In other words: Amigas were the world's first Hackintosh.

"There MUST be some reason the Mac is so much more expensive ....." a question that remains unanswered to this day.

Indeed I had Amax running on my 2000 and the machine sported VGA output via the Commodore Flickr fixer. It really did look amazing on my crisp VGA monitor and I used it as needed while attending university for writing and stuff.

"There must be something the Macintosh can do that the Amiga can't do." Yes, there is. It can empty your parents' bank account much faster.

The Atari ST could also emulate a Macintosh, and do a better job of it with its hi-res, non-interlaced monochrome graphics mode (compatible with a VGA monitor). Its GEM interface was also more Mac-like -- enough to get Digital Research sued by Apple, which resulted in the DOS version of GEM being crippled, although the Atari version (TOS) remained unaffected.

"There's gotta be a reason macs are so much more expensive, I'm sure there's things it can do that others can't". I guess some things never change.

Those Amigas keep on impressing me. They were completely off my radar until the mid 90s, and by then Apple was already onto PowerPC.

I was lucky to receive my Amiga 500 for Christmas 1987. Was the luckiest boy in town I, at least thats how I felt. Tried some DOS Emulators and found MS Flightsim was running quite OK-ish in Software Mode. We had some Macs in School for the older classes but one days they presented them on a "open Door" day. Learned some LOGO on it, I think that was my first "coding" experience. Nice Video!

Ha, I remember doing this on my accelerated Amiga. I spent days trying to work out how to do it, eventually got it working and then had no idea what to do next. I had no Mac software and so I just noodled around around the basic tools and prefs with this overwhelming high and mighty attitude that my Amiga was emulating a Mac, faster than the real thing. I think I really was an insufferable Amiga fan back then. Thankfully now I appreciate and love all the computers and just love tech in general.

I hauled my A3000 and 1950 monitor in to high school for a “show and tell” type event. Blowing the minds of the 6 kids of 20 in the class paying attention with all the awesome of the Amiga. Fired up games, sound digitizers/editor, 3D software, Dpaint, and more.

I really liked the aside where you explained how you fixed the video problem you ran into. That's something that a lot of content creators would've just fixed and then never mentioned, but it's always fun to see good problem-solving.

One thing the Amiga couldn't do that a Mac could do was survive as a computer platform to this very day. I was working at a computer store in the early 80s in the 2nd largest city in washington state, and was selling the heck out of the Apple IIs. Then one day the Mac showed up. My sales skyrocketed. Across the street was a department store that had an electronics department and they sold the Amiga. I'd go over on my lunch hour and check out the competition. I never saw any customers. Then I'd go back to the store I worked at and was busy all day selling macs, mac software, mac printers, mac scanners. And after work some times my fellow salesmen and I would lock the doors and network all the macs and play maze wars. It was a glorious time.

I am happy I went the Amiga route back then even though the Mac "won" the computer battle. I had tons of fun with my Amiga's 1000, 500 and 2500. Great video!

I used AMax to run PCB design software when developing my Amiga SCSI interface, which was published as the cover story in AC Tech’s Amiga magazine.

