AMAX
30 messages in this thread
Do you have an AMAX already??? If you do let me know as I have a couple of
questions for you as I can't get mine to run
Shoot Ron. I've got one and it works fine. Personaly I don't think it
should have been released without complete hard disk support but heck it
does work.
Anyone mind if I jump in on this conversation too?
I have to get an AMax board since my school requires the use of mac Pascal
packages for a number of our computer science courses.. a severe nuisance.
What is the current state of HD support? i.e.: I have a Supra controller
with a Seagate 83M drive. I left 10M as a spare partition for (hopefully)
Mac software.. any idea if it is possible to get that partition recognized
by the AMax board? Should I even attempt it? How useful is the board? What
does it's speed compare to (Mac Plus, SE, SE30, etc.. though I know not to
expect much)?
Thanks..
Brian
Brian:
How much ram do you have? I have 5 megs, and set up 2 of them to be a RAM
disk that masquerades as a very fast hard drive so far as AMAX is
concerned.
The other three megs are used by AMAX for the MAC system. I boot from
disk, create the RAM "hard drive", copy the system disk into that drive,
and then reboot from the RAM "hd". The second boot is almost instantaneous
(I have a 68020, and two of the megs are 32 bits). Anyway, once I've done
this, I also normally put my applications into the RAM "hd" and just use
the MAC floppy drive for data. While I'd much rather have an actual HD
hooked up to this thing, the above works very well, and is super fast.
AMAX uses all my ram, my 68020, my mmu, and my 6881 math chip. Everything
runs VERY quickly.
Ray Lewis
Ray,
That's a very clever way to run things! So basically, you have an Amiga, a
MAC II, and an IBM AT (you *do* have a bridge, if I recall?) in one neat
little package, all running with a 68020.
Now, that's a Ronin Hurricane board? And at what speed again? And what
did it cost? You *know* why I am aasking, don't you? <grin>
–Gabe
Gabe:
At home I have a CBM 68020 board, no bridgeboard, and the AMAX with a
Cutting Edge external MAC style drive. Five megs of memory, two are 32
bit.
The CBM board, with the two megs of 32 bit, cost me about $1500 around a
year ago.
The AMAX, with Apple 128 k roms and the cutting edge drive cost about $450,
as a package.
At work, I have the CBM 68030 board, with 4 megs of 32 bit ram (for 5
total), and the AT bridge. I can easily take the AMAX/Cutting Edge drive
into work (haven't done it yet, but it's simply undoing one plug), and have
a MAC, 2500/30 Amiga and AT clone all in one box.
Ray Lewis
Speed wise it looks to be operating at about the same speed as the original
Mac Plus and SE. So its not too bad in that reguard, The HD support is in
April. Or so I'm told as of this week. No one knows how they will do it.
Heres how I wish they would do it. Have a program in Amiga dos that says.
How big shall we make our Mac hard disk look like? 5 meg 10, 100 whatever.
Than it writes an Amiga "file" that is really just the data of a blank Mac
HD. Now than we can do all our xfers etc from an AmigaDos side without
making some weird Ass extra partition etc. This is how the Mac folks do it
on there PC software emulator which brings me to the Transformer <grin>.
What a stupid program when it doesnt have HD support. If you can't use a
HD it isint done yet! Or so I say! <grin> All in all it works pretty good.
Sound is lacking tho. Disk formats are pretty easily read in. Even Mac
Games work?!?!? Weird!
Hmm.. sounds irritating. I have but 1 meg.. might get the money to expand
to 3M over the summer. I have an extra 10MB partition on my drive that I
was saving for AMAX, in case it had HD support.. Mac's are a pain in
general, much more so when you have to swap disks every few seconds. You
say HD support in April? Hmm.. the class for which I'd need the AMAX board
starts then.. maybe I can wait. Is there an AMAX rep around here we could
ask? It would be frustrating to buy the board out of desperation and then
find it updated a week later to provide something as essential as HD
support..
Brian
Brian:
One nice thing about the Amax as it presently is: You can use your
Amiga drivesas if they were Mac drives, although the format isn't right.
What they do is have a completely different format that isn't quite
Amigados, and isn't quite Mac dos (or whatever it's called) but rather
their own format. I have Amax with an Amig-A-Tosh disk drive (an Apple
like drive for the Amy) that I use for copying original Mac stuff from, but
I boot off of the internal Amiga drive with an Amax format disk. If you
have an extra floppy, you can have something Mac's can't – 3 (or 4)
floppies! Sure, it ain't the same as a hard disk, but what the heck, it
beats a blank!
-Mike
I hope someone writes a CrossDOS type of utility for AMAX format to
AmigaDOS format. It would make trasferring files less painful.
Raman
Raman,
Writing such a utility for AMAX is not possible because of the way the MAC
drives work. They write at different speeds on different parts of the
disk, and the AMiga drives are not made to allow these speed changes. You
could write a driver that will let you write or read 1/3 of a Mac disk, but
not all of it. Not that I am a Mac drive expert, you understand – I just
read a lot.
……Betty
I have a question, speaking of AMAX. When is their next revision due out,
the legendary one supporting Appletalk and hard drive partitions? I had
understood that they were aiming for Christmas 89, are they having trouble?
Thom
Sorry, Thom – I don't know anything about that one. Heard a rumor that it
would be 'soon', heard another that said 'April', and just assigned all the
rumors to RSN 🙂
……Betty
I talked with em about a week ago and the man says "April". Didnt say
which year tho <grin>
Did they say which SCSI busses would be supported? I'm still hoping
for support for my C Ltd. non-Kronos controller, so that I can use not only
my HD, but my LazerXpress SCSI laser printer as well.
