[OT] Emulation and HC-like software [was: Freely and Legally Available HyperCard]

[Roger.E.Eller at sealedair.com]

On 01/22/2006 at 11:49 AM, Marian Petrides wrote:
> How many other folks on this list have a
> comparable machine kicking around?

My computing roots are similar to those of the Mac followers here. 
However, my fanatic obsession lies with the Commodore Amiga. I have owned 
2 Amiga computers over the years, an A500, and an A4000 (top of the line). 
The Amiga, like the Mac, was born in 1984. Several creative and inventive 
people have created emulators to allow the "Mac experience" to be shared 
by the Amiga community. The one that I had (and still have) was called 
"Emplant". It was a hardware emulator created by Jim Drew. This thing was 
great! Since the A4000 utilized the Motorola 68040 cpu, the emulation was 
almost at 100% speed of a real Mac. This thing was an internal hardware 
card which included a SCSI chip, and 2 Mac serial ports. My first 
experience of the internet was through AOL, running inside my emulated 
Mac. Those serial ports allowed the Mac emulation to access modems and 
printers. Fondly thinking back, there was no Mac software that I tried 
that would not work. My kids grew up on Mac educational software, and 
Amiga native games. It was so cool to see my 4 year old son casually 
cranking up emulation software and understanding that we were playing in a 
"pretend" Mac. On a legal note, at the time it was legal to run a Mac 
emulator as long as you also had in your posession the authentic Macintosh 
ROM chips, either purchased from Apple, or extracted from a real Mac. Many 
Emplant owners got theirs from Mac repair shops (pulled from dead 
motherboards).

Even on the Amiga itself, I purchased a short-lived development software 
called "Foundation". It was so similar to HyperCard that it was scary. 
There was no HC import module, but I did successfully copy/paste scripts 
from Mac HC into Amiga Foundation, and recreated a cool recipe database 
that I had made in HC. Oh, did I mention that the Mac emulation was 
running as a "task" of the Amiga OS. The Amiga was one of the first 
computers that could truly multitask and dynamically allocate RAM to its 
tasks. The clipboard was shared between OS's. It's just too darn bad they 
met an early demise due to poor management and lack of marketing focus. 
They do exist today, but the new Amiga is Linux kernal based. Kinda like 
OSX is based on Darwin/BSD. Sorry for the long OT post... just had a 
memory flood (in a good way).  ;-)

Kind regards,
Roger Eller <roger.e.eller at sealedair.com>