I used ShapeShifter on my A1200 with a Blizzard III card back in the mid to late 90's simply so that I could do online banking through NetScape because SSL wasn't available on Amiga browsers. I refused to get a PC. It worked quite well!
Nice, thanks for sharing! It's great hearing that people were able to use these emulators for real-world purposes, not just as a curiosity. I was also impressed at how feature-complete ShapeShifter is given that it was free software.
@@retrobitstv I don't remember it being free for me, I paid Christian Bauer at the time by sending him money through the post. I think maybe it was crippled shareware? I happened to be living in England at the time, which was pretty cool as an American Amiga user. The Amiga scene was much more active there.
@@dangoswick Ahh that makes sense. Maybe it was made free later on after it was no longer commercially relevant? I didn't see anything in the manual or on the website about registration in 2021!
The Commodore Amiga 3000 is easily the best of the line. It was so fast when it came out, compared to the A500 and A2000 predecessors. One of my friends, on the way home from the World of Commodore Amiga show, said the Amiga 3000 felt like it was psychic, opening the window before you even clicked the disk drive icon.
I never got into Amigas back in their heyday and I sort of stumbled into the 3000 later on, not really knowing what made it special. I guess it was luck or destiny, but I'm sure glad to have it now and it keeps surprising me!
I regretted selling mine, it did take a bit of Varta damage, but it did not affect anything the way I was using it. Sadly, it may have diminished the scan doubled VGA output, according to the buyer. I still wish I’d kept it though. I’ve owned the 500, 2000, 3000 and 4000, but only kept the 5 and 4 (no space).
@@bliskin8847 I too had an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 4000. The Amiga 500 was great but largely unexpandable. The A4000 in contrast didn't even really feel like a completed machine. It felt really rushed like it could've used another six or eight months in R&D.
Thanks! A video card is on my wishlist but I'm not sure I'd get that much use out of one on my un-accelerated machine, since I mostly run OCS/ECS software anyway. Maybe I'll find a good deal on eBay one day!
@@retrobitstv A 32-bit Zorro III-capable video card brings night and day performance changes even on an unaccelerated A3000. While the 32-bit chip memory access is fast, ECS still steals cycles badly when you try to use graphics modes with lots of color -- especially when maxed out in 35ns pixel clock 2-bit or 70ns 4-bit modes. You won't notice much improvement in the 1-bit 35ns mode you were using most of the time (as that steals zero cycles), but the 4-bit 70ns mode you were testing in steals most of the cycles on the chip mem bus. It's not just a chunky-to-planar issue, it's a chip mem bandwidth issue. That's why high-res 16-color games on OCS/ECS Amigas were very rare. Graphics updates from the CPU would always be slow (even on the 32-bit chip mem in the A3000), and without true fast memory (like most A500s with their slowmem trapdoor expansion), it slowed all non-Kickstart ROM code execution to a crawl. That's why ROM add-ons on A1000s were popular as it instantly gave the A1000 256k of real fast memory formerly used by kickstart.
@@retrobitstv The cycle stealing is a core feature of how the Amiga chipset operates. The original design in ICS/OCS was that ordinarily the chipset gets half the cycles and the 68000 gets half the cycles. Since the 68000 can hit the bus at most every other cycle, this lets it run at full speed. However this only gives the chipset enough bandwidth to do 16 colors in low res, or 4 colors in high res. This is why the default workbench is only 4 colors. In addition, the blitter needs free cycles to do its work. This can be done while still letting the CPU have priority sometimes, or "nasty" mode where the blitter blocks the CPU until it's done with its operation. ECS uses the same bus as OCS so it inherited these features. AGA works the same way, but Lisa gained the ability to do a 4x speed fetchmode, so that it can do 256 colors in low res without stealing cycles and still leave time for the blitter to work. (The AGA blitter is exactly the same and as the ECS blitter, and thus is kind of slow, but it can do more work with the extra bus time). That's why games were so limited by the most common configuration being the A500 with 512k chip/512k slow. If the A500 had real fast RAM they could've used to blitter a lot more or had the CPU do more work (though for the super common 16-color CPU-driven Atari ST ports this wasn't an issue) Chip ram was still the same slow A3000 ECS-style stuff in AGA, that's why adding fast RAM to the A1200 made it literally twice as fast. (If they'd included even 256k of fast RAM to the stock A1200 or CD32 it would have made a huge improvement).
@@NozomuYume ECS Agnus and ECS Denise are still 16-bit with the same clock speed as OCS Agnus and OCS Denise. Amiga 3000's ECS Agnus 8372B and ECS Denise can be installed on Amiga 500 Rev6A's 16-bit Chip RAM configuration. ECS Agnus and AGA Alice must be resigned to remove 68000's two-clock cycle behavior. Amiga 3000's 32-bit Chip RAM and 25 Mhz PCB design are nearly useless for 3.5 Mhz 16bit ECS Agnus and ECS Denise. Faster Chip RAM enables improvement among the various Amiga chipset's concurrent functions. 16-bit ISA bus ET4000AX with either fast 16-bit VRAM or 32-bit DRAM murders Commodore's efforts. AGA Lisa (raster and 8 sprite engines) can support A1200's double-clocked and 32-bit width Chip RAM improvements.