I really felt the anecdote at the end, trying to convince schools to save tens of thousands of dollars by shopping smarter. We had an after-school computer club, where we dabbled in coding, board building, and primitive Internet content creation. We couldn't use the computers in our lab because they were 10 year old Macintosh computers. Albeit, they got the job done, the purpose of our computer lab was to teach basic word processing and publishing, but our club required us to bring in our own computers from home to do some things. We noticed the old Macintosh computers were starting to fail, though. We knew they would have to be replaced soon. A pitch as drawn up for a handful of cheap-ish modern computers for the school, an effective guide to begin a long-overdue upgrade to their decade-old computer lab. Unfortunately, the prevailing mindset at the time wasn't "what computer is best," but instead was "what computer is easiest for us teach?" Which, credit to Apple, they definitely had us cornered 10 years ago. Sadly, we came to find there is a rampant culture among teachers, this mindset of "my job is to TEACH, not to LEARN." They've used these Apple computers in the classroom ever since their Reagan-era unboxing, and haven't seen any need to upgrade for new confangled real-time video or Internet hootnanny. Watching video on the computer? Surfing the Internet Superhighway? Feh, those are just fads, they'll be gone like pogs and fanny packs. So, the old Apples stayed. Wasn't a huge defeat, though. We merged our computer club into a more organized (and state-sponsored) robotics club, which provided us with all the tech we needed. And with the soon-to-be roll-out of Windows 95, we got a massive donation of Windows 3.1 PCs from a local business, which one-by-one began replacing the aging Macs as they started to die of natural causes. It was actually kind of an exciting time, where our computer lab was kind of this jumbled hybrid mess of several computers running different generations of operating systems and different software libraries. Our lab had the row of still-functioning retro Macs, a new row of Windows 3.1 PCs, a handful of the more capable donated PCs that were upgraded to Windows 95, and the couple PCs specifically designated for the robotics club (though they could still run Sim City 2000 at cheetah speed, an imperative performance standard). It was a wild, chaotic, disorganized mishmash of everything. And it was beautiful. Nowadays, school computer labs just don't really exist anymore. There isn't really anything to teach. Computer interface design has become intuitive enough that people can figure it out on their own with relative ease, and the software handles most of the tricky stuff. But I still believe kids should somehow be given exposure to different operating systems wherever possible, and instead of blindly pledging allegiance to arbitrary "brand loyalty," just appreciate the unique capabilities each platform has to offer. Because you never really know when a company nowadays will do what Amiga did in the 90s, and release something truly extraordinary beyond everything else, without anyone really noticing. Kind of like what Apple is doing today, bringing the story full circle back to their local dominance of my school 40 years ago, releasing an exciting generation of chips that merges the CPU and GPU together with encouraging results. If today's Apple is that "something truly extraordinary beyond everything else," I'll be glad my school familiarized me with the OS way back when.

I ran that myself. If you ever get a chance, get A Jim Drew EMPLANT card it had the Apple ports on there as well as could use Apple II ROMs and you have a color mac You could to 16 colors I believe on the stock. If you had a Picasso and retargetable graphics you could do a full 256 color and if you did do benchmarks and you had enough RAM, you would see that the Amiga would toast a real Mac in just about anything including performance

During the switchover from 68k to PowerPC, I quite often used my Amiga 4000/030 with Shapeshifter to boot directly into MacOS, because the internet was just coming up here in Germany and getting the Amiga online was a lot more hassle than just using AOL on the Mac side :D I did end up using the Amiga with a lot of ported Unix tools later on, but for some time, I literally booted to MacOS every day and with a 68030 and a graphics card, it was sheer delight. By then, MacOS 7.5 and later got along a bit better with different screen resolutions and everything looked a lot more polished than on the Amiga, where a lot of applications still insisted on using Topaz 8 for their font, despite nicer fonts being available on higher resolutions. This also made for a lot more consistency which Apple still enforced a bit more back then.. if there was a dialog asking for "Yes, No or Cancel", you knew which order the buttons would be in and which one was the default.. Apple specified their UIs to that level of detail(and at some point, applications like Kai's Power Tools and Bryce completely went off that wagon :D ) and I think, that made for the appeal to new computer users, after explaining the basic concepts, everything looked the same. I've only very recently had the "joy" of having to use a modern MacOS for longer than a couple of hours and I almost went mad, because they seem to have tacked on a lot of functionality from other operating systems onto some of the same "old" design principles.. Only that now you have a second mouse button and most of the settings that seem to make sense for people coming from other operating systems are hidden in the accessibility settings as if we were dumb or something :D With the advent of hard drives, Apple also stayed a lot longer with the (then quicker) SCSI drives than everybody else who went for IDE drives instead and a lot of software for the media creation and publishing industry was Mac-first, like QuarkXpress and pretty much everything from Adobe, making it a nice choice for creative workers, that don't want the computer to be in the way too much. So in a way, it was worth the money for the computer to not have to deal with the computer too much. Back when you could almost render your PC unbootable by copying and pasting some magic garbage into your config.sys or autoexec.bat, you could easily boot a mac into failsafe without any extensions and you wouldn't miss too much. It was not as easy to delete relevant parts of your operating system, you had to put some more effort into that :D The PowerPC laptops that followed shortly after my Mac period actually made me think whether I should be buying a PC laptop to run Linux or get a Powerbook Duo 2300... But by then, I was already so much acquainted with the Unix ecosystem(which became the Amiga's official development environment(aka the Geek Gadgets)) and on my way to a career in Unix administration, so I went for Linux and I've only just recently installed MacOS 9 into a PPC emulator, just to play Escape Velocity again :D

