Running Mac OS 6.0.1 On The Amiga 500 Computer

The perception among the tech industry is one of constant updating, but retro tech certainly has its place within fans minds if this fun hack is anything to go by. A Reddit and Imgur user by the username of wowbobwow (yippi yo yippy yay) Sorry but that sprang to mind, used an emulator called “A-Max” which in turn allowed the Mac ROM OS 6.0.1 to run on the Amiga 500.

For a minute let’s talk uber tech with regards to this application, emulation is any other faster computer program which mimics the behavior of a piece of computer hardware. The problem with this process is that when a program is run via emulation, said program becomes slower and therefore is unable to run at full speed due to the lack of bandwidth when imitating another system.  Therefore this project is not true emulation but is rather defined by a statement from the clever Hacker which is as follows,

“Worth noting that this is not “software emulation” like how you might run Mini vMac on a modern computer. This setup literally connects two Apple Macintosh ROM chips (from a Mac Plus, in this instance) to the Amiga’s floppy drive, and via some unholy alliance of A-Max controller software + Apple ROM code + the Motorola 68000 CPU in the Amiga (the same chip that powered all the early Macs), this is a “hardware” emulation system. Interestingly, the Mac boot disk I have is too old to be 32-bit compatible, so while it “sees” the full 9 megs of RAM in the Amiga, it can only access 512k of it.”

This project has been coined CoMacintosh by the author and it again conveys little limitation of what can be achieved by a skilled ethical hacker.

Thank You to Techworm for providing us with this information.