I remember emulating ms-dos on my Amiga 500, it took about 15 minutes to load Wordperfect 5.1,but it worked, especially the emulation of 720kb PC floppy discs struck me as very futuristic.
As far as I can remember the reason the Amiga ate the apple's lunch with emulation was because of a much better system design. I can't remember the exact details however it was mostly due to the bus size between CPU and ram..
A mac using a 32bit CPU only had 8bit wide path to the ram.
An Amiga using a 32bit CPU had a 32bit path to the ram.
So even if the CPU speed was 25mhz on both systems, the Amiga could access its ram 4 times faster In the same number of clock cycles because it got a 4 times bigger chunk per operation.
I loved my Amiga 4000 with video toaster.. 😍
Also back in the day, I remember buying a quantum 80mb scsi hard drive. In the supplier catalogue the first half was mac stuff, the second half was PC stuff. The seemingly same drive was in both sections, but cost $200 more in the Mac section. I asked the manager who I'd become friends with, is the mac drive faster? Why is it $200 more? He laughed and replied "same drive, it's just mac users are stupid and they will pay more"
The LC II had a 16-bit bus but the LC III had no such restriction.
I had several Amigas and two of them used Mac emulators. In the early '90s for a budget-conscious, business cooperative project, I connected a hardware-based Mac emulator, namely an external Readysoft AMAX II unit, to an Amiga 500. I also added a Commodore A2024 15" monochrome monitor. The A500 was unexpanded or accelerated yet was quite adequate for running Adobe Pagemaker, with the A2420 monitor providing 1024x1024 (PAL) resolution. We simply couldn't afford a Mac back then but the desktop publishing employee needed one and was amazed that the Amiga could do the job. We of course used Amiga software when we weren't emulating a Mac to spreadsheet our tasks and expenses and perform other chores.
Nowadays we can still say "The Fastest Apple Mac is a PC", and i'm of course talking about Hackintosh :)
Rodrigo B.P
To see an Amiga run the MacOS of the time running Microsoft Flight Simulator and doing a better job, I'm just glad I made the right choice back in the day.
We wouldn't have a Hackintosh scene if IBM hadn't completely failed to deliver on PowerPC clock speeds and thermals, forcing Apple's hand in adopting Intel's architecture.
Rodrigo: I doubt that the fastest macos-Notebook is a PC notebook, though.
@@dieklaue1 If Hackintosh works on Intel Radeon Kaby Lake G series SoC. It would be soo much more powerful than 13" Intel IRIS MacBook Pro.
@@RedHairdo RedHairdo Can you point out the Amiga emulator for the Mac prior to OS X on Intel architecture in 2006 as I can't find it?
In the end this was a look at two systems that were comparative technically, cost and time period. Not next generation systems running software that didn't actually exist when you say it did. Amiga A1200 was released in 92 and was out of production (Commodore bankrupt) in 94
. Power PC was released in 94, I guess they need Commodore to go bankrupt to compete. Still had to wait years to get an Apple OS that could preemptively multitask (OS X)
Said it before ! X5000 is only Amiga in name as it has licensed the Amiga name. It has no Amiga hardware, even the OS is licensed from a 3rd party company. It's a nice idea that's expensive due to the limited market.
I drove an Amiga 4000 040 as a daily driver, having started with a series 1 500 and the changing the for a 500 Plus with hard drive. I used it for desktop,publishing and running an American Football team in the British league. I still have them both in storage and I am seriously planning to restore them to use when time allows.
You are familiar with the leaking battery issues with the A500 Plus? If not, de-solder that battery from the motherboard now! ...Oh, wait. You moved to the A4000, right?
Commented on the last one but ... the faster than a real mac thing applies to the fusion emulator. According to Jim Drew in some comments on amiga.org (I think, memory is fuzzy) Fusion replaces a bunch of MacOS components with hand optimised versions that are significantly faster.
It also applies to any Amiga with a 68060 in it, because Apple never used the things themselves and MacOS was slowly ported to PowerPC with 68K emulation for... not trivial portions of the OS, so the '060 Amigas outrun any native '040 Macs on 68K code, and outrun the PPC Macs on any of the emulated 68K code, even though the PPC running native code is tangibly faster. (Especially once you get to the 604e based stuff, which was pretty beastly in all fairness.)