I grew up on the 64 at home and the IIe at school. Never really had much exposure to Mac but my school did get a Novell network with XT (ps/2) clients and a ps/2 386 server. I SO wanted an Amiga back in the day Oh and Protip: if you are running a school network based on Novell netware, make sure you put a password on the SUPERVISOR login lol

Your writing lab: Apple was super smart about getting their computers into schools. Most people who aren't in technology field (and some who do) make up their mind on computer/phone (and other) brands in Jr High and High School, and rarely change their minds after that.

Very interesting! Because as they say, “Once you go Mac, you never go Jack. Tramiel.” Or something.

back in 2019, on the Atari 8 Bit convention called "Fujiama", my friend Beetle (named after the Volkswagen car) ran Shape Shifter on his Amiga, and inside it on Mac OS Classic he ran the Atari 8 Bit Emulator called Rainbow. Machine on machine on machine is quite cool I think.

Wow, this was new to me, thanks! I remember having a similar argument among friends, I was the Amiga 500 guy, and a friend of mine had his fathers work laptop that ran Mortal Kombat 1 and 3, Duke3D and such. I really liked the Amiga but they said that it's just a game machine. I knew in my heart that it was capable of more than "just" games (even though we only used it for games) I didn't really use any office software and didn't tinker with Workbench much to defend my position. Well, by the time these PC games were out, the Amiga was surpassed, but for a long time a simple Amiga 500 could do much more than PCs at the time. I still remember this argument to this day... Amiga was not only a gaming machine, dammit!

Love that outro music. Happy Easter! And thanks for a fun video :) What a cool piece of tech.

I wrote my novel on the last verison of Clarisworks, Appleworks. It must have combined MacDraw and MacPaint into the suite of tools, but if that's the case or not, I did use the Drawing tool to make visuals associated with my story.

I remember running an Mac-emulator called "Shapeshifter" on my Amiga 1200, which could run Mac OS 7. A friend of mine had a Mac, and the way we transferred stuff from his Mac to my Amiga, was to use PC-formatted (720k) disks which both of our computers could read. I did have a turbo-card with 8 mb additional ram, 68030 (or 68040?) CPU + MMU on it. Though, the emulation was still a bit slow. Although, I used a TV (Pal here in Sweden) as my screen, and the flickering in the interlaced mode was quite intense. So, it was more of a fun novelty to launch Shapeshifter, but nothing I used to any serious extent.

I've never seen the AMax in action. I had an Emplant card for my 4000, and it worked well. It emulated a Quadra 700. I used to run Quark, Illustrator, and Photoshop on it because the magazine I worked for had Mac SEs that were terrible for doing any sort of design work.

The amount of effort and love put into your videos astounds me. You're the best!

Never knew about these old emulators. I used Shapeshifter later on in the late 90s early 00s, mainly to use Office and Java for University. But I imagine few people cared about emulating a Mac until the Amiga started to lose software support.

Impressive. As some others said, the Atari ST had Magic Sac and later, Spectre GCR from the same developer that provided the same functionality and ran 20% faster than a Mac because of the ST's faster clock rate.

That was a truly fascinating video, and I’m sure as a kid it was probably about one of the coolest computing solutions. Emulating a super expensive computer on a budget computer is spectacular!

The intro tune is Awesome 👍🏻I've never mentioned that before. Keep the great content coming. Thanks!

I know it takes more than one day to put a video together which is why it's weird that ONLY YESTERDAY, the "Amiga Love" channel made a video about Mac OS on Amiga hardware.

seeing those innumerable hordes of Mac's in that lab struck me how wealthy schools are in the US. my art dept had one Mac, that was the only Mac in the school of 1800 pupils!

This is really neat. I love that you also had footage from your school

Thank you for this great series of videos. I love this channel. Excellent work!!!

I remember a co-worker around 1996 was a huge amiga fan. I always thought he was just being eccentric, because to me it was an expensive computer that only people doing video production used. I never experienced the “cheap” amigas or if I did, I didn’t know what they were at the time. It’s interesting to see what was and how the “better” machine doesn’t always come out on top.

