Thanks a lot! :spin
Downloading+testing them now...

I really hope that too! :nervous Keep your fingers crossed...

I thought about a possible solution (again, crossed fingers are needed) which could lead us to understand the A-Max IV format structure... It involves using your newly bought CrossMac (or a newer release, if it can be found).
OR it involves using the last available release of the Emplant Disk Converter...

Peter, do you remember if CrossMac has the ability to dump a whole floppy, creating its image?

P.S. Right now my aim is not to recover cosmicfrog's floppies, but to obtain a booting floppy for A-Max IV. If that can be done, then we'll finally be able to do some serious testing...!

No, sorry. :sad

As you know, CrossMAC comes with its own DiskCopy utility which makes block-for-block copies of Mac or AmigaDOS disks, but it has no provision for creating disk images, unfortunately.

Bad news... I tried your new (interleaved) floppy images, and the A-Max IV behaviour is absolutely identical: the 720KB image freezes WinUAE, and the 1.44MB image causes the cyclical "boot retry" behaviour.

I noticed one thing, though (not only related to the last floppy images you uploaded)... When A-Max IV tries to read those floppies, I hear the underlying Amiga doing the usual noise (the one it makes when a non-DOS disk is inserted in the floppy drive): "trrrrrrr.... trrrrrrr.... trrrrrrrr" and then the smiling face appears and the loading attempt begins...
So (but we knew that) the AmigaDOS is active in the background; sorry, what I mean is that since A-Max IV doesn't take full control of the machine (while its predecessors did), could it be that some special drivers should be located in the Devs or Libs drawers etc.??
Something similar to what the Emplant Disk Converter needed?
Furthermore, I read on those Italian magazine that A-Max IV installs some patches (and I suppose some drivers too) on the Amiga hard disk, during the installation.
Perhaps I'm not able to correctly run A-Max IV because it needs an installation first? BUT in the A-Max IV HACKED floppy I can't see an install icon, while I can see it on the other (non hacked) versions...
Damn all these variables...

Damn! That really is bad news! :mad

You could be right. I seem to remember someone mentioned in this thread (it might have been Boo Boo) that a CrossMAC installation was required in order to run A-Max IV.

When I get my A-Max II Plus card installed, I will be installing A-Max IV from the original disks uploaded by desiv. Then we will know what changes the installation makes to the hard disk, especially if a log file is created. :agree

I remember that post, but I'm sure Boo Boo was wrong... A-Max IV doesn't need CrossMAC in order to run correctly or to read Mac/A-Max floppies. He relies upon its great card, directly connected to a floppy drive! Damn!!! I'm beginning to hate A-Max!!

Yeaaaah, I'll wait for it!!! :great:bowdown

Another possible solution could be found using File Devices or Mac hdd partitions on an Amiga drive.

Do you remember File Devices?
"File Devices are files (on an AmigaDOS device) containing whole Mac devices. Their access speed is very slow, and their sizes are equal to the physical sizes of the emulated devices"

"hdd partitions are Amiga partitions, formatted with the Mac filesystem. A-Max IV can use both the old A-Max (pre-IV) partitions and those created by Emplant.
In order to avoid the annoying "Not a DOS disk..." requesters caused by non-AmigaDOS partitions, A-Max IV is able to automatically mount (during the Amiga startup) and recognize as a Mac disk every partition having the DOSType set to 0x54.465.300, which are otherwise ignored by AmigaDOS"

The only questions about File Devices are:
- will A-Max IV boot from a File Device which is an image of a bootable System floppy? Or is A-Max IV able to use those images after booting up only?
- how do we produce the first bootable image? Perhaps we could use one of those images produced by you, prowler, even if they don't work when used as booting floppies under WinUAE...

Interesting article here: http://www.amigareport.com/ar214/p1-7.html

Things like:
desiv
(still around, just busy at work...)

Hi desiv, thanks!! :)
I saw that webpage before, but didn't pay the necessary attention to the "File Devices" section :banghead.
I hope prowler will be able to create a correct 800KB image, using the transfer utility included in the A-Max IV floppy. Let's hope it doesn't rely on IC5's version... :(

This has possibilities. I have edited the quotation from your post to single out the File Devices.