Wow, great show Matt! I love it - you: a 20 year old emulator of a 30 year old machine on another 30 year old machine. :) Super interesting that you chose Shapeshifter. I also missed out on that one back when it was hottest; thanks for showing us that it's mature and useable.
Thanks! I was super impressed at ShapeShifter's performance. I tried to get Basilisk II to work with native HDD partitions in both emulation and real hardware and it would install MacOS okay, but always failed to boot successfully after. My experience with emulation of contemporary systems in that era was that usually some kind of hardware or cpu board was involved. It's been real interesting to find out about all these capabilities and software that existed that I never knew about, which is the whole point of the exercise in the first place!
@@retrobitstv I wonder what would have happened if, instead of Apple licensing Macintosh in the later era, they'd done in the 68k era and managed it more closely, like w/Commodore. Still, a PC maker can't win big by running someone else's OS; or rather, you just become a commodity. (RMC did a neat video about the "Mac clones" - all those license Macs that lasted a few years. Most of those where hideous, aesthetically. :) )
So it only took me a year but I have shapeshifter running on my A4000 (060) with a cybervision 64/3D card. I’m currently using 8.1 but will make another Mac drive with 7.5.3, system is a bit slow but it may be due to only having 16 mb ram (only 2 mb free on the Mac side). According to Norton 5 benchmarks, it’s about as fast as a Quadra 700. I switched to Macs my first year in college because all the science apps in my labs were for the macs. Now, I can run all my old software on my Amiga.
What I hope to see is a MC68000 expansion board with 16MB static RAM and its own video display for the Commander X16. Then could have a way better CPU than the 6502 - and easy instruction set access to more memory than 64K and bank switching. And best of all - a CPU that can be a serious target for a C compiler. Could get the very same synergy going that you did here with the Amiga host OS and the Mac guest. In this case the 68K could run a nice development environment with its own display for IDEs, and the compiler and assemblers would be present to target either CPU. Could do serious software development for the X16 right on the X16 itself.
If you want performance in colour mode, you have to force the screen to low res and put up with panning the display when the mouse hits the screen edge
@@retrobitstv no worries. Amiga’s are great, but display DMA crushes CPU performance once you cross certain thresholds, no matter what CPU is installed or how much fast RAM is available. The freeware program cpublit can help in some circumstances, but I suspect not with Shapeshifter, although I never tried it.
@@StefanHolmes If you want performance in colour mode, you use an external video driver which uses the MMU to accelerate C2P functions, like MuEVD (which is on Aminet)!
I'd never heard of ShapeShifter before, but the second I did, the name of one PPC emulator I'd used before, SheepShaver, suddenly made loads more sense!
Thanks! It's amazing how well mod files hold up after all these years. I still love to listen to them on shuffle when I'm working on projects in the retro corner.
I have A-Max IV (I think it's rare board) running on my A3000 on dedicated HD. The only problem I have is that the max OS version I can use is 7.1.1. I posted the video many years ago showing it running. Before that I was using Shapeshifter all the time.
Nice, found your video; I had never seen A-Max IV in action before. I'm running A-Max II with the original "cartridge" and the A-Max 2.5 software on my A2000 w/'68040 for #MARCHintosh, almost exactly as I did in 1991. If interested, you're welcome to see my #MARCHintosh video from yesterday. We're trying to sort out it's poor floating point performance; looks like A-Max IV may be necessary for support of the 68040's internal FPU.
@@DrDavesDiversions I think A-Max IV does not support 68040. It's been years ago, but I think I tried 68040 CPU card on A3000 and A-MAX and did not work.
Do you have the A-Max IV manual? It looks like it specifically mentions the 68040: crossconnect.tripod.com/AMAX40.HTML I also found this online content this morning (while researching why A-Max II seems not to support the 68040's FPU): q( The ROMs are Mac+ ROMs, but they are deeply "revised and corrected" by A-Max IV in order to be used with 68040, FPU, 8+ MB RAM and color graphics. Hence some diagnostic utilities can "see" them as more recent ROMs (for example, as Mac II ROMs) ) eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=15719&page=48
@@DrDavesDiversions No manual, I need to make a correction, my memory if fading on me. Looking at the EAB thread I noticed that I said in it that AMAX IV works with 68040 card, I had problems with Picasso card. Post #1178. Show me where I can find that Mac Speedometer and I can do some tests.
@@dvuemedia Cool. Speedometer is on Macintosh Garden, at least. I use one that works on System 6 that I got elsewhere, but you can probably use this, no? macintoshgarden.org/apps/speedometer-402 There is also SieveAhl which is 68k-famliy specific. I posted my results from this in the my "Fastest Mac Plus" video's comments comments: www.floodgap.com/retrotech/mac/ahl/
WAIT!! @2:40 you have a SCSI2SD box plug into the ext SCSI of the A3K- what box? im thinking of getting the new zuluscsi 240 - much easier than cracking the A3K case open or troubleshooting a long extension SD cable (they don't always work)....is this just an enclosure for a similar board?? PS- have a ZZ9000 MNT RTG card, so this looks really attractive to try.
Yea, it's an older SCSI2SD v5.5 and it gets the job done. Today, I'd go with a BlueSCSI V2 external unit in a heartbeat instead. They are cheaper, faster, and much easier to use as they operate with image files instead of native partitions on the sdcard. I'd like a ZZ9000 but they're a bit pricey!