Thanks but surely the fact I know all that should be obvious from the fact I mentioned amiga.org, Jim Drew etc?
donpalmera Did you consider that other people perhaps didn't? 😉
Great thorough video. I just subscribed. The amiga deserves more credit. Impressive.
That 2.5" drive, being newer, may have a big speed advantage-especially in vital low-KB random reads... the HD was often a Mac's biggest bottleneck by a large margin...
I can't say for certain how fast the Amiga Connor drive was, however the 2.5" HDD's of the time were much slower than the 3.5" equivalent drives (they were designed for laptop low power use) and the IDE port on the A1200 isn't fast either (2.4 MB max) . The Mac SCSI interface could run rings around it on a hardware level (5 MB Max) but the HDD bundled with the Mac was a 3.5" 80MB 3,600 RPM drive so I'm unsure of how quick either was (one thing is for certain neither would have been considered quick)
scsi drives are faster than 2.5 IDE, and 3.5 IDe of that era. SCSI requirs no CPU control (DMA) - Bottlenecks are usually in the contoller arhitecture and memory access configs.
@@TheSudsy As a generalization that's true, however the SCSI drive in use was a cheap slow one and the implementation in the LCIII was the same as the LC & LCII which was well below optimal (Prior to the LCIII they had a data bus that had been slow). It was the slowest version of the AM85C80 and that would have caused some bus clashing even with DMA. Originally I found that the LCIII should have been capable of 5MB Max, however due to the way it was used I have read that it was actually ~1.5MB. Basically Apple took a race car and removed a wheel or two.
I remember reading that Seagate used to use the Amiga to test their drives as they were faster than the Mac. Makes sense now.
@@daishi5571 such is the way of Apple. Take some great hardware, throw it together and intentionally hamstring it, and charge out the yin yang.
I had that exact setup A1200 with Phase 5 68030/50/882/50/SCSI 16Meg Fast with altec SCSI to CF-card interface and it boots from CF and i still have this machine :)
Back in 1993 8MB RAM was nearly maxed out. 32MB was absolutely bonkers.
It sure was I think I had 4MB on my 486 back then
ehr...1mb Ram was common on 286 machines or lowend 386sx, in 1992 and 1993.
Windows 3.1 came out on 1992 and it ran better on 4mb ram. I remember that PC memory mapping was a bit frustrating, having conventional memory (0-640k), expanded memory (till 1mb), end extended memory (over 1mb), and these mapping needed proper setup (EMM386.sys, Himem.sys).
I bought 8mb ram for my 486dx4 just before Windows 95 came out, and after a while maxed it with 16mb ram. Cheers, M
Memories...in 1996 my second PC was an Epson ActionTower 5000 486dx2/66 8mb ram, and my trusty old A2000 was maxed with a GVP 030/40Mhz and 12mb ram (still have it up and running, waiting for a V4).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC#MPC_Level
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide
Derek Tweedie You are dead wrong. Most desktop PCs for sale in 1993 had at least 4MB ram. Just look at the ads in Byte Magazine from 1993 (you can find them on archive.org), No one sold 1MB desktops then. 4MB simms cost 130-155usd in 1993. Sure some cheapo laptops had 1MB ram but most had a minimum of 2MB. So you are just dreaming up your facts, just check PC magazines and you will see that you are wrong.
Derek Tweedie OH and just for shits and giggles, look at Byte magazine from mid 1995, the norm was 16MB ram and plenty of machines sold with 32MB and only budget machines had less then 16MB ram so your computer in 1996 with 16MB was not crazy at all haha. In 1996 I had already upgraded my pentium machine to 32MB ram.
If you had access to a graphics card with chunky modes like a Picasso IV the Amiga would just obliterate an equivalent Mac. That's how I got back on the internet back on the day, as Netscape for Mac was a far superior browser to any Amiga browser of the era. I don't know what it was but there's something about the classic Mac hardware that makes it very inefficient. Maybe it's bus contention, maybe it's something to do with how the processor modes were used, I don't know, but the Mac's architecture stymied the 68K processor's real potential performance, something that the Lads from Los Gatos managed to avoid so long as you had some fast RAM in the system.
