CompuServe Messages

Erik, I, too, was surprised by the Amax's video performance. I called Readysoft and they told me that without a 24 bit video card, my benchmarks were in line. I was able to improve performance significantly by changing to a "standard" 640 x 400 non-overscanned hires laced screen and by increasing the refresh timeout. Benchmark was about .70 of a Mac II. I believe Emplant benchmarked about equal to a Mac II. Only drawback is that the timeout causes jerkier scrolling, but is tolerable. I also was able to install System 7 Pro, which wouldn't work on Amax II, but works fine with IV, although it is a bit more cumbersome than 7.1 and doesn't really add much additional functionality unless you are networked and need Applescript. SCSI stuff works like a champ. I have both a tape drive and CD-ROM drive and both were easily recognized as scsi manager devices. On the downside, Amax IV no longer reads and writes 800k Mac disks. It only reads/writes high density disks unless the 800k disk is a 720k IBM format. They have an Amiga utility which will read/write the 800k disk into an Amiga file device, sort of like the Janus JLINK device. This file device shows up on the Mac desktop as though it were a true disk, so in that respect you don't lose the function, but it is now less convenient, especially for loading software which was distributed on the 800k disks. Multi-tasking is good. It works well along with the bridgeboard. I think Amax IV is a good product except for the limitations on video and the awkwardness of using 800k Mac disks. However, that isn't a lot different from Emplant, which also didn't read/write 800k disks unless you had Sybil, which never seemed to work too well for those that had it.