I currently have an A-Max cartridge (with a MAC 800k drive,) & an Emplant card (with SCSI & e586.) Gave up on trying to sell them (only people interested were in Europe and didn't want to pay the shipping.) So I'm going to set up MAC emulation on my A4000 (68060@50Mhz - Emplant,) and/or my A2000 (68010 @7Mhz - A-Max.) From web research, it seems that the MAC II emulated by the Emplant is backwards compatible with the MAC Plus & MAC 512k emulated by the A-Max. So, dropping the A-Max is a possibility, but would prefer to avoid trying to go the other way around.
On to the questions:
1) From what I've been reading, even if I decide to go just with the Emplant, the A-Max would be extremely helpful for reading original MAC disks. The Amiga floppy, even with CrossMAC isn't capable of reading disks that use the variable speeds of the MAC floppy drive. I haven't been able to confirm that 100%, though, and don't have any disks on hand to test. Any details on this would be appreciated
2) Since the Emplant has a SCSI port, is it worth it to tear my system down pretty much completely to install a dedicated MAC SCSI drive? I don't, currently, have a drive of appropriate size (that can physically fit,) and is HFS compatible, but getting one doesn't pose that much of a problem. If push comes to shove, I have a 16GB drive, that isn't HFS compatible, and is too large anyway, that I can offer up in trade
3) Is there anything that pushes the Emplant or A-Max software over the others available (Shapeshifter, Fusion, etc..?) I would assume, an emulator designed to take advantage of the HW on the Emplant card would have an advantage over software that does it all in emulation. But the information I'm getting on the web seems to imply that, other than getting images of the ROM chips, both the Emplant & A-Max are pretty much completely unneeded. Anyone willing to give me the pros & cons of each.
4) Related to #3... Can any of the others use the HW of either the A-Max (real drive access,) or the Emplant card? The SCSI port on the Emplant is already available to the Amiga, & is autoboot capable (according to HW database.) But is there any other HW on the Emplant that aids in Emulation?
5) Will eventually start doing research on the e586 and it's pros & cons, but that's outside the scope of this particular thread.
That's about it. Other than the difficulty I'll eventually face installing this on my setup DVD. Using WinUAE, with as close a clone of my real systems as possible, to do a complete install of the OS and the utilities & such I'll want to always have on each system. Then the installer I'm also writing will walk me through setting up the drives & putting all the software on each drive it needs to go on