I had an OS 8 or something Macintosh Quadra Power PC in the late 90s/early 2000s and it's nice enough but without multitasking it was nothing special, the hardware with the 'Wings" capture card was excellent. I had forgotten all about Shapeshifter and it might be nice for my Amiga 4000/040 I didn't really have anything to use for, cheers. Question:Would Shapeshifter run the original monochrome port of Gauntlet for Macintosh classic?
15:30 I don't know about amigaos but the "multitasking" of classic macos (anything pre-Unix MacOS X) certainly was a disaster; it was a patched cooperative frankenstein where even a corrupted font would bring the whole system down; the dreaded Error type 11 with constant bombing forcing you to cold reboot losing all your work drove nuts every apple user back in the 90s
Good to know :) I have very little experience with classic Macs. The basic task switching I did try seemed to work okay in OS7, but I didn't test the performance or push it to the limit at all. AmigaOS has a preemptive multitasking kernel that was way ahead of its time, by all accounts. I should brush up on its capabilities since I was never an Amiga user back in the day but what I've seen so far is impressive.
AmigaOS had really good multitasking, it can also offload lot of work to co control chips, the copper, blitter and Paula, this also helped, what AmigaOS lack was Virtual memory, so video editing was tricky, often requiring extra hardware upgrades. Two things went wrong with Amiga marketing, and choice of graphics, planar graphics was good for 2D games, bad for photo editing.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 No, it was totally true. There is a great RMC video that covers it pretty well called "The Fastest Apple Mac is an Amiga - Fact or Fiction" that explains it. I'd recommend that video for anyone who is interested. He goes into a lot of detail about it... The more you know!!!
Are you positive about the speed penalty using hardfiles? I believe it may have been an issue in the past, when people were still using Fast File System, but using SFS or PFS makes them much faster to access. Have you run your own comparison tests?
Great question. I made that statement based on what I had read in the manual, not any real-world testing. Since I was already doing some more testing on the Amiga this afternoon, I fired up SS, created a 200MB hard file, duplicated all the contents of my MacOS partition on it, booted from it, and re-ran the Speedometer disk test. With the native SCSI2SD partition, my machine scored a 0.72 on the test (where 1.0 = Quadra 605). Booting only from the hardfile scored it a 0.58. It's certainly only one data point, but it's a place to start.
@@retrobitstv It's good to know how the two performed, that's interesting how much slower the hardfile was. Do you have many buffers for the Amiga partition it's stored on? It's crazy how much extra speed you can get with the AddBuffers command if it's not all set up perfectly in HDToolbox.
I have not changed any of the default settings in HDToolbox except for setting the block size to 4096 because 512 seems to run up the memory usage for large partitions. I'll look into the AddBuffers command, thanks!
@@retrobitstv Cammy is right,SFS and PFS filesystems speed up the amiga side a good bit and it will likely show. That being said i always found real partitions faster,especially with good scsi.
Regarding the software you had problems with, I think often that software has problems on real Macs as well. The cause varies, the very early software from 84 to 88 often assumes it's going to be running on something like a Mac Plus, with only a 68000, 1MB RAM, System 6.0.8 or earlier and so can have trouble on anything that doesn't match those specs. I'm massively oversimplifying the following, I'm sure an expert could explain it better. A particular problem is the while 32-bit clean vs NOT 32-bit clean, which was a real problem in the early 90s for Macs. See, the original Macs had as little as 128K of RAM, and so choices had to be made regarding making the most effective use of that RAM. So for those early systems, because they ran a 68000, they made use of some of the "unused" bits in the 68000. This was ok, until later Macs started using the 68020 and 030s, and RAM installs went up, and people wanted to start running more than one app on their mac, as well as use more RAM. The Mac ROM had to have bits re-written so it was 32-bit clean, and the MacOS also had to be re-written in a likewise manner. For a while during the crossover, there was a Control panel that could turn 32-bit clean on and off, so you could run your old software that didn't work correctly if 32-bit clean was turned on, but the expectation was that software would be re-written or replaced with 32-bit clean code.
Thanks for the excellent info! I didn't realize this was a problem, but again, no real Mac experience to draw from. That makes sense though; I should have checked more carefully to see if the software I tested was even supported on later 32-bit systems or not. I thought I might get around the problem by testing different OS versions. ShapeShifter does not allow me to install System 6, the OS throws an error about 24-bit addressing.
@@retrobitstv Yes, I gained that eperience through using Shapeshifter back in the day on my A1200. And yes, System 6 isn't 32-bit clean, hence the error about 24-bit addressing. System 7 was the first version that was 32-bit clean, and System 6 generally only ran on machines that didn't have 32-bit addressing in the Mac ROM.
RMC Retro has a nice vid on this as well. Being that the same spec Amiga was faster than the Mac. Apple sure didn't like this back in the day. Hahah.. but is it a emulator or more like a virtual machine avant la lettre?
Thanks, I'll have to check it out! Neil definitely has the Amiga credentials so I'm not surprised he's covered this subject already. I'm just discovering all the things the Amiga can do for the first time now! That's a great point, I don't have a good enough understanding of how ShapeShifter passes through CPU instructions or translates/map memory access, if at all, but it does seem very much like a hypervisor in that capacity. Disk access and graphics are much more traditionally emulated, so perhaps it's somewhere in the middle?
