Running macOS on the Amiga in the 80s [video] | Hacker News Reader

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

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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…

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/

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!?)

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).

What mostly killed the Commodore Amiga, was brutal mismanagement by Commodore itself.

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.

If Commodore hadn't gone under, the next generation Amigas would have been using HP-RISC, though, with an A1200-on-a-chip for running older software. (That SoC was supposed to include a 68k core plus the AGA chipset cores, kind of like the Apollo Vampire).

Yes, zia.io / ziaspace.com are the same, and yes, that's the same Amiga 1200 - small world! Now the primary shell server for email / web hosting / development is an AlphaServer DS25.

Of course the Amiga needed a recapping a handful of years ago, and since the early 2000s the storage has been upgraded a few times, but it's still happily running, serving Aminet files and compiling pkgsrc packages.

It's funny - if you look at the pictures on the mini web site it hosts, you can tell they were taken with a real film camera and digitized.

That machine was an excellent Mac workstation, and now it's a very stable and reliable server. I really got my money's worth from it :)

I was around arguing with Amiga fanboys in this era. It was a very brief period of time - maybe less than a year after the PowerPCs were introduced when this was true. By the 1995, Apple released the second generation emulator, all of the apps any one cared about were native, and even none native apps were calling mostly native OS routines.

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/

Great content, well-presented, and regularly produced videos. I find I look forward to his videos every month.

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.

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.

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).

> The assault rifle over the back was definitely something weird but quite a bit of America is like that

Not really. Nearly everyone in my family has owned guns, including myself. We have family who hunt professionally. Several of us know people who concealed carry for legitimate self protection. Carrying a gun on full display is something you do because you have a specific purpose to use that gun. Doing so for entertainment is ridiculously unsafe under most circumstances and to the extent it’s part of American culture it’s a particularly toxic variant of that. But that’s a very limited subset of America. Most of our shitty gun culture is much more just plain American toxic culture generally

This. And also - maybe something to add that could explain his behaviour of showing force / guns on purpose. He was bullied a lot at elementary school - he was also the smallest kid in class. He mentioned this in one of his recent videos. (I am also a gun owner / concealed-carry license and located in EU).

Interesting. He is displaying obvious bully-like behavior: implicit intimidation, tension escalation, keeping others off-guard, blatant disregard for others' personal space and comfort. It seems like he learned all of the wrong lessons from being bullied. He learned that being a bully is good.

> (like when he was surprised that the electrician who came to his house was black).

I think he joked that Morgan Freeman came to his house, but yes, it was a bit tonedeaf

>I think he should be more aware of his global audience.

Why?

Why should the 8-Bit Guy, or anyone else, "be more aware" of an audience for which he creates interesting free content?

If people don't like his videos because of something that appears on his videos (or off screen, in this case), fewer people will stop watching them and maybe he will change his approach/message to cater to them. Or not.

If you mean that he should avoid triggering his audience, <https://gfycat.com/ImaginaryGrandioseAgouti>

"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/

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I think 7.6 was the full/official switch.

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://www.atarimagazines.com/v7n3/magicsacpro.html

This is Mac OS, not macOS.

In the 1980s it wasn't even Mac OS; it was called System.

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.

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