#AMAX & Mac Diskettes
6 messages in this thread
Phil: I'm doing EXACTLY what you describe. I've got one external AMAX cart
running on an A2500, using a hard drive partition, and it's a screamer!
We're also running an external AMAX II cart on an old Amiga 500 with 4
megs RAM and a hard drive. When in Mac emulation, we're using Aldus
Pagemaker 4.0. It works pretty well. Unfortunately, the external AMAX cart
does not support Appletalk like the internal AMAX II+ card for the
2000/3000/4000, so in order to print to a Postscript laser printer, we
need to print to a file and then use an AMAX-supplied utility to dump that
file to the printer. Other than that, it's sweet. Oh, we also bought an
ordinary Mac floppy drive, used. It hooks into the AMAX and we can read
Mac floppies directly. We have set up a bootable Mac partition on the
Amiga hard drive, and we also can run the Mac RAM disk as needed. You can
also read Amiga disks in the Amiga drives while in Mac mode, using an
included transfer utility. You must supply your own 128K Mac ROMs, but
there are several places that sell these and there is something of a
personal used market, too.
Right now, I think I'd check out the Emplant board. It emulates a COLOR
Mac for about twice the money as an AMAX, which still only supports B&W. I
don't have one, but from all accounts it sounds great. You'd need an A3000
at least, however.
— Ron Legro, Milwaukee
via AUTOPILOT (the only way to fly)
Ron:
Thanks for the info! It's nice to know that something as complex as
PageMaker will run on AMAX-II. Are you saying that, with this setup,
there's no way for PageMaker to print to a printer plugged into the parallel
port of the Amiga? Or is it only PostScript printers that won't work (I
don't know anything about Mac PageMaker — will it print to a non-postscript
printer)?
Thanks a lot for the help,
–Phil
Phil:
No, just Postscript printers won't work directly on the external AMAX
cartridge, as they depend on AppleTalk. AMAX *will* let your 9- or 24-pin
printer emulate an Applewriter dot matrix printer with modestly success. A
utility called GP Powerprint (about $80) will greatly improve the
emulation. With this setup, you can use standard Mac fonts or Truetype
fonts without problem.
The reason the Postscript printer won't directly in my case is that the
external AMAX cartridge doesn't carry AppleTalk ports. However, the AMAX
II+ card that fits in a slot DOES have AppleTalk, so printing straight to
a Postscript device shouldn't be a problem with the card slot version.
Of course, with the external cart you can always print an Aldus document
to a disk file and take that in to a service bureau, but that's not very
useful for page-proofing. That's what we did, though, before we were able
to afford a Postscript printer.
I forget whether Pagemaker for the Mac supports non-Postscript devices. I
don't think it does. I can check for you, if that's important. Just
remember, that's a limitation of Pagemaker, not of the Mac or AMAX.
— Ron Legro, Milwaukee
via AUTOPILOT (the only way to fly)
Ron:
Hmmm… intersting. I have to call ReadySoft anyway because I have no
diskettes or manuals (except one thin upgrade manual). I may compare the
cost of these materials with buying a used AMAX II+, then decide on what
I'll do.
I'm probably going to get PageMaker 5, so I'll check the literature to see
what kinds of printers it supports.
What do you think the minimum amount of fast RAM should be to run PageMaker?
How much do you have, & how's the performance?
Thanks for all your help,
–Phil
Phil,
Pagemaker can support any printer depending upon which drivers you use.
You can use the Aldus drivers or print directly through the Mac's drivers. The
Aldus drivers, however, have been optimized for use on a variety of laser
printers and are preferred. You select the desired drivers at install time.
Pagemaker is a memory hog. You will need a MINIMUM of 2 meg of FREE
ram or Pagemaker will not likely load. Version 4 requires AT LEAST 1.5 meg of
FREE ram or it won't load. Pagemaker will be slow and ponderous if you don't
have enough memory, so the more the better.
I have 1 meg of chip and 4 megs of fast RAM, and I'd say that's about as
little as you're comfortably going to get away with using Pagemaker under
AMAX. It's a RAM hog, especially when you're pushing lots of fonts around.
I can still run Multifinder, but not with a big PM document in memory.
— Ron Legro, Milwaukee
via AUTOPILOT (the only way to fly)