I have been keeping an eye on this one! I've been a little hesitant due to the price of admission, but there's no arguing the ZZ9000 a great value compared to a used $300 Picasso II or something!
I'm not 100% sure this is the same as mine but try here: www.emaculation.com/doku.php/downloads - look for "System 7 boot disk (very basic System 7 boot disk)".
@@retrobitstv many thanks, I managed to get the image from a friend. I'm struggling to get it to work though. Have set up a 2Gb partition on an SD card and followed the steps you took. I'm running OS 3.2.1 on an A1200 with TF1260 and MUtools installed. Just keeps crashing on the smiley face screen 😔
@@amimmortal77 I don't know much about '060 accelerators. Perhaps it's possible there some issue with differences in architecture the Mac ROM can't handle. Can it operate with full '030 compatibility? The IIci I was emulating had the same exact CPU as the A3000 which may have helped.
@@retrobitstv hi there, I've got it running nicely in 256 colours on my AGA 060 machine, but I'm having bother understanding how you move files using Mac-Handler when you need to move the resource and data forks separately. I think your video fast-forwards this part! I'm trying to install Toast from both a *.sit and *.bin file, but Stuffit just creates a file with no readable attributes when I do 😞
@@tekk9995 Just a joke, that we'd ask Apple what to call something based on their code in ROMs. :) Lets give credit to Christian for the awesome ShapeShifter software, Simon Douglas and ReadySoft credit for the awesome A-Max software, and Jim Drew and/or Utilities Unlimited credit for EMPLANT... but Apple and lots of their developers get the credit for the code in their ROMs - the foundation for all these products. :)
"Two fully multitasking operating systems at the same time..." SNIP - nope, MacOS was NOT multitasking until much later on, and even then it was only cooperative mulatiastking which is vastly inferior to the Amiga's pre-emptive multiasking. Mac OS, just like Windows, eventually did get pre-emptive multiasking and catch up..... around ten years after the Amiga first had it. :)
The Amiga interface does look quite poor here. Like it was done by some engineers alone. :) At this point though, think I'd only look back at RiskOS as it runs natively on ARM and is paridoxically also the future.
1987 RiscOS doesn't natively boot on modern ARM hardware since CPU ISA alone doesn't complete the full backward compatibility. Early 1980s MS-DOS can still boot on a modern PC with UEFI Class 2.
You should have blown peoples' minds to lower the Mac screen and show amiga stuff like a mod player, running in the background without dropping a beat.
Shapeshifter was how I played Doom on my A1200+030 back in the day
I used ShapeShifter on my A1200 with a Blizzard III card back in the mid to late 90's simply so that I could do online banking through NetScape because SSL wasn't available on Amiga browsers. I refused to get a PC. It worked quite well!
Nice, thanks for sharing! It's great hearing that people were able to use these emulators for real-world purposes, not just as a curiosity. I was also impressed at how feature-complete ShapeShifter is given that it was free software.
@@retrobitstv I don't remember it being free for me, I paid Christian Bauer at the time by sending him money through the post. I think maybe it was crippled shareware? I happened to be living in England at the time, which was pretty cool as an American Amiga user. The Amiga scene was much more active there.
@@dangoswick Ahh that makes sense. Maybe it was made free later on after it was no longer commercially relevant? I didn't see anything in the manual or on the website about registration in 2021!
@@retrobitstv This article mentions it. I might still have my original floppy! www.amigareport.com/ar408/news1.html
I was using Shapeshifter back when it came out on my A1200. Oddly I was using it to run emulators on the Mac that didn't exist on the Amiga.
These sneaky Amiga machines!
The Commodore Amiga 3000 is easily the best of the line. It was so fast when it came out, compared to the A500 and A2000 predecessors.
One of my friends, on the way home from the World of Commodore Amiga show, said the Amiga 3000 felt like it was psychic, opening the window before you even clicked the disk drive icon.
I never got into Amigas back in their heyday and I sort of stumbled into the 3000 later on, not really knowing what made it special. I guess it was luck or destiny, but I'm sure glad to have it now and it keeps surprising me!
I regretted selling mine, it did take a bit of Varta damage, but it did not affect anything the way I was using it. Sadly, it may have diminished the scan doubled VGA output, according to the buyer. I still wish I’d kept it though. I’ve owned the 500, 2000, 3000 and 4000, but only kept the 5 and 4 (no space).
@@bliskin8847 I too had an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 4000. The Amiga 500 was great but largely unexpandable. The A4000 in contrast didn't even really feel like a completed machine. It felt really rushed like it could've used another six or eight months in R&D.
I cant believe i did not know about this channel !!>....just the channel / content i was looking for...articulate, content rich and just perfect !
Glad you found us and welcome!
Great video!
1. Shapeshifter got SCSI direct (no emulation overlay)
2. There is 3rd party MMU custom video driver for faster 16 color.
Very cool!! Nice to see all of the emulation videos for #MARCHintosh!!
Shapeshifter really comes alive when using a separate video card on the Amiga. This is a great video, I really like your step-by-step approach.
