5 ms·

Running macOS on the Amiga in the 80s [video]

100 points by marban 5y ago

icedchai 5y ago
I remember doing this. Someone from a local BBS mailed me a pirated Amax emulator (it was patched to load the ROM from disk.)
karmakaze 5y ago
Similarly there was Magic Sac for the Atari ST that could faithfully run MacOS apps with 640px width vs 512px which made a big difference alleviating the need to horizontal scroll to see portrait page width.
tejtm 5y ago
"Shapeshifter" did it for me, even got myself legit physical ROMS to have on hand just in case anyone cared. Mac users were shocked it booted faster than native hardware. Looks like decedents are still around although superseded. https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/ https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/
sys_64738 5y ago
I did this via AMAX. There was a time that the fastest Mac was slower than an Amiga emulating a Mac.
boboche 5y ago
Shapeshifter was epic. Could enrage any apple fanboy around running benchmarks much faster than stock mac because roms were loaded in fastram. That expensive Quadra was toasted against my cheaper A2000 + Fusion forthy at running anything, including photoshop. There was that other board that was supposed to emulate pcs mac and whatnot that ended up only running macos and vapor, that was a shame though. Awh yes, Infamous Jim Drew. 30yrs later, still remember that name…
technothrasher 5y ago
To his musing about whether he ever convinced anybody at his high school that his Amiga was better than a Mac, I can say as a fellow high school Amiga evangelist... no, you didn't.
johnklos 5y ago
It was quite interesting to have an Amiga with a super fast m68060 around the time of the m68k -> PowerPC transition. Many things on the '060 were faster than even native PowerPC apps on the first generation Power Macs. With real DMA Fast SCSI-2, 256 megs of memory and true multitasking, it was a beast of a machine. ShapeShifter is quite good. I still have it, and it's still productive :) http://lilith.zia.io/ http://lilith.zia.io/
- actionfromafar 5y ago
  Yep, came here for this. There were a couple of strange twilight years when Commodore was almost (then actually) dead, and at the same time: An Amiga with external third party graphics card, 68060 third party CPU, SCSI-2 was faster and cheaper running MacOS than anything Apple could offer. Notably Photoshop was faster, because it took quite a while for all filters to be competently ported to PPC, and as OP said, the PPC in the Macs weren't even that fast in the first models. Edit: I think I might have had an account on that BSD Amiga of yours, at one time? Early 2000s if true. Someone gave me shell access to a tricked out A1200, I wonder if it could have been yours. If I recall correctly, some people had web pages there, including some musician called Zia. (You!?)
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The 68k had become a dead end by that time, this is what really killed the Amiga platform. Meanwhile PPC was in active development (and modern versions of IBM POWER are still in development today, for what it's worth).
    - actionfromafar 5y ago
      What mostly killed the Commodore Amiga, was brutal mismanagement by Commodore itself.
      - coldacid 5y ago
        This. Between Irving Gould sucking Commodore blood like a vampire, and his hatchet-man Mehdi Ali's endless stream of bad decisions, Commodore was already doomed years before it finally went bankrupt in '94.
saagarjha 5y ago
This is Mac OS, not macOS.
- wmf 5y ago
  In the 1980s it wasn't even Mac OS; it was called System.
  - sircastor 5y ago
    I was quite young at the time the Macs my dad owned were running System 6 and System 7. I remember coming across across hand-written disk that said something like “System 4.0.2” and being dumbfounded because it had never occurred to me that there’d been a system 1-5.
ulkesh 5y ago
I just watched this video today. The Amiga truly was ahead of the curve and sadly I didn't get to participate in 80s and early 90s computing much (I had a Commodore Plus/4 but that was it). Even now, I find that there is so much more to learn about that era. The 8-bit Guy, previously The iBookGuy, has an enormous amount of retro-tech information, including a whole series about the Commodore line of computers. And he developed his own game for various Commodore systems (and also an MS-DOS game). A little bit about him: https://www.the8bitguy.com/8bit-guy-about/ https://www.the8bitguy.com/8bit-guy-about/ Great content, well-presented, and regularly produced videos. I find I look forward to his videos every month.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  I feel like any discussion of him must include the controversies: He seriously damaged a rare and valuable IBM 7496 workstation, on camera, while trying to get it to work. Personally, I find his particular flavor of pro-gun ownership to be distasteful, in particular, happily being filmed wearing an assault rifle slung over his back while ordering food. I know that's not necessarily unusual in Texas, but I think he should be more aware of his global audience.
  - sircastor 5y ago
    It’s a reminder that it takes all sorts to make a world. I think SV has an effect of homogenizing computing hobbiests into a single type of person.
  - some-guy 5y ago
    The assault rifle over the back was definitely something weird but quite a bit of America is like that. Even the rare IBM destruction wasn’t that big of a deal to me. What made me pissed was wearing the assault rifle on video while _mocking_ one of the parents of the Sandy Hook massacre. He has also said some questionable lines in his videos (like when he was surprised that the electrician who came to his house was black).
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
naetius 5y ago
Minor correction op: in this case it's "Mac OS". "macOS" is for the post-Mac OS X.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
  In the '80s / early '90s they just called it "System". I think the transition to "Mac OS" branding came shortly after the introduction of PowerPC.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    I think 7.6 was the full/official switch.
spullara 5y ago
The first time you could every truly run two Mac OS programs at the same time (non-cooperatively) was when you were running two copies of ShapeShifter on an Amiga. Pulling down the Mac OS desktop screen to reveal the other Mac OS desktop behind was super cool.
flembat 5y ago
In 2022 an FPGA Amiga with shapeshifter still makes a very good 68K Mac. I use a vampire standalone system, a small system with a compact flash for a disk, it runs at 85Mhz and feels very like a real high end Mac of the 68k era.
xyzzy21 5y ago
Atari ST has something similar with the "Magic Sac" plug-in module. You needed Mac ROMs for it but since both were 68000-based, it was modestly easy to do. I had one back in the day. https://atariage.com/forums/topic/283329-magic-sac/ https://atariage.com/forums/topic/283329-magic-sac/ https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n3/magicsacpro.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n3/magicsacpro.html