Wow, that was my high school typing class too (not that exact one, but it was full of those same Macs in 1997). -- My grandma was super insistent that I take a typing class in HS because "computers are the future". -- Thanks Grandma. ❤ I remember for the typing test, they put a piece of paper over our hands, and made us type without being able to see the keyboard (not bragging; I think most people can do this now; it just seems funny looking back on it). -- And we used to type a few pages and then copy and hold down paste, and then copy the whole document again and hold down paste again (over and over increasing the copy size by like 10x each time) until the machines ran out of memory and quit responding (those poor Macs. 😅).

Great content, really enjoying watching it all, wish I'd found it sooner, lol, currently binge watching to catch up.🙂

Love your channel, Fantastic stuff, Thanks for all you do!

From 1995-1999 I ran Shapeshifter on my A4000, just for Netscape. Until I got a G4 Powermac, Mac prices at the time were competitive with PCs in the UK. Not in the last 10 years they haven't

A childhood friend of mine and his dad were huge Amiga fans. I remember his dad having something on his Amiga that could emulate a Mac. (they had at least four Amigas over the years so I don't remember if it was on the 1000 or 2000 let alone how he emulated the Mac. All I know is it wasn't on the his mom's 500). Unfortunately I can't ask how they did it as Jon and his dad have both passed away.

thank you David for a good video.. always enjoy watching it. Stay safe 🙂 Ps. the things you experienced trying to convince people in regards to the amiga.. thats what I experience in regards to my VR and trying to get friends to get it too.

Hi, I am a timetraveler. I just came here to let you know thank you for your videos. Your videos are mush watch for all the time travellers who want to visit 1960-1999!

Most people did creative and good things with their Amigas. I only used my Amiga to redraw the mouse cursor to look like the male genitalia...... I feel like an ant among gods, and I love it.

Very interesting software! The more i learn about the Amiga the more i wish i was born in the 80s instead of the mid 2000s.

I absolutely love the fact you even have old video footage from your high school back in the day. Stuff like that is priceless.

Great video as always. Those novel interoperability solutions are amusing!

RMC: YOU STEAL IDEA! The 8-Bit Guy: DID NOT! RMC: DID SO!

So cool to see this in action! I wonder - did it get updated to support newer ROMs and overall Mac compatibility at any point? How did it handle audio? What was the highest Mac OS version it supported (limited by the ROMs?)? Any relation between this and ShapeShifter? Any relation to the modern Basilisk II emulator? Also, I think the Atari was supposed to have a similar option available for Mac compatibility, based on something I saw on an episode of the Computer Chronicles about the Atari. Any chance you might cover that at some point?

An excellent episode as always.

Yay!!! Class of 93!!! I had an Amiga 500 as well, but my experience with the Mac came from doing a group project with the son of a newspaper editor. They had a fully loaded Mac with a hard drive and Adobe PageMaker with a laser printer. I was amazed by the results. I had a star nx2420 color printer and could not get anything close to what that Mac/printer combo could do. However, I used that Amiga all throughout High School and my first year of college.

A-Max was a very popular early emulator from Readysoft (the same software house of Wrath of the Demon and Dragon's Lair). It was much publicized on magazines and very well reviewed . Then come other emulators of that fruit branded computer, but A-Max was the first from what i recall.

I had to laugh when you said your high school's computer lab was stuffed with Macs as mine was at the same time in elementary school. I credit this as the reason why buying a Mac comes with a bit of nostalgia. Macs certainly seemed less troublesome than the hand-me-down IBM hardware my stepfather would tinker with at the same time.

My friend, i love every video you make :)

I love your studio!

Maybe you could have set your camcorder shutter speed to 30 so that both even and odd fields would be blended together for each frame.

It's nice to see that Apple's trend of selling less powerful hardware for 3x the price of competitors goes way back to the 80s!

Happy Easter, David!

super cool video man. happy Easter!

The Atari ST hads everal Mac "emulators" - The Magic Sac, and several iterations of the Spectre

A modern Mac: No, you can't swap SSDs, you'll need a second Mac then to restore the OS. And don't even think of installing a second one. 1980's Mac: Ah, an Amiga CPU? Bah, I'll work just fine.