Thanks! A video card is on my wishlist but I'm not sure I'd get that much use out of one on my un-accelerated machine, since I mostly run OCS/ECS software anyway. Maybe I'll find a good deal on eBay one day!
@@retrobitstv A 32-bit Zorro III-capable video card brings night and day performance changes even on an unaccelerated A3000. While the 32-bit chip memory access is fast, ECS still steals cycles badly when you try to use graphics modes with lots of color -- especially when maxed out in 35ns pixel clock 2-bit or 70ns 4-bit modes. You won't notice much improvement in the 1-bit 35ns mode you were using most of the time (as that steals zero cycles), but the 4-bit 70ns mode you were testing in steals most of the cycles on the chip mem bus. It's not just a chunky-to-planar issue, it's a chip mem bandwidth issue.
That's why high-res 16-color games on OCS/ECS Amigas were very rare. Graphics updates from the CPU would always be slow (even on the 32-bit chip mem in the A3000), and without true fast memory (like most A500s with their slowmem trapdoor expansion), it slowed all non-Kickstart ROM code execution to a crawl. That's why ROM add-ons on A1000s were popular as it instantly gave the A1000 256k of real fast memory formerly used by kickstart.
@@NozomuYume Great info, thanks! I was not aware of this cycle stealing with ECS. TIL :)
@@retrobitstv The cycle stealing is a core feature of how the Amiga chipset operates. The original design in ICS/OCS was that ordinarily the chipset gets half the cycles and the 68000 gets half the cycles. Since the 68000 can hit the bus at most every other cycle, this lets it run at full speed. However this only gives the chipset enough bandwidth to do 16 colors in low res, or 4 colors in high res. This is why the default workbench is only 4 colors.
In addition, the blitter needs free cycles to do its work. This can be done while still letting the CPU have priority sometimes, or "nasty" mode where the blitter blocks the CPU until it's done with its operation.
ECS uses the same bus as OCS so it inherited these features.
AGA works the same way, but Lisa gained the ability to do a 4x speed fetchmode, so that it can do 256 colors in low res without stealing cycles and still leave time for the blitter to work. (The AGA blitter is exactly the same and as the ECS blitter, and thus is kind of slow, but it can do more work with the extra bus time).
That's why games were so limited by the most common configuration being the A500 with 512k chip/512k slow. If the A500 had real fast RAM they could've used to blitter a lot more or had the CPU do more work (though for the super common 16-color CPU-driven Atari ST ports this wasn't an issue)
Chip ram was still the same slow A3000 ECS-style stuff in AGA, that's why adding fast RAM to the A1200 made it literally twice as fast. (If they'd included even 256k of fast RAM to the stock A1200 or CD32 it would have made a huge improvement).
@@NozomuYume ECS Agnus and ECS Denise are still 16-bit with the same clock speed as OCS Agnus and OCS Denise.
Amiga 3000's ECS Agnus 8372B and ECS Denise can be installed on Amiga 500 Rev6A's 16-bit Chip RAM configuration.
ECS Agnus and AGA Alice must be resigned to remove 68000's two-clock cycle behavior.
Amiga 3000's 32-bit Chip RAM and 25 Mhz PCB design are nearly useless for 3.5 Mhz 16bit ECS Agnus and ECS Denise.
Faster Chip RAM enables improvement among the various Amiga chipset's concurrent functions.
16-bit ISA bus ET4000AX with either fast 16-bit VRAM or 32-bit DRAM murders Commodore's efforts.
AGA Lisa (raster and 8 sprite engines) can support A1200's double-clocked and 32-bit width Chip RAM improvements.
Wow, great show Matt! I love it - you: a 20 year old emulator of a 30 year old machine on another 30 year old machine. :)
Super interesting that you chose Shapeshifter. I also missed out on that one back when it was hottest; thanks for showing us that it's mature and useable.
Thanks! I was super impressed at ShapeShifter's performance. I tried to get Basilisk II to work with native HDD partitions in both emulation and real hardware and it would install MacOS okay, but always failed to boot successfully after.
My experience with emulation of contemporary systems in that era was that usually some kind of hardware or cpu board was involved. It's been real interesting to find out about all these capabilities and software that existed that I never knew about, which is the whole point of the exercise in the first place!
@@retrobitstv I wonder what would have happened if, instead of Apple licensing Macintosh in the later era, they'd done in the 68k era and managed it more closely, like w/Commodore.
Still, a PC maker can't win big by running someone else's OS; or rather, you just become a commodity.
(RMC did a neat video about the "Mac clones" - all those license Macs that lasted a few years. Most of those where hideous, aesthetically. :) )
@@retrobitstv Probably could get it working if you had 3.x ROMs. I'm guessing that Amiga 3000 is using 2.x ROMs. Amirite?
There is also Fusion mac emulator on Amiga,also a good one especially with gfx cards etc.
yup, had an A2500 with a EGS / Retina card and fusion and was really happy. Later an A3k/ A4k and A4Kt
Great video! I’ve never used an Amiga before, but I’d certainly love to.