Betty:
Ahh, then the question should be this– is it possible to make a
drive like the amig-a-tosh (apple style drive) read & write amigados
format?????
-Mike
Mike, I don't know. I never tried to change the speed on a drive, but I
would not be willing to say flatly that it cannot be done on any drive. I
suspect that the Mac-style drives have those speed changes built in pretty
solid, though.
You know, I have lots of the old Commodore IEEE drives – 8050 drives that
stored .5M on one side of a 5 1/4" floppy, and 1001 drives that stores over
1M on both sides of same. I've wished that there were a way to use THOSE
on the AMiga, but they were smart drives with all of the software built
into the drive itself, and if there is a way to use them, I have not heard
of it. We have quite a few of those, too – three 8050 drives and two of
the 1001's, all just sitting idle these days.
……Betty
Betty;
Using those old drives on the Amy should be easy. You just have to strip
out the 'smarts,' build the little 'select' latch and configure the
mountlist properly.
=>73<=, bill =>KB7LX @ K4IWW<
Mike,
The problem of disk interchangeability between the Mac and the Amiga
is due to (as Betty has explained) the fact that the Mac floppy drives
operate at a variable speed while Amiga drives maintain a constant speed.
The original Apple drives and early clone drives were 'dumb'
mechanisms….they were capable of variable speeds but the actual speed
control was done by a special floppy controller chip in the Mac….a chip
called the Incredible Woz Chip (the Amiga isn't the only computer withe
'cute' chip names!). More recent Apple and Mac clone floppy drives have
the speed control built into the drive and do not need to depend on the Woz
chip to rotate at the right speed depending on the position of the drive
head. Amax does not emulate the Woz chip in their software hence only new
drives work with it.
Central Coast Software is selling a combination hardware and software
product called Mac-2-Dos which allows you to hook up a Mac drive to an
Amiga and to transfer files back and forth all under AmigaDos. Mac-2-Dos
also provides for a full emulation of the Woz chips. They also market an
'older' style 'dumb' drive which can be held at a constant drive speed and
hence can be used as both a Mac drive and an Amiga drive. This drive will
also function normally on all real Macs since they contain the Woz chip.
It will NOT work under Amax since as noted above Amax does not emulate the
Woz chip.
Apple has a new drive called the Unidrive which can read both Mac and
IBM disks which must mean that it is capable of having a fixed and a
variable speed. You should be able to get this drive and any third party
clones of it (if there are any) to work as an Amiga drive either under
Mac-2-Dos or under custom software.
<continued>
<continuation>
For more info on Mac-2-Dos see my review of it in the current issue
(April-May) of Amiga Plus magazine.
For the record I'm no expert on the Mac but did a lot of research on
it for the article……unfortunately most of the above technical info got
left on the editing room floor due to space limitations.
Ed
I bought an older MAC drive for my AMAX, and like you said, it doesn't
work. If I buy MAC-2-DOS, will I be able to use it to transfer MAC software
to my AMAX?
*** SLY ***
Edmonton, Alberta
Betty, I didn't mean MAC format on MAC drive.. But a similar utility could
be written for the AMAX format on Amiga drives.
Raman
There is one way to do it. Dave Small made a gadget that allows Atari ST
single speed drives to read&write Mac format. He changes the clock speed
to the disk chip (genius!) I wouldnt be suprised if some smart chap came
up with a similar mod for our Amiga Disk controller…… Ok someone do it
! <GRIN>
Betty,
But since the AMAX format disks are run on Amy drives, one should be able
to do a CrossDOS to them and perhaps on the Mac Drive hooked up to the AMAX
cartridge as well.
FL
Frank:
But don't you have to run a special utility to read the special Amax
formated disks in either MAC or Amiga mode? Seems to me that the native
Amiga drivers won't read those disks. I don't use that feature much
myself, because of the MACBinary/resource fork etc. problem for anything
except data files and the rather small capacity of the Amax formatted
disks. I have a Cutting Edge MAC style drive hooked up to my Amax.
Ray Lewis
Ray,
The fact is that the Amiga can physically read AMAX disks. Software to
to do this can be operated under AmigaDOS. Small capacity? AMAX has 800k,
MAC has 800k, where's the difference. Also, Mac-t-DOS does read Mac-format
drives/disks under AmyDOS so a smarter Cross-DOS should be able to do both.
FL
Ray:
You are thinking of the transfer disk formats, those are small, and
I've never been able to get it to work. I like yourself don't have a need
for them, as I have a Mac type (Amig-A-tosh) drive hooked up to the AMAX
module, however, you can also use you internal amiga drive(s), as well as
amiga external drives with AMAX by simply putting a blank disk in the
drive, and formatting it as if it was a Mac disk, the AMAX format is done
by AMAX automatically, and I use this so that I can have the Mac style
drive free to use for either outgoing or incoming Mac disks.
-Mike P.S. I think it was you that said
SuperGeciGEL allowed you to use SetCPU's fastrom option, well I tried it,
and still AMAX died, as well as it seemed to make my system buggy, although
I'm not to sure I had a good copy of it, as it said that it should stay
resident after reboot, but didn't.
-Mike
Yes and when they do HD support I hope that they have Amiga software that
supports reading that data.
Tis true Mike. I started doing that myself so its a big improvement! Still
I wish for HD support!!!
I don't know I hope an AMaxer comes on line. I agree that the Mac is a
very frustrating machine. Im only using it as part of a contract to
provide MAC ready manuals on Aldus. I guess its needed in the electronic
form.