That done, I then took the Indivision ECS board from my Amiga 600 system (as it is no longer useful since the issues caused by the Vampire...) and attached it to the A3000, and put the cleaned Denise chip on top:

I was very proud of my build at this point, backed it up on my PC using win32 disk imager again, and decided to pose for a selfie to celebrate, wearing my new Amiga sponsored Football shirt, used by Chelsea in 1994 English Premier League season. 

I found that Sordan.ie is selling a replacement LED panel for the Amiga 3000, which I picked up. 

Here it is installed on the A3000 in place of the old original one:

Now I have working LED's with the case on, and I can add further IDE storage in the future (using a Buddha Ide card which I do have) and also see the disk activity for that too. For now though, I don't need that functionality as the Buddha card is not installed.

It was originally included with the Amiga 3000 when I bought it, but I didn't use it initially. It has the Mac Roms already installed, and a pass through for the internal floppy drive to be usable by the card when running the Macintosh emulation. I installed it in the Amiga 3000. As it is a Zorro II card, I don't expect any hardware issues having it installed.

Next, I set to work preparing two 1 GB SCSI partitions for use by AMax when running. To do this, I set up two partitions called AMAX0 and AMAX1. They need to have specific names to be picked up by AMax:

I then formatted them as Amiga FFS, as per the instructions I found on the official Amax website:

With that done, I downloaded the Amax software from the Amax site I linked above, wrote out the floppy disk images to real floppy disks and installed the software on the AmigaOS 3.1.4 hard disk:

With the installation successfully completed, I then ran Amax II software and there is a few different configuration options, based on what functionality you want to have working in the emulation:

When I select the Hard Disk  / SCSI preferences, you can see below it has automatically detected the correctly named AMAX0 and AMAX1 partitions, and set them as bootable and mounted:

Under video preferences you can set the screen resolution, screen colours and more:

With serial/parallel preferences you can choose whether to pass through the serial ports and parallel ports from the Amiga to the emulation. Useful for connecting a printer I suppose. Might be able to use the MIDI port connected to the Serial port perhaps? Might have to test that later!

You can also set the memory options. The Amax software doesn't play nice with AmigaOS 3.1.4, so when you finish using it, you have to reboot. So don't sweat making sure AmigaOS has memory available also.

There are also general preferences which I didn't play with:

When I selected Start Amax, I get this install screen before starting. Annoyingly the floppy disk supplied on the "official site" are pirated, and cracked. I have the legit roms installed, so I didn't need this...

Here is the boot screen, ready for me to put in a Macintosh formatted 800k floppy disk.

Naturally, this is where I hit a snag. I didn't have a system disk. Or any 800k Mac disks for that matter. The powerbook 165c uses 1.44MB floppy disks for its Mac system disks.

Here is my setup to make this happen:

So I formatted a 1.44MB floppy disk on the Powerbook 165c first, using it's Mac floppy drive internally:

I downloaded some software called Disk Copy 6 via the Powerbook G4. This software is used to write out Mac floppy disk images to disk, and this version runs on my Powerbook 165c:

I copied to my 1.44MB mac floppy using a USB floppy drive on the Powerbook G4. I then copy the files off the floppy disk on the Powerbook 165c to a hard disk scratch folder I created, then extract using StuffIt expander and install the software on the Hard disk: 

I then use Disk copy to write out the disk image I copied to a 880k Amiga floppy disk, which is only 800k formatted on a Mac:

The floppy disk is now written out to the 800k floppy disk on the Powerbook 165c.

So now, the moment of truth, does it work? I tested it on the Powerbook 165c and it does boot on it, so I know the written out floppy disk works. I put it in the Amiga 3000 floppy drive, it reads and then nothing....

I tried it out on my Raspberry Pi 400 (running AmiKit XE 11.5). It works perfectly and I love being able to play this game on the Amiga finally!

I have ordered the physical boxed version with floppy disks and CD32 disk, and will play this game on the original Amiga system hardware when it arrives. For now I have the digital version in ADF form to play!

Adelaide Retro Computing Meeting May 2021

Life in Adelaide has been pretty normal for quite a while now, with no local transmission of Covid, no masks and no lockdowns since a short one back in October 2020 for 3 days. 

Commodore 64's were well represented too:

Some Retro PC's were also there, like this Japanese Ai-PC16 laptop:

Here are some black and white (creme) IBM PC's from the late 1990's. I have a IBM 300 Pentium 200MMX PC at home I use for DOS PC demos and to run OS/2 Warp 4. Little bit more interesting I think than just running Windows 2000 like the ones below. YMMV :-)

Here is an Apple II, with plenty of floppy drive options available :-) (you can see a PowerMac G4 in the background too)

Tandy 102 Portable computer anyone?

Amazing to realise it is almost 10 years ago since that happened. 

That done, I ran the OS X Lion USB boot disk (yes, Apple used to sell these!) and restored from my Time Machine backup prior to the hard disk crash. The system now runs perfectly again.

iPad Pro M1

Having 2TB is fantastic - it means I can finally fit all my music, photos and videos when travelling.

This iPad is extremely powerful with the M1 chip in it, which basically makes this iPad Pro the same specs as a MacBook Pro 13" M1 laptop, minus MacOS, but plus the touch display.