Thanks! I missed the Amiga in it's heyday but I'm having fun learning what they can do 35 years later :)
I did use DiskDoubler and DD menu to change type/creator of files - there were some EVD to run decently at 16 colors that i did use with my 1200/030
So it only took me a year but I have shapeshifter running on my A4000 (060) with a cybervision 64/3D card. I’m currently using 8.1 but will make another Mac drive with 7.5.3, system is a bit slow but it may be due to only having 16 mb ram (only 2 mb free on the Mac side). According to Norton 5 benchmarks, it’s about as fast as a Quadra 700. I switched to Macs my first year in college because all the science apps in my labs were for the macs. Now, I can run all my old software on my Amiga.
What I hope to see is a MC68000 expansion board with 16MB static RAM and its own video display for the Commander X16. Then could have a way better CPU than the 6502 - and easy instruction set access to more memory than 64K and bank switching. And best of all - a CPU that can be a serious target for a C compiler. Could get the very same synergy going that you did here with the Amiga host OS and the Mac guest. In this case the 68K could run a nice development environment with its own display for IDEs, and the compiler and assemblers would be present to target either CPU. Could do serious software development for the X16 right on the X16 itself.
If you want performance in colour mode, you have to force the screen to low res and put up with panning the display when the mouse hits the screen edge
I'm going to try that as it never occurred to me. Thanks for the tip!
@@retrobitstv no worries. Amiga’s are great, but display DMA crushes CPU performance once you cross certain thresholds, no matter what CPU is installed or how much fast RAM is available.
The freeware program cpublit can help in some circumstances, but I suspect not with Shapeshifter, although I never tried it.
@@StefanHolmes If you want performance in colour mode, you use an external video driver which uses the MMU to accelerate C2P functions, like MuEVD (which is on Aminet)!
Impressive!. Thanks for the video :-)
I'd never heard of ShapeShifter before, but the second I did, the name of one PPC emulator I'd used before, SheepShaver, suddenly made loads more sense!
Same dev
Great Fun!! Now I'm gonna have to have a go myself :-)
Great guide - thanks!
Glad it was helpful!
AMAX Crew represent! ;D
I'd like to see a video on the Pi 400 running Basilisk II,... THAT would be very interesting,...
Thanks for the suggestion! I was thinking of looking at the MiSTer core for a second #MARCHintosh video, but maybe I can try both :)
Elysium.mod very nice. I have that in my archive somewhere. Great vid Matt!
Thanks! It's amazing how well mod files hold up after all these years. I still love to listen to them on shuffle when I'm working on projects in the retro corner.
I have A-Max IV (I think it's rare board) running on my A3000 on dedicated HD. The only problem I have is that the max OS version I can use is 7.1.1. I posted the video many years ago showing it running. Before that I was using Shapeshifter all the time.
Nice, found your video; I had never seen A-Max IV in action before. I'm running A-Max II with the original "cartridge" and the A-Max 2.5 software on my A2000 w/'68040 for #MARCHintosh, almost exactly as I did in 1991. If interested, you're welcome to see my #MARCHintosh video from yesterday. We're trying to sort out it's poor floating point performance; looks like A-Max IV may be necessary for support of the 68040's internal FPU.
@@DrDavesDiversions I think A-Max IV does not support 68040. It's been years ago, but I think I tried 68040 CPU card on A3000 and A-MAX and did not work.
Do you have the A-Max IV manual? It looks like it specifically mentions the 68040:
crossconnect.tripod.com/AMAX40.HTML
I also found this online content this morning (while researching why A-Max II seems not to support the 68040's FPU):
q(
The ROMs are Mac+ ROMs, but they are deeply "revised and corrected" by A-Max IV in order to be used with 68040, FPU, 8+ MB RAM and color graphics. Hence some diagnostic utilities can "see" them as more recent ROMs (for example, as Mac II ROMs)
)
eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=15719&page=48
@@DrDavesDiversions No manual, I need to make a correction, my memory if fading on me. Looking at the EAB thread I noticed that I said in it that AMAX IV works with 68040 card, I had problems with Picasso card. Post #1178. Show me where I can find that Mac Speedometer and I can do some tests.
@@dvuemedia Cool. Speedometer is on Macintosh Garden, at least. I use one that works on System 6 that I got elsewhere, but you can probably use this, no?
macintoshgarden.org/apps/speedometer-402
There is also SieveAhl which is 68k-famliy specific. I posted my results from this in the my "Fastest Mac Plus" video's comments
comments: www.floodgap.com/retrotech/mac/ahl/
I played Wolfenstein 3D and stuff on my A1200 (040) and recently Prince of Persia 2.
WAIT!! @2:40 you have a SCSI2SD box plug into the ext SCSI of the A3K- what box? im thinking of getting the new zuluscsi 240 - much easier than cracking the A3K case open or troubleshooting a long extension SD cable (they don't always work)....is this just an enclosure for a similar board??
PS- have a ZZ9000 MNT RTG card, so this looks really attractive to try.
Yea, it's an older SCSI2SD v5.5 and it gets the job done. Today, I'd go with a BlueSCSI V2 external unit in a heartbeat instead. They are cheaper, faster, and much easier to use as they operate with image files instead of native partitions on the sdcard. I'd like a ZZ9000 but they're a bit pricey!
Strewth, what a price! One Macintosh or two Amigas.... not a difficult choice!
Nice, I need to try this
Top Tutorial, Thanks!