100 points by marban 5y ago

I remember doing this. Someone from a local BBS mailed me a pirated Amax emulator (it was patched to load the ROM from disk.)

karmakaze 5y ago

Similarly there was Magic Sac for the Atari ST that could faithfully run MacOS apps with 640px width vs 512px which made a big difference alleviating the need to horizontal scroll to see portrait page width.

tejtm 5y ago

"Shapeshifter" did it for me, even got myself legit physical ROMS to have on hand just in case anyone cared. Mac users were shocked it booted faster than native hardware. Looks like decedents are still around although superseded. https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/ https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/

sys_64738 5y ago

I did this via AMAX. There was a time that the fastest Mac was slower than an Amiga emulating a Mac.

boboche 5y ago

Shapeshifter was epic. Could enrage any apple fanboy around running benchmarks much faster than stock mac because roms were loaded in fastram. That expensive Quadra was toasted against my cheaper A2000 + Fusion forthy at running anything, including photoshop. There was that other board that was supposed to emulate pcs mac and whatnot that ended up only running macos and vapor, that was a shame though. Awh yes, Infamous Jim Drew. 30yrs later, still remember that name…

technothrasher 5y ago

To his musing about whether he ever convinced anybody at his high school that his Amiga was better than a Mac, I can say as a fellow high school Amiga evangelist... no, you didn't.

johnklos 5y ago

It was quite interesting to have an Amiga with a super fast m68060 around the time of the m68k -> PowerPC transition. Many things on the '060 were faster than even native PowerPC apps on the first generation Power Macs. With real DMA Fast SCSI-2, 256 megs of memory and true multitasking, it was a beast of a machine. ShapeShifter is quite good. I still have it, and it's still productive :) http://lilith.zia.io/ http://lilith.zia.io/