The Amiga separated the chipset RAM speed (known as Chip RAM) from the CPU RAM (known as Fast RAM) and this gave it a huge speed boost. So yes on the Mac (and PC) it was bus contention (one bus shared by all) When Jay Minor designed the Amiga he said that part of the design was to work around the 68000 inefficiencies by off loading to a chipset to make it efficient.
Excellent video as always. This was why our PCI Amiga would have been so powerful had it made it to market. Look out for David Pleasance new book to find out why.
I used an Amax II card in my A4000 back in the computer shop where I used to work back in the day. The Amiga had a 24 bit graphic board, and a stock 68040 processor, and a new thing called an ethernet board. It was by far faster than the best Mac of the day, and even with the extra boards, it was less expensive.
No wonder Amiga failed then, they didn't charge enough for their computers.
No, it was marketed awfully.
The Amiga could run Apple software faster than an Apple, and the complete combination was cheaper than an Apple was. It could also run as an IBM compatible - but if you told somebody that back in 1988 - the first thing the person would ask would be:
"Amiga is a computer?"
then next:
"I've never heard of it."
The engineering of the machine was great, but the marketing was terrible. The marketing stressed how great it was for playing video games (and it was), but not how it could be used for work.
Most Amiga users didn't even know it could run as an IBM compatible, and those that did would ask "why would I want to downgrade my machine to a piece of crap IBM compatible?" - well you wouldn't, but an office worker would want to be certain that the programs everybody else in the office used, would work on their computer too. People simply didn't know this could be done.
@@fuzzywzhe
A Bridgeboard was never a downgrade since the IBM was hardware emulated on the Amiga and you needed a Zorro II at least. If not to run a AT/XT it was to be able to have a huge HHD, HDF and CD-ROM. Because of the hardware emulation you can switch on the fly between PC and Amiga. With a 8Mb fast memory Zorro II expansion the Amiga outperformed any AT/XT of that time though only 4Mb could be used at that time together with a Bridgeboard due to Zorro II limitations.
Society has continually demonstrated that better often does not win. Marketing strategy and image always come in first.
Biggest issue with the Amiga is that the hardware never kept up. IBM PC had 256 colour VGA graphics in 1987, whilst it took until almost the end of 1992 for the Amiga to get it with AGA. IBM PC had 9 channel sound in 1987 (AdLib), but the A1200 still had 4 channel sound from 1985...
@@yukatoshi Very true. However, CGA cards ability to scale enabling games such as Wolfenstein produced the killing blow. The once more capable custom video hardware via 2D could not keep up to the explosive FPS games. I am impressed with what many developers did with games such as Gloom, but it simply was not enough. Also the hardware expansion paths available were far too expensive and with machines like the A500, quite limited.
By contrast, when I moved from a 1040STE to a Performa 5200 in 1994, initially running MagicMac, I was amazed at the increase in speed...
Out of curiosity, does Shapeshifter have any connection to the modern day 68k Mac emulator SheepShaver? The names sound close enough that I can't see it just being coincidence
There is a link yes en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SheepShaver
there are indeed an obvious connection between ShapeShifter (68k Mac emulation) and SheepShaver (PowerPC Mac emulation) both were originaly developed by the same guy.
I don't know whether someone commented this already, but I just go ahead: I think the graphics speed is really something you can recognize. I am not familiar with the graphics technology of the Mac, but the Amiga had this chunky-to-planar problem, i.e., having to write three color values per pixel instead of just one, e.g., on the PC. I may be wrong, but you can see a very annoying delay in the graphics on the AMIGA. In the light of history, the AMIGA was ahead of its time to produce steady graphics, but when playing animations or videos with the old graphics modes it had a disadvantage. Are you able to comment on this with more knowledge that me? :) I cannot remember the exact details there.
Update: I should have watched the video to the very end, where you comment on the graphics conversion already :) Sorry.