I had an OS 8 or something Macintosh Quadra Power PC in the late 90s/early 2000s and it's nice enough but without multitasking it was nothing special, the hardware with the 'Wings" capture card was excellent. I had forgotten all about Shapeshifter and it might be nice for my Amiga 4000/040 I didn't really have anything to use for, cheers. Question:Would Shapeshifter run the original monochrome port of Gauntlet for Macintosh classic?
15:30 I don't know about amigaos but the "multitasking" of classic macos (anything pre-Unix MacOS X) certainly was a disaster; it was a patched cooperative frankenstein where even a corrupted font would bring the whole system down; the dreaded Error type 11 with constant bombing forcing you to cold reboot losing all your work drove nuts every apple user back in the 90s
Good to know :) I have very little experience with classic Macs. The basic task switching I did try seemed to work okay in OS7, but I didn't test the performance or push it to the limit at all. AmigaOS has a preemptive multitasking kernel that was way ahead of its time, by all accounts. I should brush up on its capabilities since I was never an Amiga user back in the day but what I've seen so far is impressive.
AmigaOS had really good multitasking, it can also offload lot of work to co control chips, the copper, blitter and Paula, this also helped, what AmigaOS lack was Virtual memory, so video editing was tricky, often requiring extra hardware upgrades. Two things went wrong with Amiga marketing, and choice of graphics, planar graphics was good for 2D games, bad for photo editing.
the fastest mac is an amiga
They used to say the fastest Mac you can buy is an Amiga, and for a while, that was true. ;-)
It was never true, just another Amiga fans wishful thing.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 No, it was totally true. There is a great RMC video that covers it pretty well called "The Fastest Apple Mac is an Amiga - Fact or Fiction" that explains it. I'd recommend that video for anyone who is interested. He goes into a lot of detail about it...
The more you know!!!
Can't remember if I had a true chunky driver for my Voodoo (Mediator)
Are you positive about the speed penalty using hardfiles? I believe it may have been an issue in the past, when people were still using Fast File System, but using SFS or PFS makes them much faster to access. Have you run your own comparison tests?
Great question. I made that statement based on what I had read in the manual, not any real-world testing. Since I was already doing some more testing on the Amiga this afternoon, I fired up SS, created a 200MB hard file, duplicated all the contents of my MacOS partition on it, booted from it, and re-ran the Speedometer disk test. With the native SCSI2SD partition, my machine scored a 0.72 on the test (where 1.0 = Quadra 605). Booting only from the hardfile scored it a 0.58. It's certainly only one data point, but it's a place to start.
@@retrobitstv It's good to know how the two performed, that's interesting how much slower the hardfile was. Do you have many buffers for the Amiga partition it's stored on? It's crazy how much extra speed you can get with the AddBuffers command if it's not all set up perfectly in HDToolbox.
I have not changed any of the default settings in HDToolbox except for setting the block size to 4096 because 512 seems to run up the memory usage for large partitions. I'll look into the AddBuffers command, thanks!
@@retrobitstv Cammy is right,SFS and PFS filesystems speed up the amiga side a good bit and it will likely show. That being said i always found real partitions faster,especially with good scsi.
Very impressive piece of software. Now you need PC emulation card so you can use all three platforms at the same time. :)
A PC bridgeboard just sold on eBay for $50 the other day and I missed it! Alas.
@@retrobitstv $50?! I'd gladly pay that for one for my a2k.
how about running logic or opcode plus serial midi interface? (i know there is octamed (great) and bars n pipes (gives me eye cancer) etc.)
He’s just found the best Mac ever made (lol 😛).
Regarding the software you had problems with, I think often that software has problems on real Macs as well. The cause varies, the very early software from 84 to 88 often assumes it's going to be running on something like a Mac Plus, with only a 68000, 1MB RAM, System 6.0.8 or earlier and so can have trouble on anything that doesn't match those specs.
I'm massively oversimplifying the following, I'm sure an expert could explain it better.
A particular problem is the while 32-bit clean vs NOT 32-bit clean, which was a real problem in the early 90s for Macs. See, the original Macs had as little as 128K of RAM, and so choices had to be made regarding making the most effective use of that RAM. So for those early systems, because they ran a 68000, they made use of some of the "unused" bits in the 68000. This was ok, until later Macs started using the 68020 and 030s, and RAM installs went up, and people wanted to start running more than one app on their mac, as well as use more RAM. The Mac ROM had to have bits re-written so it was 32-bit clean, and the MacOS also had to be re-written in a likewise manner. For a while during the crossover, there was a Control panel that could turn 32-bit clean on and off, so you could run your old software that didn't work correctly if 32-bit clean was turned on, but the expectation was that software would be re-written or replaced with 32-bit clean code.
Thanks for the excellent info! I didn't realize this was a problem, but again, no real Mac experience to draw from. That makes sense though; I should have checked more carefully to see if the software I tested was even supported on later 32-bit systems or not. I thought I might get around the problem by testing different OS versions. ShapeShifter does not allow me to install System 6, the OS throws an error about 24-bit addressing.
@@retrobitstv Yes, I gained that eperience through using Shapeshifter back in the day on my A1200. And yes, System 6 isn't 32-bit clean, hence the error about 24-bit addressing. System 7 was the first version that was 32-bit clean, and System 6 generally only ran on machines that didn't have 32-bit addressing in the Mac ROM.