Thanks for the great video, Have a good weekend 8 Bit Guy.

Excellent video. This is taking me back.

I was very confused until you mentioned that there is (or was) a software only solution, because I still have the AMax disk and a couple of disks with macintosh software and they work without any additional hardware!

"If the Mac is so expensive then it must be good for something." There we have Apple's marketing strategy.

I'm glad you mentioned geek bits. i hadn't heard of it. sounds like my kind of podcast

While the Amiga was clocked a little slower than the Mac Plus, the way the logic was implemented meant the Mac seems to run at the same speed, despite the faster cpu clock. SpectreGCR on the ST did a similar thing but used the full 640 by 400 on the ST high resolution screen, as well as doing some funky stuff with the disk drive via a cable from the SpectreGCR box to the ST floppy port. The ST had the same cpu clocked at the same speed as the Mac plus but appeared to run faster, however most of the logic on the Mac SE was condensed into a single chip, making the SE faster than the Mac Plus, despite being clocked at the same speed! A few years ago on my old Atari Music Network site, I ran a comparison between my Mega ST and my Mac SE and found that natively, the Atari was snappier but as I didn’t have a working SpectreGCR system, couldn’t compare them running Mac software.

The fastest Mac was actually an Amiga. Apple never made an 060 Mac, but there was an 060 Amiga. Hence, the Amiga could run Mac OS quicker than a Mac.

I don't understand why Amiga failed, they had better computer. Imagine having (A)Phone and (A)Pad with Workbench X :)

10:46 - To think that these kids are 27 years older now, 1995 s not that long ago but it is still 27 years ago.... How time flies.

I enjoyed the video David, I had no idea how complicated resolution changes could be back in the 80s

David: I watched this episode on my PS4 which is hooked up to my stereo system… I never realized how great your intro music sounds on proper equipment. Kudos!

Ha that takes me back, I had an Aladin cartridge on the Atari ST that worked in a similar fashion. You needed some real Apple Roms to make it work, but on a high res mono Atari monitor it was a perfect emulation. Pretty soon realised that Macs were a lot more boring than Ataris and went back to native Atari.

I owned an Amiga as well, back in the day. I started with an A2000. But, later I also got an A500 and even an A1000 just for fun. Sad that commodore mismanaged things so horribly. The A3000 wasn't the major step forward that was needed at that time, and the graphics chips that once allowed the Amiga to shine became a prison of sorts (while other computers could take advantage of higher resolution modes via graphics cards). The Amiga market tried to catch up with devices such as DCTV and HAM-E (I had both of those), the Video Toaster, etc... and eventually the AGA chipset. But it was all too little too late. I loved all the crazy inventive products that offered inexpensive solutions. Like the Mac emulators. I owned a VBS (Video Backup System) that allowed a person to backup their Amiga data to a regular VHS tape. Outstanding product that only cost about $30 and gave you all the storage space you could ever want or need for the cost of VHS tapes. I owned a device (can't remember the name) that allowed you to connect a fiber optic cable to the print head on any printer and turn it into a page scanner! It was only about $45 when page scanners used to cost about $1200. I also owned an Atari ST, but preferred the Amiga. The ST also had a Mac emulator. I had lots of fun with my Amiga. Great video!

For the Amgiga's competitor, the Atari ST, there was a Mac emulator called Aladin which delivered flawless Mac emulation particularly with the Atari's hi-res, paper-white, larger display, including flawless matrix printer support. It was my gateway into the blissful world of Macintosh before I got my first Mac SE.

Maybe you could try to use a PowerPC upgrade and run newer Mac OS versions on an Amiga. I think there was a G3 upgrade for 68k macs, so if there’s a way to add a PDS slot it might be possible to run Mac OS X on an Amiga! Edit: I just remembered that there are PowerPC upgrades for the Amiga, so it would be another way of running PPC Mac OS

Back in ye olde days (late 80's/early 90's), we had a Commodore 64 at home and at school, they had Apple IIe in the computer labs. I remember thinking "Wow, these Apples suck compared to what I have at home, they must be cheap garbage!" When I learned how much the cost compared to what I had, I was confused as to how the one with less features (I had color and sound! The computer lab teacher tried to tell me that I was lying, and that the Apple was the most advanced computer and what I was describing was impossible, lol) were more expensive. To this day, I still have a very low opinion of anything from Apple.