actionfromafar 5y ago
Yep, came here for this. There were a couple of strange twilight years when Commodore was almost (then actually) dead, and at the same time: An Amiga with external third party graphics card, 68060 third party CPU, SCSI-2 was faster and cheaper running MacOS than anything Apple could offer. Notably Photoshop was faster, because it took quite a while for all filters to be competently ported to PPC, and as OP said, the PPC in the Macs weren't even that fast in the first models. Edit: I think I might have had an account on that BSD Amiga of yours, at one time? Early 2000s if true. Someone gave me shell access to a tricked out A1200, I wonder if it could have been yours. If I recall correctly, some people had web pages there, including some musician called Zia. (You!?)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The 68k had become a dead end by that time, this is what really killed the Amiga platform. Meanwhile PPC was in active development (and modern versions of IBM POWER are still in development today, for what it's worth).
  - actionfromafar 5y ago
    What mostly killed the Commodore Amiga, was brutal mismanagement by Commodore itself.
    - coldacid 5y ago
      This. Between Irving Gould sucking Commodore blood like a vampire, and his hatchet-man Mehdi Ali's endless stream of bad decisions, Commodore was already doomed years before it finally went bankrupt in '94.

saagarjha 5y ago

This is Mac OS, not macOS.

wmf 5y ago
In the 1980s it wasn't even Mac OS; it was called System.
- sircastor 5y ago
  I was quite young at the time the Macs my dad owned were running System 6 and System 7. I remember coming across across hand-written disk that said something like “System 4.0.2” and being dumbfounded because it had never occurred to me that there’d been a system 1-5.

ulkesh 5y ago

I just watched this video today. The Amiga truly was ahead of the curve and sadly I didn't get to participate in 80s and early 90s computing much (I had a Commodore Plus/4 but that was it). Even now, I find that there is so much more to learn about that era. The 8-bit Guy, previously The iBookGuy, has an enormous amount of retro-tech information, including a whole series about the Commodore line of computers. And he developed his own game for various Commodore systems (and also an MS-DOS game). A little bit about him: https://www.the8bitguy.com/8bit-guy-about/ https://www.the8bitguy.com/8bit-guy-about/ Great content, well-presented, and regularly produced videos. I find I look forward to his videos every month.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
I feel like any discussion of him must include the controversies: He seriously damaged a rare and valuable IBM 7496 workstation, on camera, while trying to get it to work. Personally, I find his particular flavor of pro-gun ownership to be distasteful, in particular, happily being filmed wearing an assault rifle slung over his back while ordering food. I know that's not necessarily unusual in Texas, but I think he should be more aware of his global audience.
- sircastor 5y ago
  It’s a reminder that it takes all sorts to make a world. I think SV has an effect of homogenizing computing hobbiests into a single type of person.
- some-guy 5y ago
  The assault rifle over the back was definitely something weird but quite a bit of America is like that. Even the rare IBM destruction wasn’t that big of a deal to me. What made me pissed was wearing the assault rifle on video while _mocking_ one of the parents of the Sandy Hook massacre. He has also said some questionable lines in his videos (like when he was surprised that the electrician who came to his house was black).
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago

naetius 5y ago

Minor correction op: in this case it's "Mac OS". "macOS" is for the post-Mac OS X.

0xcde4c3db 5y ago
In the '80s / early '90s they just called it "System". I think the transition to "Mac OS" branding came shortly after the introduction of PowerPC.
- majormajor 5y ago
  I think 7.6 was the full/official switch.

spullara 5y ago

The first time you could every truly run two Mac OS programs at the same time (non-cooperatively) was when you were running two copies of ShapeShifter on an Amiga. Pulling down the Mac OS desktop screen to reveal the other Mac OS desktop behind was super cool.

flembat 5y ago

In 2022 an FPGA Amiga with shapeshifter still makes a very good 68K Mac. I use a vampire standalone system, a small system with a compact flash for a disk, it runs at 85Mhz and feels very like a real high end Mac of the 68k era.

xyzzy21 5y ago

Atari ST has something similar with the "Magic Sac" plug-in module. You needed Mac ROMs for it but since both were 68000-based, it was modestly easy to do. I had one back in the day. https://atariage.com/forums/topic/283329-magic-sac/ https://atariage.com/forums/topic/283329-magic-sac/ https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n3/magicsacpro.html https://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n3/magicsacpro.html