RMC Retro has a nice vid on this as well. Being that the same spec Amiga was faster than the Mac. Apple sure didn't like this back in the day. Hahah.. but is it a emulator or more like a virtual machine avant la lettre?
Thanks, I'll have to check it out! Neil definitely has the Amiga credentials so I'm not surprised he's covered this subject already. I'm just discovering all the things the Amiga can do for the first time now!
That's a great point, I don't have a good enough understanding of how ShapeShifter passes through CPU instructions or translates/map memory access, if at all, but it does seem very much like a hypervisor in that capacity. Disk access and graphics are much more traditionally emulated, so perhaps it's somewhere in the middle?
@@retrobitstv th-cam.com/video/Jph0gxzL3UI/w-d-xo.html
And if your considering a RTG card think of the MNT ZZ9000. It's perfect!
I have been keeping an eye on this one! I've been a little hesitant due to the price of admission, but there's no arguing the ZZ9000 a great value compared to a used $300 Picasso II or something!
@@retrobitstv you won't regret it. I have one for my 4000
Would you happen to have links to where you got the system70_boot.dsk file from? I am having a real tough time finding it anywhere!
I'm not 100% sure this is the same as mine but try here: www.emaculation.com/doku.php/downloads - look for "System 7 boot disk (very basic System 7 boot disk)".
@@retrobitstv many thanks, I managed to get the image from a friend. I'm struggling to get it to work though. Have set up a 2Gb partition on an SD card and followed the steps you took. I'm running OS 3.2.1 on an A1200 with TF1260 and MUtools installed. Just keeps crashing on the smiley face screen 😔
@@amimmortal77 I don't know much about '060 accelerators. Perhaps it's possible there some issue with differences in architecture the Mac ROM can't handle. Can it operate with full '030 compatibility? The IIci I was emulating had the same exact CPU as the A3000 which may have helped.
@@retrobitstv I'm pretty sure it should work, but I'll persevere and let you know how I get on
@@retrobitstv hi there, I've got it running nicely in 256 colours on my AGA 060 machine, but I'm having bother understanding how you move files using Mac-Handler when you need to move the resource and data forks separately. I think your video fast-forwards this part! I'm trying to install Toast from both a *.sit and *.bin file, but Stuffit just creates a file with no readable attributes when I do 😞
What's with the weird Mac emulator names, like ShapeShifter, SheepShaver, and Basilisk?
I don't think the Apple marketing folks ever replied to their emails when considering names. ;)
Also the original one was called "Emplant," so other than A-Max, kinda set a silly precedent. :)
Well, sheep shaver is kinda relevant. Shave those apple sheeople
@@DrDavesDiversions It's not Apple software - it was developed by an independent dev Christian Bauer
@@tekk9995 Just a joke, that we'd ask Apple what to call something based on their code in ROMs. :)
Lets give credit to Christian for the awesome ShapeShifter software, Simon Douglas and ReadySoft credit for the awesome A-Max software, and Jim Drew and/or Utilities Unlimited credit for EMPLANT... but Apple and lots of their developers get the credit for the code in their ROMs - the foundation for all these products. :)
The Amiga 3000 is a superior machine compared to the Mac IIci.
The 2 color (B/W) mode on Mac use same bitmap format as Amiga, the 4,16 and 256 colors mode are not the same.
Commodore didn't expand Amiga 1-bit plane format into chunky mode. VGA supports both 4-bit planes and 8-bit chunky pixel formats.
for this to work do u need the shapeshifter rom chip installed in the machine???? thanks.
There is no need for any ROM chips or other hardware, just a MAC ROM file on the disk you're running Shapeshifter from.
@@retrobitstv but on winuae why do i need to change the rom chip to shapeshifter roms which is compatible with the mac? thanks.
@@ms-ex8em WinUAE emulates the Amiga machine. Mac ROM needs to be a file and to be accessible for Shapeshifter's load Mac ROM function.
Amiga with nice graphics card, then you can experience true power of AmigaOS 😉
"Two fully multitasking operating systems at the same time..." SNIP - nope, MacOS was NOT multitasking until much later on, and even then it was only cooperative mulatiastking which is vastly inferior to the Amiga's pre-emptive multiasking.
Mac OS, just like Windows, eventually did get pre-emptive multiasking and catch up..... around ten years after the Amiga first had it. :)
Ah yes, my complete lack of classic Mac knowledge is showing! Well, learning is the whole point of doing this stuff :)
Mac got preemptive multitasking 15 years later, MacOs x
The Amiga interface does look quite poor here. Like it was done by some engineers alone. :) At this point though, think I'd only look back at RiskOS as it runs natively on ARM and is paridoxically also the future.
1987 RiscOS doesn't natively boot on modern ARM hardware since CPU ISA alone doesn't complete the full backward compatibility.
Early 1980s MS-DOS can still boot on a modern PC with UEFI Class 2.
TEN! OS-X is pronounced ten, not ex.
Can you tell I'm not a Mac guy? 😅
You should have blown peoples' minds to lower the Mac screen and show amiga stuff like a mod player, running in the background without dropping a beat.
do u know how to run shapeshifter on the Amiga emulator (winuae64)?? thanks..............
how do u run this on winuae64?? thanks.........