Amiga emulation of a Mac

Use ShapeShifter to provide Mac emulation. By far the best option. The one I use myself. The writer of ShapeShifter (Christian Bauer), reportedly has a Newton himself.

You will need ShapeShifter 3.3 or better. As of writing, the current version is 3.10, however the latest version which uses the serial port properly is 3.7. To run ShapeShifter, you will need...

• Plenty of RAM. I have 8 MB of Fast.
• An Apple ROM.
• System 7.x. It is possible to (slowly) download the entire 7.0.1 from Apple ftp sites. I myself actually purchased 7.5 from an Apple dealer, but 7.5.5 works best (see the Shapeshifter section on my Amiga page). It is possible to purchase System 8.1/8.5, but you will need a 68040 main processor. System 8.x does not work properly with 68060 processors, you need to turn off some of the 68060 options.
• You really should register. This allows you to use a hard-drive partition, which is many times faster than using `filedisks'.

Other users have found that the serial port of a GVP serial card does not work with ShapeShifter.

I have tested Lunatech's Package Installer, Apple's own Newton Connection Kit (now obsolete), the Newton Backup Utility, Newton Connection Utility and a demonstration version of Newton ToolKit 1.0.1.

There are more expensive commercial Macintosh emulations for the Amiga. These are AMax, Emplant and Fusion.

A demonstration version is on the Aminet.

Back to Newton homepage

Last modified 1st February 2000.