If the prices are comparable then the Amiga really does have a price/performance advantage over the LC III. But the LC III is at an incredible disadvantage here being a non-FPU 25mhz 68030 where as the Amiga with an accelerator card has both an FPU and a 50mhz 68030, strictly hardware wise this is not a very fair comparison if you're only trying to ascertain performance per clock "emulation" vs native. The LCIII has similarly specced accelerator cards that would probably allow it to match the Amiga's performace quite easily. I suppose it'd be good to define your terms before you start, are you comparing dollar to dollar performance, overall maximum performance, clock for clock performance, which one is it? It's also difficult to call Amiga's multitasking an advantage since if you install Mac OS 8 on the LC III you get similar abilities, since they use very similar hardware and the 68030 is identical between both machines (this is literally all just down to the kernel and OS software).
Flüg A Mac accelerator would be fun to try as would dropping an FPU into it. When I show the benchmark of the LCIII with FPU it's a lot closer, I'm not sure how much that would have cost in 1993/4, and as I say at the end it's fast and loose, there are faster Macs and there are fasted Amigas but it was fun to see what the Amiga could do with this software.
It was fun to watch! I had no idea you could straight emulate a 68k mac on an Amiga, it actually has me interested in getting an Amiga to do play with. Currently I have an LC III with a 50mhz 030 + FPU acceletor card and also a LC475 with the 68LC040 (even without an FPU the LC475 still seems to edge out the 50mhz 68030). I was very young when these machines came out so didn't have much of a choice but to game on a 68030 LCIII. The accelerator I have now is a DiiMO 030 and apparently retailed for $199 www.micromac.com/products/diimo_030.html.
I agree with the disadvantage you mentioned. However, the A1200 was
a) Emulating
b) running a GFX Chipset on 14MHz only.
No matter how fast the Blizzard card was, the Mainboard remained on 14MHz. ;-)
Not that I think it would have made a difference, but as they aged, a number of those spin drives have gotten rather slow, and replacement disks become a must. Of course that would apply equally to both systems, but my LCIII benefitted from a replaced harddrive.
I also have a place in my heart for the Mac, as when my main system an A2000/GVP 040/33 with its GVP gfx, toccata, SD64, Picasso-II, A2286, paradise VGA died, i bought a Pulsar-II+ mac clone with dual 604e and 256megs, later upgraded to G3....And the reason why the Mac is so "slow" is the fact that everytime you do a cold startup (power on) it checks its ram read/write and it takes longer when more ram is installed...i still wait for at least one minute more when my P-II+ G3/786Megs boots for the first time after real power off.
Very interesting comparison. Didn’t expect the Amiga to fare so well.
I did - my first thought was that it'll most certainly beat any LC Mac. Those things are computer architecture abominations.
The LCIII at least has a proper 32bit data bus though unlike the crappy LC/LCII. Having a 32bit data bus Amiga against a hampered 16bit data bus LC/LCII would indeed be pretty unfair comparison wise. Also the 68030 in the Amiga is double the speed!
Having said that I used Amigas in the 90s to emulate Macs they did indeed perform easily as good as the equivalent Mac. Once you got a 68040 40MHz or better, they were pretty awesome against the late Quadras and Centris machines, and they even held their own against the early PPC machines given they often hampered by having to emulate the 68k for a lot of the mainstream software that wasn't yet ported to the PPC. The really weak link for emulating a Mac on the Amiga was the Amiga's AGA chipset, it was pretty slow in 256 colours, but as I had a graphics card in the Amiga, that wasn't an issue (lucky me!) - although AGA in 16 colours was perfectly good.
Once the faster PowerMac 7300s in 1997 and thereabouts started coming along with PPC native software on the Mac, no question that having a Power Mac with a decent 603 with native PPC was a no brainer!
Hopefully that's a fairly equitable viewpoint!
The Amiga was 50mhz and also had L2 Cache... so it would be even more than double. but its accelerator was 3 years newer, so not a direct comparison imo.
I used Shapeshifter back in the day to run the Mac version of Netscape. The Amiga devs just never quite seemed able to provide a browser that was quite up to the standard of Netscape so there was no Flash and Javascript support was kind of dicey. The smulated Netscape, on the other hand, ran just fine. Could even play early Flash games in it like Slap a Spice Girl
I'm back and watching again!
I'm like a crazy fool!
I do that!
I have to say that Mac really was a beautiful machine, the design looks good even today
A Brutal but Deluxe head to head...
Ice cream!