In emulators such as Mini vMac, which have no support for reading and writing real Macintosh media, hard disks are emulated as large floppy drives. Other emulators, such as SoftMac, are able to use both real Macintosh SCSI hard drives and File Devices. The latter can represernt hard disks either as large floppy drives or as SCSI hard drives whichg may be partitioned, using a similar approach to WinUAE's RDB support.

I think A-Max makes it possible to declare these devices before launching the emulation, so they can be used as boot devices if the format is correct. Moreover, if A-Max IV uses the large floppy drive method of emulating hard drives, then this could provide a facility for making floppy disk images.

I'm not sure which transfer utility you're referring to. Is it the one on the A-Max Utilities disk? When I get my A-Max II Plus card installed, all my effort will be directed toward creating a bootable floppy disk image for the emulator by whatever means.

Thanks for that link, desiv! :great

I don't remember seeing that report before, but it's particularly relevant now. :agree

No no, it's the one included in every A-Max IV floppy I saw...

Well, that's a relief! :D I don't think there was an A-Max Utilities disk released for A-Max IV.

You know what? I'm testing over and over that damned A-Max IV Hacked floppy, and I remember an old post (by Boo Boo, I think) stating that the mouse could only move across 1/4th of the screen... and it's true.
I didn't give it the necessary attention, but... could it be that that damned (and I repeat damned) floppy is seriously bugged, and we are losing all these hours for nothing? :guru:guru:guru
I mean: without having a real A-Max card, we (I, Boo Boo etc.) will not be able to run A-Max IV :crying

P.S. right now I made a copy (using the latest version of Emplant Disk Converter II - v7.2) of a 6.x Mac System floppy, from A-Max format to 1.44MB format. I tested it with A-Max IV under WinUAE and... FREEZE!!
Perhaps the obtained 1.44MB extended adf was not HFS formatted by the Disk Converter... who knows.

My God, you're right! :shocked I hadn't noticed before that only one of those A-Max IV disks is a hacked version. :mad

Do later versions of Emplant share the A-Max IV image format? I wouldn't have thought so. Are there any significant differences, I wonder, in the format of the A-Max and Emplant disks written by version 7.2 of the Emplant Disk Converter? If we could only mount those disks, or make images of them with a utility other than the Emplant Disk Converter, it might tell us a lot.

CORRECTION!!! (possibly good news)
By playing with some config parameters before starting the A-Max IV emulated Mac, I was able to obtain the entire screen surface available for mouse movement!!!
So perhaps there's still hope... :nervous .... good night :sleep

Ha, that's what I hoped! And that's why I made many tests with the latest Disk Converter and DD/HD extended adfs...
But, no matter what I tried, I couldn't achieve anything decent... :(

Well, that's another relief! :D That hacked A-Max IV disk is the only way to get the emulator running in software only. :guru

Goodnight, mate. Sleep well. You deserve it! :agree

Today, I received the AGA Experience Volume 2 CD which I recently bought on eBay, and I've just noticed that it contains the Emplant software, version 5.5, which AFAIK was the final version. :great

Unfortunately, the readme file doesn't mention any changes to the Disk Converter II program, which is of particular interest to contributors to this thread, but I shall be uploading a copy of the software tomorrow nonetheless for anyone who's interested. :)

Okay, I've uploaded the Emplant 5.5 software to the Zone for anyone who wants to take a look.

I've just Zipped this up straight from the CD in Windows, so some of the file attributes won't be right for the Amiga.

I'll try to replace it with an LZX Amiga archive over the weekend.

CrossMAC Mac File System for Commodore Amiga from the USA

http://cgi.ebay.com/CrossMAC-Mac-Fil...item414eedd4af

He's a good, reliable eBay seller, so that's likely to be an accurate description. I have bought from him on two occasions.

However, that 'Buy It Now' price might be a little optimistic. My copy of CrossMAC did not come from him, and I paid considerably less at auction ($6 USD + shipping, IIRC). Mine was the only (and minimum) bid. :)

could`t remember if you already got it or not, you know how it is

still waiting for the abridged version of this thread :)