Toward the end of my senior year of High School, when so many students hadn't seen anything but the ancient Franklin (Apple II clone) systems we had, I got my teacher to allow me to bring my Amiga 1000 to school to show the students apps like Sculpt3D and where the current state of computing was actually at.

I had Amax running on my A500+. Had a GVP HD with Amax installed along with the Lattice C compiler. I wrote my dissertation using Amax running Word. This allowed me to use my Amiga as my full home Dev machine and then be able to take my files back and fourth to university.

I'm convinced at this point that the 8-Bit Guy grew up in Europe. Noone bought a Mac here because of 'It's more expensive, so it MUST be better'.

Amiga's continue to increase me after all these years. Actually pretty amazed to see it running MacOS - love this, David. For my gaming interests I still look at the Amiga, C64, and DOS as tops.

This was so fascinating! I had no idea even that the Amiga had the same CPU chip as the macs at the time. Thanks for doing this vid I loved it

I also used AMax to run Mac stuff on the Amiga was running 640x480, used my parallel printer (the Mac utility program PowerPrint was able to print through the Amigas parallel port to a espon compatible printer) Had a second hard drive to boot and run Mac stuff. also an Apple Power CD to do CD stuff It was quite usable till I got a real Mac a couple years later. Very usable.

5:40 What the hell is Claris McWright? It's MAC-WRITE. It's not an Irishman.

Apple charging 3x as much as the competition despite their products not being any better. Good to see they're keeping tradition alive.

Happy Easter!

Thank you! Always interesting.

The fact that my shitty android phone can literally do everything my other family member's overpriced apple phone can do at 1/10 the cost makes this ending even more poetic

Apple: Does less, costs more since 1987

Neat to see this in action with it's rom card approach. I definitely like the idea, as only needing to possibly get a spare Plus ROM upgrade kit and an 800k external drive would definitely make it a cost-effective option, and the ability to forgo both and do it all in software is a nice touch. Our house had always been a hand-me-down PC kind of household for most of my adolescence, so my experiences getting Mac software running would have been through Fusion PC or SoftMac. It's always interesting to see solutions like this that were available when the actual product was still on the market.

I had it all. Top of the line was a internal card with color support of Mac on my A3000. Since it had a HD disk drive, it did support all Mac formatted disks as well. It was the fastest avilable Mac at the time. it all workt very nicely.

"There must be some reason why the Mac is more expensive, it can do things [the others] can't" - Still Apple's current marketing strategy....

I so remember doing this and wow my uncle didn't like it as mine was the faster Mac! hahahahaha

So much fun! Thanks for the video. 💜

Just another Reason to keep in your pocket! Nice to see A-Max II in Action as I wondered how it could read Mac till you explained it! Wow! Thanks!

I wonder if the black bar on one of the screens visible when recording at 60fps has anything to do with the NTSC video standard? NTSC analog video standard is 59.97Hz rather than an even 60 with digital standards. Or maybe it was just the camera's 60fps setting not having a long enough exposure time to help blend the phosphor scan lines.

68060 worked for Amiga, and with Sheepsaver, you can run Mac OS (68k) on an Amiga......faster than on a real mac? ✔️💥

This video combined with RMC - The Cave's "The Fastest Apple Mac Is An Amiga" video now really has me fired up about restoring my A500. I have now managed to find emulators/"virtualisers" for the Mac, the ST, and even the Sinclair QL which will all run on an Amiga. Heck, I even have a 1040STf which I know I can get to run MacOS too. Essentially, I will end up having more "Mac"s than STs or Amigas. For a while at least. Great video! I think this would fit well as a companion piece to the Commodore documentary.

Oh the memories. I had an emplant card in my A4000 which was how I got on the Internet in 1994. Mac's were even more expensive in the UK back then so this really was an affordable solution. Enjoyed the video.

Macs were able to do something the Amiga could not: get into US schools by the millions and convince an entire generation of kids that "computer" meant "Apple" and "Apple" meant "cool" which Apple was able to leverage once those kids became adults just in time to get them hooked on iProducts