This is a *very* cool video, bringing back memories. In my experience, the Macs of that period always seemed to be somewhat sluggish when compared to contemporary PCs. Particularly, mouse operation was very much a drag, and I usually had to max out mouse acceleration.
I've used my Amiga 1200 for Cinema 4D, office and gaming of course.
My amiga 500 with sculpt3d
Great video. This was a fantastic era. I will never forget it.
Well, I must say your vid made my day:) Althought I only had a C64 with a BB4 cartridge and the Datasette (or how it was called...) and never used any Macs, all my life I was sure that the Amigas were the fastest ones when it was about the graphics - especially the most powerful ones - A3000 and A4000. Back in the days I remember there was a duel between the A1200 and the Atari Falcon and it come out that the younger Falcon still was no match for Amiga. Commodores were the best:) I took a look accidentally, but it was worth.
I too was an Amigan. Started with a A500, then a 2000 which I cut a trace near my new Agnus to release an extra 0.5mb of chip mem! I put a Fusion40 in there, but then ended with a 4000 before I departed to pc.
My main uses were 3d and video captions. Used Warm and Fuzzy Logic's Toaster crack to get Lightwave, but moved to 3dStudio4 (dos) soon after. For all the talk of speed, the rendering speed for fpu calculations was pretty dire. I remember using alot of Adpro, Morph Plus, Imagemaster, Broadcast Titler, DPaint IV, Scala and eventually got Opalvision 24 bit card and paint package which was - I have to say - superb, and usable professionally.
First job with the Amiga though was with a local production company providing captions for the closed circuit for Crufts dog show at the NEC back in '93. Used a 1u Neriki genlock and Scala with a 16 colour palette for captions. Just made sure that my designs didn't go off screen so no-one would know we were keying an underscanned frame over pal!
Amiga's and their native rgb video out was what got them where they were. When composite video was still king, and low/high band were still pro video formats - which wasn't long - Amiga was a king among serfs. I still know many gfx artists who started out on Amiga's... Imagine, Vista Pro, Lightwave, and with ARexx scripting there were pretty much a good sized bunch of well skilled 3d techie's heading towards a career in tv. Heady days.
Its more of a case of a 25mhz system with no FPU vs a 50mhz with an FPU and only slightly hampered by the graphics translation.
The A1200's GFX Chipset (and totally different architecture) and Mainboard still runs at only 14MHz, plus it is emulating a Mac (while still providing native OS Operations simultaneously). ;-) Same Price range as well.
Was using Shapeshifter and Fusion Mac emulators back i the days on A1200 and A4000 with graphic card and Cyberstorm 6060 card. Was doing some Photoshop and playing Warcraft 2... it was fantastic :) thanks for the video
Ah, those were t’days. I wonder how good the Amiga would be now if Commodore had continued development. I still have my 1200 in a tower. It hasn't seen the light of day for about 15 years though.
This was a really interesting video. I was not aware that you could run the Mac operating system on an Amiga. The hardware options are very interesting for someone looking to dabble with this kind of vintage stuff.
I did run a Mac emulator back in the day in my Amiga 500. I did that to run the Mac version of Netscape which was the browser to use back in the day. But it wasn’t fast!!! This was back using a 68000 CPU.
Shapeshifter was an awesome 68k Mac emulator during the day. I used it to run Matlab and Microsoft Office on my accelerated Amiga 3000. Running in parallel with a C compiler on the Amiga side. In fact I could run MS-Dos stuff (slowly) in PC-Task as well so in practice I could run Mac, Amiga and MS-Dos at the same time in separate screens or on the same screen in separate windows. Just awesome for its day.
Sometimes I like to come back and re-watch this video. For some reason, I get a lot of satisfaction watching that Amiga beat the mac at it's own game!
Same, and I've never knowingly been in the same room as either of these machines
It keeps being recommended to me despite (maybe because) my many posts on it.
I had an A1200/60 (75Mhz OC) 128MB Fast Ram (+SCSI module) and Picasso IV... It ran VERY fast!
Why is everyone so shocked? apple have always been overpriced and underpowered.
i couldn't agree more with you.
The superb marketing of Apple has always fooled a lot of people into thinking that Apple is better, more innovative, superior - etc. They really have amazing marketing. They have convinced a significant number of people to spend a GRAND on a *phone* that has a bill of materials of around $300.
