Wait a sec - what about Macs?
 

Has any serious investigation been made into whether or not older Macs (from the beige G3 on back) are capable of reading/writing Amiga disks? The controller used, though (maybe) somewhat undocumented, is radically different from the standard PC kind and might have the features and abilities needed for the job. It'd be worth the effort, especially since in the end it's a lot easier for someone to find an older Mac than it is to spend a lot of money on a Catweasel or spend a long time using a serial link.

Not sure about the Mac thing, but I think you can read Amiga disks on a PC if you have 2 floppy drives. There's some program out there that does a bunch of shifty stuff and somehow manages to get it to work. Dunno how well it does on non-DOS disks though.

Early Mac floppies were perculiar. The drive write speed was variable. They can't read Amiga disks, neither can anything else read those vari-speed floppies.

Does the Mac-Classic fall under this category? There was a program for the Amiga that let me read and write those disks, and I think there might've even been one for the PC as well.

th4t1guy: That may have been something called 'A-max' (or something) iirc. It was either just a device that read mac disks or it may have been an early mac emulator which came with a device to read disks. Saying that, this is only a faint memory and this could all be rubbish. Can anybody verify? :)

I don't remember the program for the PC, but the one I used on my Amiga was CrossMac.

Wonder what the incompatabilities were that now you can buy external USB
floppies that are Mac & PC compatible. I have an external Mitsumi that does just that. By the way I have A-Max III and believe it was an emulator. Never tried it, just part of a collection of disks I picked up on eBay.

AFAIK Apple pretty much shelved support for its old variable speed drives. So any USB model you find today is probably similar if not identical to dedicated PC USB drives anyway.

Amax was an emulator, but also allowed you to read Mac disks by connecting an Apple drive. I've uploaded a scan of an article from Amiga Format to the Zone.

CrossMac can not read low density Mac floppies without extra hardware. (ie. Amax + 800k Mac floppy drive)

All of the A-Max series are hardware solutions. Are you sure you have an AMax III? AFAIK, it was never released, only the A-Max, II/II+ and IV.