You have to respect them for that. They really do have good marketing. Their products? Engh.
Spot on fella, apple have never been anything special at all, in fact pretty far from it, but when adverts are rammed down your throat every 5 minutes people start believing it. AMD dont advertise on tv they put their money into product development instead, ryzen 2 2700x is a freaking amazing cpu
Engh, x86 is dead, ARM is going to eat their lunch over time. AMD hasn't posted a profit in over a decade. How they stay in business??? No idea.
I thought that PPC or even the DEC Alpha years ago was going to be the x86 killer, but it's going to be ARM. Everybody uses ARM, it's everywhere. It's a beautiful architecture, wonderful assembly, and it's easy to port to.
My next desktop is going to be an ARM variant of some sort, tired of this crap x86 architecture. It's basically a space heater. I've got an "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770S CPU @ 3.10GHz" - this is more than the enough power. I think an ODroid would handle about everything I want. I've not thought "gee, I wish my processor was faster" in about 15 years, and I'm an electrical and computer engineer. Heck, I don't even want a higher resolution monitor anymore.
The future is going to be low power CPUs, even for servers and that's ARM.
Just had to lol at this comment, amd have done better in the last 12 months than ever thanks to ryzen, even beating intels 8800K, there will always be gamers demanding the best so no arm wont cut it im afraid, too slow. everyones an electrical engineer on youtube.
God I loved my Amiga a500 with a1meg upgrade played afterburner and test drive 2 good old days
Amiga was the fastest Mac because Mac 68k never had 060. Amiga did and with RTG Amiga was faster. For Amiga user Mac was way to get newer software. Lots of users used Mac emulator for MS Word and mainly for internet browsers (late 90s). Also using hd images is not good on A1200, its better to make dedicated partition.
There was certainly an improvement using PFS instead of FFS for the file system and I understand more gains can be made using a drive natively, I should certainly try it. I was using the CFlash card to add sit files to the single HD file on my PC and then copying it across to the IDE drive, so it was really for convenience. I moved on to PC around 1992 so it's an era of Amiga fun I'm catching up on
TheMrKocour This is also what I always thought when I heard the saying. The sole fact that Amiga had better 68k hardware available made it undeniable. Also the version of it that I know specified "fastest 68k Macintosh is an Amiga".
lucas rem Steve Jobs did not develop the ARM processor. They was Acorn, out of the UK. Jobs did go on to create NEXT, which had an advanced Unix-based desktop operating system,which later became the basis of Mac OSX.
ZygmaExperiment Apple also worked on the ARM CPU on their Newton line.
Madd the Sane Yes, but only after Acorn had already invented it.
I miss my A500 with the attaching 20 MB HD and 2.5 MB RAM. Ironically, I just got my M4 MacBook Pro with 24 GB RAM and 1TB HD. That said, the Amiga graphics bring back fond memories
Ah, the Amiga vs Mac war- I well remember that. My computer may have been a lowly A500, but I didn't let that didn't stop me from participating in it. A couple memories from the time- if I recall correctly there was Amiga hardware available to plug a Mac ROM into, which could actually be purchased directly from Apple (the ROM, not the board). Shortly after this, Apple pulled them from sale.
Also, a friend of mine in college noted (correctly or not) that Amiga GUI objects seemed to be named to make sure that Amiga didn't step on Apple's toes legally. Like "buttons" vs "gadgets." We laughed at this, but I have always wondered if Apple really would have sued over this had the Amiga had similar terms, and if Apple would have had a case.
The A-Max plugged into the Amiga external floppy port and allowed Mac drives to be plugged in. It also had sockets for the Mac ROMS to allow for legal :-/ emulation.
Apple would have never had a case. They ripped all of their crap off from Xerox, right down to the mouse pointer. As did Microsoft, except that Microsoft inverted the mouse pointer's colors. Xerox should have filed against them both.
Apple _did_ file suit against Microsoft later, but failed.
All I remember was the Amiga vs Atari wars. If someone ever even mentioned Mac, the common reaction was like: "A what now?" Then at best: "I think it's one of those video editing stations." :)
There were of course similar preconceptions about the only uses for both Amigas and Ataris too though.
90's from highschool to college i was an amiga guy. i had an amiga 500 and 3000. with the amiga 3000 i had both memory upgrades reaching 16 megabytes and both PC and Mac emulation by way of the Emplant emulation card. Basically the card provided what mac chips that were crucial to its replication and everything else was routed thru the amigas native chips. And trust me when i say it was fast. Not only that, since the amiga OS was true multitasking, i was able to run all three emulations at the same time!! drag down one deskop of one computer and their was the next computers OS. in fact the only emulation that was always rather slow was the PC/windows os, As windows was simply a clutter mess of an OS. Both mac and amiga OS were designed mostly light and clever. i had the thrill of going thru college utilizing all three computers under emulation. which opened the doors to using a wealth of software.
Just half through the video, but of course a 68030 @ 50 Mhz beats a 68030 @ 25 Mhz (you can basically see the double time that the Mac takes). It's impressive how little time the emulation/virtulization takes though. So yeah, the Amiga wins at being the better Apple ;)
Same processor family, so it's like running VMWare on x86, very little hypervisor overhead and no machine code translation. It's not really emulation so much as VM.
You imply that it's not a fair comparison, 50 vs. 25MHz. But I'll bet that given a certain budget, say, $1000-1500, IDK, because of Apple's inflated prices for inferior spec systems, you could still buy a faster Amiga than a Mac back in the day. So is it a fair comparison? Dollar for dollar, yep.
So to summarize. Amiga does Apple better than Apple does Apple...
After owning an Amiga it took about 8 years before i switched to the pc before the pc got good enough, and i only switched because i had no other choice, Apples sucked and Commodore had gone under, if Commodore had not gone under i would most likely still own an Amiga now.
I've had several Amigas, including a 1000 and a 2000 and would still be working and programming on them if Amiga had continued to exist. I stopped programming when Amiga went down because I could not in good conscience advise people to use PCs. Even now, so many years later, I find the unreliability of PCs and the software they run shocking.
@@BartBVanBockstaele I guess you run Windows?
@@resneptacle Unfortunately, yes.
I used my 1200 tower ( home modified with blizzard, a pc tower, pc psu, pc keyboard 2 harddrives, a cdrom, a midi interface ) as a "DAW" with bars&pipes for over 10 years..even in proffesional studios ... and it still works great. but ok..it only do MIDI in the DAW ( you cAN record live sound in to it ...no problem but it is best s a pure MIDI sequencer).
For a more "portable" system i had a modified A600 with a HD and a blizzard card...it was easy to put in your backpack... hoock up to any monitor and just go .. simple machine and I made alot of fun stuff with it
the most glorious time in the amiga history was when A600 and A1200 came.. they had a PCMCIA slot WICH ment .. ethernet suddenly became available ... before there was only full lenght zorro slot cards for the A2000 and A3000 ...hoocking up your A600 to a network in a copy party/ hackerens was HUGE back then....no more slow null modems :)
the TCP-IP protokoll finally came to the amigaworld and I've surfed ALOT on the web with my A600 and A1200 It was mostly IrC back then but still.... and you had grapewine to surf with.... suddenly the amiga was like the mysterios LINUx.. you could do anything you wanted to do....
oooh I could talk for hours and hours about what I used my Amigas for and how much fun it was.. and how much fun it was to be part of the development .... maybe I should star my own Amiga youtube channel about that ... I never sold or got rid of all my amigas so I still have them and they all works fine... even my Amiga cdtv wich was known for alot of problems... all the hardware hacks we did...modifying, fixing so we could show those stupid pc owners who was boss haha... great times...
And I recent the term "game consol" when ppl tlk about amigas..they just don't know how far ahead the amigas was...
Back in my day, the common saying was that Atari ST (aka Jackintosh) was faster at being a Macintosh from the original Macintoshes. And this was in the early days of the Atari ST, without any extension boards etc.
The ST could also run Macintosh software at a higher video resolution, something the Mac couldn't do until the Mac II and SE (with video card) came out in 1987.
The quote originated at a time when the Mac used the CPU for everything, grafics, sound, and about half the time , number crunching. The Amiga's gfx coprocessors gave it a huge advantage. The Atari ST was a smidge faster. But the Mac only truly caught up when the Ami & ST were out of production.